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Monthly Archives: May 2011

Garden Bed Number Two Ready for planting…

26-May-11

Digging with Bears.

26-May-11

barratrously A friend gave me some offsets from her bottlebrush buckeye plant, but not knowing quite where to put it – they get very large – I stashed the plants in my vegetable garden, which had not been planted.  The time has come to plant vegetables, so I chose some spots for the buckeyes and transplanted […]

Bee Plants in the Catskills.

23-May-11

Aliaga We just had our wildflower festival at Catskill Native Nursery, and the owner, Francis Groeters, gave a pretty impressive talk on native pollinators (as opposed to the nonnative honeybees).  One of his powerpoint slides – how I love scientists – simply said “Observe.”  His point was to observe how the plants in your garden create […]

“Church as Permaculture.”

23-May-11

Richard Rohr, a Franciscan true to the name, has been writing recently on “Church as Permaculture”: Mere beliefs do not necessarily change the way we live in this world.  What we have been calling “Emerging” Christianity or “Lifestyle Christianity” involves a real movement toward simplicity—at all levels.  A return to a simple lifestyle is the […]

Saint Francis, Nature, and Poverty.

23-May-11

I have been reading Thomas of Celano’s two lives of Saint Francis, with all the complicated pleasure of advancing age.  In 1973 the Franciscan Herald Press put out a lovely edition of the early writings about Francis, Saint Francis of Assisi: Omnibus of Sources, a beautifully executed book, hardbound, with maps of Italy and Assisi, […]

On Artistic Discipline.

17-May-11

From Carey’s Wallace’s essay on maintaining discipline as an artist.  The most difficult of all tasks, for precisely the reason she indicates: There is no such thing, we discovered, as disciplining one corner of a life. There are only disciplined or undisciplined lives. So far I’ve kept to precisely the opposite pattern – bursts of […]

Spring Arrives.

13-May-11

Giant Ledge, May 2011.

On the death of Osama Bin Laden.

04-May-11

No sympathy – live by the sword, die by the sword – but only a coward exults over a corpse.