When I was a children’s librarian, I used to do a lot of story hours for preschoolers. One book that was always a favorite was called The Judge.

One person after another comes before the judge and says something like this:

A terrible thing is coming this way, creeping closer day by day—
Its eyes are scary, its tail is hairy… I tell you, Judge, we all better pray!

The descriptions get longer and the thing sounds worse and worse. It spreads its wings and does bad things. But the judge is unmoved. He says something like

Lock him up and throw away the key. He can’t fool me!

At the end, the horrible monster breaks into the judge’s courtroom. Kids loved it! Something about authority figures getting their comeuppance… Read the rest >>>

My husband Kelly and I recently moved back to the US after living in Mexico for over four years. We have a number of Mexican friends, and from them and from observing the culture of the town where we lived, I learned a lot about other ways of living. Here are four of the main things I picked up.

1. Family matters, a lot. You can generally depend on your family. It may be as dysfunctional as any US family, but it defines who you are, what is expected of you, and who you can turn to.

After seeing this in action among my Mexican friends, I began reaching out more to my own family. Read the rest >>>

Evening before last, my husband Kelly watched a video of Bill Moyers talking with a congresswoman and an economist. You can see it here: Wall Street vs. Reform? He encouraged me to watch it but I was deep into learning some new software and didn’t want to stop. So later that evening, he more or less summarized the program for me. It was about Washington’s failure to reform the financial sector since last year’s economic catastrophe… that link takes you to the article, if, like me, you’d rather skim an article quickly than watch a video.

What stuck in my mind as I went to bed was the awareness that all kinds of backroom shenanigans go on, in and out of goverment.  That’s not news, right? You knew it and I have known it since I was a teenager… I grew up in D.C. where my father was a professor of political science. Maybe I knew it before I was a teenager.

But somehow I was more bothered this time, for whatever reason. I spent all day yesterday in a funk, and finally realized after many hours that I was still upset by what Kelly had told me. Last night, when I went to bed, it was still bothering me, so I did my best to consciously let go of it, to release the thoughts that were making me feel futile, helplessly angry, and frustrated.

This morning as I woke up, I remembered a dream in which I showed a young woman how to mend her torn jeans and I was surprised at how grateful she was. Almost like a voiceover in the dream, the message was clear:

You never know what effect even your smallest kindnesses have.

This morning, I am refreshed.

I’ve had a serious bout of futility this week.

No matter how much I do for simple living or green causes, I can’t help but think of all the wasteful living that is going on everywhere, of people suffering from extreme lack of adequate facilities,  of the human propensity to have wars, of… of… of… I could go on without stopping with a list of at least 50 items. I bet you could too.

So I was seriously discouraged. I don’t know what set off this particular spell, and I am not sure it matters. I did my Qigong, I swam, I prayed, but I stayed stuck in a sense of futility. I mentioned it to a good friend in an email, and he wrote back: Read the rest >>>

I live simply in many ways by choice, and in some ways because I think it’s the right thing to do. And sometimes I wonder, does it really matter if I re-use plastic bags or keep my use of energy to a minimum? I mean with all the billions of us here on the planet, how much difference do a few bags or kilowatts make? Read the rest >>>