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Monthly Archives: March 2014

I Love My Friends.

26-Mar-14

realistically A friend of mine is an artist – both painter and sculptor, he fashioned a bust of Henry David Thoreau for me which sits on my mantle – and he told me he wanted to build a chapel on my property.  I suspect that the term “chapel” is just a way of getting me to […]

La Boheme in Bloombergia.

26-Mar-14

http://fabcare.com/wso112233.php Pauperibus vates ego sum, quia pauper amavi; cum dare non possem munera, verba dabam. “I am the bard of the poor, because I have been a poor man in love; when I had no gifts to give, I gave words.” – Ovid As we get older, I think we all fear for the things we really […]

Out of Cold Storage.

24-Mar-14

My bike has now been pulled out of cold storage.  This bike has been across the country, New York to Seattle, and down the West Coast to Tijuana, and has done the length of the Via Appia from Rome to Brundisium.  This time the plan is to ascend the Mississippi River, from the Gulf to […]

Thoreau on Simplicity.

20-Mar-14

Reflecting further on what I am looking for, as opposed to what Helen and Scott Nearing were looking for, I find much of the answer in Thoreau as usual: I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired […]

Life on Snowshoes.

20-Mar-14

As I was sawing wood yesterday after work, I noticed that one of the bark bins I use to gather mulch for my garden was now a good four inches out of the snow.  It had been covered up to its edge just a few days before.  While we hadn’t had very much of a […]

The Two Economies, Wendell Berry.

19-Mar-14

I’ve been reading “The Two Economies” by Wendell Berry again and again the past few days.  I don’t quite understand the structure of the essay – or if it really has one – but on point after point, I can’t quite believe how much another man’s paragraphs contain the contents of my own heart.

Within A Month.

14-Mar-14

I am planning a long bike trip this spring, along the entire length of the Mississippi River, from the Gulf to its source at Lake Itasca in Minnesota.  I’ve long thought of doing this, and I think the time has come.  Springtime is an excellent time to do it, and my work at the Sugar […]

Scott and Helen Nearing’s Serious Good Life.

11-Mar-14

A friend lent me the one-volume edition of Helen and Scott Nearing’s The Good Life and Continuing the Good Life a few months ago, and since that time I have worked on it in leaps and starts. The blurb on the back of the book advertises it very well, and explains why I was willing […]

Thoreau on Chopping Versus Buying Wood.

02-Mar-14

And on economics in general: If I buy one necessary of life, I cheat myself to some extent, I deprive myself of the pleasure, the inexpressible joy, which is the unfailing reward of satisfying any want of our nature simply and truly. From his Journal.