Our little town’s gardening group has been buzzing after two of our members — following a neighbor’s anonymous complaint — were notified recently that they might be in violation of a city ordinance against gardening in the “boulevard,” the strip of grass between sidewalk and curb in front of most houses. The issue: our members’ […]
Read moreWhat is this “little extra” – really?
Summer is here, with its higher level of activity — and time for me to take two yoga classes a week instead of just one. Among yoga’s many benefits is a higher level of awareness of your body, what it is really asking you for when you eat or drink, what all that stress is […]
Read moreStrawberries and sabbaticals.
“The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb […]
Read moreTouching through the glass: animals, people, reality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fbahS7VSFs&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3] Young parents laugh nervously as they film their child, whom they have placed up against the glass of a lioness’s cage in a zoo. Behind the glass, the lioness is deadly serious: she scratches and bites the barrier separating her from one good bite of food. Incredibly, the father giggles, “Say hi, kitty, kitty.” […]
Read moreAfoot in the world.
Back on the bike for a big day of riding today, the first in too long a time, under a sky so blue it hurt to look at it. This was the kind of sunny, windy April day that has you taking your fleece jacket off, then putting it on again, over and over. On […]
Read moreA general Cheapskate update.
Ah, loyal readers, where to begin? So much has been happening offscreen lately. Bidding gleeful goodbyes to Rick “Torquemada” Santorum (as Bob has dubbed him.) Gearing up for some local action on May 5 (stay tuned.) Ending a Lenten Facebook fast with the desire — which I don’t see changing any time soon — to […]
Read moreThe Lenten closet.
Yesterday I went to Minneapolis to buy some sorely needed new clothes. Just a few good pieces that I was lucky enough to find on sale. This afternoon — energized by what Marilynne Robinson in Housekeeping called the “swift, watery wind” blowing all around my neighborhood, and feeling it disarranging me in a good way, […]
Read moreWhitney Houston and the women-walls.
On Facebook and even email, this picture meets me at every turn, looming, vaguely Inquisitorial. You want to explain to us why you *need* birth control, young lady? Depressed by the image and its context — and by work and other First World Problems, despite even-more-stellar-than-usual moments of conversation with students — I turned to […]
Read moreMary, Martha, and cheapskate intellectualism: the New Year’s organizing dilemma.
Every year, fresh from days away at my family home where there are friendly differences about — shall we say — organizing styles, I return to my own little house and see the place with fresh eyes. Somehow, as good as I usually am about filing and purging, the place just looks full. The line […]
Read moreLearning to submit?: Economies of womanhood, personhood, and love.
I believe that what rules us is less the material world of goods and services than the immaterial one of whims, assumptions, delusions, and lies; that only by studying this world can we hope to shape how it shapes us; that only by attempting to understand what used to be called, in a less embarrassed […]
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