adapting in place
sastyk | January 18, 2013I was recently re-reading Mary Pipher's excellent book from a decade ago _The Middle of Everywhere: Helping Refugees Enter the American Community_. The book is in large part stories of refugees and a guide to helping them navigate their new world - encouraging members of the community to act as "cultural brokers" and guides to the newest and most vulnerable Americans. It is also, however, a story about Pipher's own reconsideration of traditional psychology when confronted with people to whom the worst and deepest traumas and tragedies have happened. She comes to see the American theraputic…
sastyk | December 7, 2012I usually allow my honorary older brother, John Michael Greer to debunk the idea of the apocalypse, Mayan and otherwise. He's even written a (very funny and, as usual, brilliant) book about it, and he's the master of historical examples in which everyone was pretty sure the world was going to end and it didn't. While I tend to think that we are closer to a collapse (a word I use in its technical sense, meaning big step down in complexity and function) than most people admit, I am very far from thinking that this will be the end of the world, a term that I think is largely meaningless unless…
sastyk | December 2, 2012That would have been the title of _Making Home_ except it is way, way too wordy, but that's the gist of my book - that we don't have a choice but to change our way of life, so we might as well find the best possible way to do it. The long version (and a lot of details about how) is in the book. This is the short one. ;-)
I spend much of my life making the case for changing one’s life (and not just one’s life – for supporting political and social change that is associated with it) in fairly radical ways, very quickly. I spend a lot of my time writing about this, and periodically I get on a…
sastyk | November 25, 2012A friend of mine who volunteered at a shelter in New York City told me this story over Thanksgiving. The shelter she worked in responded to the range of people affected by the crisis. Many of them, as always in a crisis, were those who were already struggling and marginalized - illegal immigrants afraid to go anywhere else, the already-homeless whose usual shelters and places of refuge were closed or underwater, the mentally and physically ill who had to be evacuated from hospitals in the flood zone. Many of the rest were storm evacuees from some of the city's most expensive neighborhoods…
sastyk | July 25, 2012M. is due with her baby any minute now, so at some point there may be a hiatus, but for now, she's got a lot to say about what her family is thinking about. You can read her bio here.
This week I did some very hard work for this class. I have to admit, it wasn't anything exactly on the homework, but there is a hard decision my family needs to make and this class has allowed me to approach it from a new angle and I think opened up the discussion more between me and my husband. Basically, we have to decide whether to stay in Maryland, where we have a lot of friends, a pleasant house and…
sastyk | July 19, 2012It is easy to get fixated on the big things that you need to do to have an impact. You need to build a barn, buy a higher-mileage vehicle, pay down the mortgage, build a three month stash of food. These are big or biggish projects, and often they depend on you finding time and energy and money in a world where those resources are limited.
I notice that when I'm fixated on big projects I can't get done, I tend to ignore smaller ones that would be really useful. If I don't have time or energy or money for the big things on my list, I can forget the other kinds of projects - low input, high…
sastyk | July 19, 2012M.'s latest update (see the first post for her bio) on what it is like to take the class. It is funny - I always worry I'm not providing enough reading material for people. Apparently that may not be a critical issue ;-).
This class is very different from any other I've taken. There are a lot of suggested readings, let's just say many of them have been posts from Sharon's blog and we know how long those can be! But there's also the class discussion, which is online. That alone is new to me, I've never taken an online class before.
Something I'm noticing every time I read through the…
sastyk | July 3, 2012
In honor of Making Home, my new book on Adapting-In-Place which comes out in August, New Society has offered to sponsor a spot in my Adapting-in-Place class that starts tomorrow. In exchange for a sponsored spot for a low-income participant who couldn't otherwise afford to take the class, New Society will ask for a weekly blog post on what the class is doing, what it is like and what you are thinking about. I'll post them at my site, and they will also appear on the NS blog. I already have one blogger doing this, but I have one more space (sorry, only one). Email me at jewishfarmer@…
sastyk | June 22, 2012Well, since the Rio Summit failed to save the world (again), and we're slipping back into economic crisis, and _Making Home_ my book on Adapting-in-Place comes out in August, it seems like the right time to teach my AIP class again. It helps to renew my sense of purpose as well - there's nothing like sitting down and sorting out all the work we're doing to get ready for the world we actually are emerging into again to feel a sense of excitement and purpose about it.
The class will start on American Independence Day, July 4, and we'll declare our independence from corporations and the fear…
sastyk | March 5, 2012I wrote this for Dr, Seuss's 105th birthday, and thought it was worth posting (a bit belatedly) for his 108th.
I once read an incredibly entertaining literary critical analysis of _The Cat in the Hat_ which began from the premise that all the action in TCITH is an attempt to fill up the overwhelming absence of the mother from the scene. She has "gone out for the day" leaving her children untended, something she clearly is in the habit of doing, since there's a sequel with the same issue embedded. The glimpses we get of "mother's new gown" and her empty bedstead stand in implicit reference…
sastyk | January 3, 2012On January 1, it was 48 degrees on my farm. My sons were at the playground, dressed in sweatshirts and jeans, rather than winter coats and mittens. Their ice skates had yet to be used this year. Their sleds haven't even come out of the garage. Walking out in the warm weather among the goats, I noticed my cowslips and primroses are up and there are buds on the pussy willows.
On the farm, we measure the severity of the winter by the final full barn cleaning before spring - the last one before heavy snow and ice make it impossible to get a wheelbarrow in and out of the barn. In a cold…
sastyk | October 5, 2011Right before each Rosh Hashana, I make a list that has two parts. The first one is a list of everything I wanted to accomplish that I have accomplished this past year. It includes small things and large. Small things like tuning the piano, regasketing the stove doors, expanding goat fence, rearranging the pantry and making 10 more jars of pickles than last year. Big things like qualifying as foster parents, Simon learning to chant Torah, Isaiah learning to read fluently, expanding our business, getting up our sign, having our largest crop of baby goats, our first experiments with beef…
sastyk | October 4, 2011My friend Alice hosted an urban permaculture class at her house a few years ago. She lives in an brownstone in a downtown neighborhood of Albany with her husband and two young kids, and the occasional housemate. Two permaculture design teachers and a host of enthusiastic students came together to create several designs for how she might optimize resource use and productivity at her home. She and her family chose one of the plans, and set to work on a number of inside and outside projects, including transforming her small, sunny backyard into an urban garden, full of food producing plants.…
sastyk | September 28, 2011There are ten children in my house, but six of them are phantoms. No, we haven't gotten a foster placement or heard anything new since the two weeks in August when we were asked to take two separate groups of five kids each. Both of those placements fell through, and there has been nothing since, which is sort of the problem.
I have little patience with being expectant, whether pregnant or waiting for a foster placement, and the six (this is a totally arbitrary number that I'm using only because it represents the number of van seats, and thus the maximum placement we could take) "ghost…
sastyk | September 20, 2011Aaron Newton and I are starting out our first-ever Advanced Adapting-in-Place class, for people who have taken our previous course or who have been on the adaptation journey for a while. If you'd like to join us there are still spots available and world enough and time to join, so please email me at jewishfarmer@gmail.com. In the meantime, the first step in sorting out what you need to do to get ready for a shifting future is to have some sense of what that future looks like - or the range of possible ways the future could look.
There are a lot of possible ways to imagine the future.…
sastyk | August 22, 2011One of the peculiarities of the white race's presence in America is how little intention has been applied to it. As a people, wherever we have been, we have never really intended to be. The continent is said to have been discovered by an Italian who was on his way to India. The earliest explorers were looking for gold, which as, after an early streak of luck in Mexico, always somewhere farther on. Consquests, and foundings were incidental to this search - which did not, and could not, end until the continent was finally laid open in a orgy of goldseekin in the middle of the last century…
sastyk | August 22, 2011Thursday was Eli's end of school graduation - and I thought in honor I'd re-run a post I wrote at ye olde blogge back in 2009. One of the hardest parts of addressing our changing world is dealing with shifting expectations and assumptions, and not getting mired down in sadness or anger. I think one of the things that has helped me is that we've had to do this in other ways before. This year is Eli's last one at the nurturing school for kids with autism that he's attended since kindergarten, and I found myself thinking about this a lot this week.
There are, of course, plenty of moments in…
sastyk | August 18, 2011Just to keep you all updated, we learned yesterday that the children's social worker has decided to separate the children, and place them in three homes. Two will stay with the current foster mother, one with one home, and they are seeking a home for one child and the newborn. Since we will take larger groups than two and there are very few homes that take three or four, we are not candidates to take any of the kids.
I admit, I'm relieved not to have to make a decision about taking these kids - it isn't the numbers, so much as the ages - I realized about myself that while I would happily…
sastyk | July 15, 2011What, you ask, has Sharon been duing, besides getting mud and manure on her? (I feel like there's been a theme to some of my recent posts, no?) I'm sure you have nothing but this on your mind - the doins a'transpirin at my house being the focus of whole tens of people (well, maybe one ten on a good day ;-). Still, I'm going to tell you.
Well, what we've mostly been doing is getting ready for the fall garden season, and getting ready for the family expansion project. As of this week, our house is open as a foster home, but of course, in our usual "doing at the last minute something we…
sastyk | May 17, 2011The old punchline "Practice, practice, practice" applies to more than musical performance. It applies to the project of coming to terms with our new circumstances, and perhaps embracing our new lives. If you live in parts of Japan right now, or in the flooded Mississippi, or in areas recently devastated by tornadoes, you know that the day when we leave off practicing and begin performing can be far closer than you ever thought.
Ideally, I feel like my last post in the Adapting In Place series ought to be something rousing and inspiring. But at the moment, I think the quiet exhortation to…