Green Gal

An apprenticeship update & an exploration of what our treatment of weeds perhaps reveals about the limits we place on compassion It's already week eight of the Apprenticeship; time has truly flown by here at the farm and gardens! This evening in the Farm Center I'm surrounded by apprentices playing charades, others prepping for tomorrow's meals, and bouquets of fragrant and enticing flowers from our flower and bouquet class yesterday. Earlier today, I learned a bit about how to grow peppers as well as the many different kinds of peppers in the world. (The article we read and reviewed this morning is available online here .) We will be growing 67 different varieties of peppers in the Chadwick Garden alone this season, totaling more than 1500 individual plants throughout the garden! These will all be planted by hand. Sometime next week, we've been promised a dried and smoked pepper tasting session, as well as a potato and garlic varieties taste t...

I'm filled to the brim with inspiration this afternoon after a delightful chat over coffee with my friend Cain at a cool little coffee shop in downtown San Jose called Social Policy (part of the Bellano "family of coffee lovers" ). (If you live in SJ, you may have seen Cain cranking down the street on his red cargo bike hauling huge boxes of awesome stuff for Cowgirl Bike Courier !) We discussed an upcoming bike/art event he is planning, a bike-to-farms ride that I'm planning, San Jose bicycle news and issues, Viva Calle SJ promotion, and more. Last evening, I also connected with friends at my house to plan our bike-to-farms ride. We had a potluck feast of homemade, vegetarian yumminess, and then we identified next steps for turning our vision into a reality. And the night before last, I attended a bike coalition meeting where I saw plans for putting bidirectional contraflow lanes around the SJSU campus and heard the good news that the Willow Glen Road Diet has overa...

National Novel Writing Month is officially half-way through, which means I should be at 25,000 words... Sadly, I'm not, but I am doing pretty well at 18,354 words! It's definitely more words of fiction than I've written in the last two years combined! So now you might be able to guess why I've been absent from the blog since November began, and likely between now and December 1, I'll be spending all of my non-work typing time trying to crank out enough words to reach 50,000 before the month ends. You can learn more about NaNoWriMo here and read my author page on the site here . Despite knowing that I should be typing words on my novel right now, I wanted to share a quick story about how I've been able to go more than a week without turning on the tap specifically for watering the garden. I also want to share some photos of the garden. It rained last Sunday, giving my plants a happy dose of water straight from the natural source. It's only rained a few ...

It's not Valentine's Day yet, but bike love is in the air! It's rainy in Santa Cruz today and I have a cold, though, so I'll share some bike love through writing instead of riding. A couple weeks ago, I submitted some photos of myself with my bike to the website Pedal Love to be included in their Valentine's Day feature . Little did I know that my submissions would lead to an opportunity to write blogs for this awesome site, an initiative of the California Bicycle Coalition . Their website states, "Women on Bikes California marries active living advocacy for women with an ever evolving new media communications platform 'Pedal Love' to share dynamic and compelling stories of how ordinary people are making extraordinary changes to their lives by bike." After I emailed my photos in, I received an email back from Melissa Balmer, Editor/Director of Pedal Love and Women on Bikes. The first thing her email said was "You made my day!" and ...

Before I introduce my younger sister, who last night began a blog of her own ( Jeune Gal ), I want to provide some background about my family. I come from a family of writers, each of us with a unique style and method of sharing our hearts and thoughts with the world. I have so much gratitude for the way I was brought up, always being read to and encouraged to write. My father recited Shakespeare to me when I was a really little kid, and perhaps the nectar of Shakespeare's language flowed into my developing brain and planted a seed that continues to grow each time a line of poetry or a storyline comes into my head. When I was seven, I applied to be a poet laureate in my hometown at the suggestion of my father, who later did become the poet laureate. Though I knew I wouldn't be selected, going through the process of submitting poetry and receiving a personal letter of encouragement from the committee was an empowering process that no doubt contributed to my con...

And I must tell you, listen, there is a heart that beats strong and true and guides the soul who speaks as we are, what we feel, expresses life unmediated by custom but pierces the skin like bullets made by God. We are those who share and say and are what we exist as, what is and what will be is, what cannot be changed by the hues of the skies but instead are that which things are by night and darkness and absence. What is positive is felt, what is negative is pacification of the world; we grow from positive pain and piercing poignant sorrow and that gives us the world of positive power, a sense of peace and joy that is so strong it is felt and heard and seen and all other things pale in comparison with it. Schopenhauer is wrong when he says that happiness is negative and sorrow positive. Sorrow and happiness are both positive; it is satisfaction, contentment, life without will or striving or love or passion that is negative. Happiness, richly and constantly new-hued-yet-true-to-it...