Martin Luther King, Jr, giving his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. Image via Wikipedia
The summer that I was 20, Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his “I Have a Dream” speech in my hometown of Washington, D.C. The day of the speech, I was flying back home from Africa, from Sierra Leone where I had been sharing in a dream of equality with other young Americans, Canadians, and Africans. We had been doing construction on a school, living together in dorms. We were on a workcamp with a group called Crossroads Africa, which placed groups like ours all over that vast continent.
It was the sixties, though we didn’t yet know in 1963 how many new beginnings would come out of that era. Equality among races was only one of the many dreams that began to sow seeds and even see some fruition in those fateful years.
This morning I woke remembering fragments of a dream. I had been back in Sierra Leone. I hadn’t found Isa, Michael, Malcolm, Georgina, or any of the other young Africans who had worked with us that summer. I wondered if they had survived the years of civil war in Sierra Leone. Read the rest >>>
The Real Dirt on Farmer John is an award-winning program about an Illinois farmer whose family has been farming on his land since the 1800s. Farmer John is a larger-than-life character, and both my husband and I were fascinated, enchanted, saddened, and delighted as his real life story unfolded. Watch the trailer for the film and you will know why:
One of many amazing things about this program is that it was filmed over 25 years of friendship between John Peterson, the farmer, and Taggert Siegel and Terri Lang, the filmmakers.
John Peterson grew up on the family farm, taking it over as a teenager when his father died. He went to nearby Beloit College and discovered a more bohemian lifestyle. Many of his friends hung out at the farm, and that didn’t sit too well with the traditional folks in his area. Financial problems forced him to sell most of the family land, and he went off to Mexico to regroup. Read the rest >>>
There’s a brand new how-to DVD just out from from the Back Yard Hive folks. It’s about an hour and a half, but they have kept the price to a low $19.95 to reach as many people as possible. I heard a couple of these people speak in my town a while back and I am impressed with their devotion to bees!
The Daily Good is an inspiring website… actually, their subtitle is News That Inspires. I find that a lot of what they do relates to living in an ecological way, or more generally it relates to living well.
I only go to the website now and then, because I subscribe to their daily email. It gives me enough about a story to decide if I want to read further. The articles seem to come from many websites.
Here are a couple if examples:
Jogging for a smile, about joggers who do errands for neighbors while running
Like many people, I am a good bit overweight. And like many people, on January 1, I decided to do something about it. Unlike many of them, I am still at it and I have lost five pounds.
But even more important, I sure think I have found a way of eating that will work for me from now on. It solves a lot of problems that I have had with food for a long time.
An online friend posted before-and-after photos of himself after eating in this way since last spring. Those sure caught my attention! I read his comments, and immediately went to Amazon and bought a couple of books. Read the rest >>>
As we say goodbye to the old year, here is a guest article from someone who has really been walking the talk, as his list shows! I too often make the point that simple living isn’t simple. –Zana
I have been asked many times about how I came to live a plain and simple life, and I am often asked how one begins living a self-reliant lifestyle. How does one transition from living a “virtual life” to a “real” life rooted in the reality of simplicity. In this article I’ll share with you how my life was changed, and the basic steps one needs to take to begin this challenging journey.
But, before I go into this subject very far I want to make an important point: The “Simple life” is NOT simple. It is actually the “complex and highly involved life”. Everything you do takes more thought, more planning, more action and more knowledge. You do not decide to start living this life and just take the plunge.
You start out one step at a time. There are many steps and they can be taken in any order. If you want to live the “simple life” you can began anywhere. Here is an example of a typical scenario. Read the rest >>>
