Eliza Daley is a fiction. She is the part of me that is confident and wise, knowledgable and skilled. She is the voice that wants to be heard in this old woman who more often prefers her solitary and silent hearth. She has all my experience — as mother, musician, geologist and logician; book-seller, business-woman, and home-maker; baker, gardener, and chief bottle-washer; historian, anthropologist, philosopher, and over it all, writer. But she has not lived, is not encumbered with all the mess and emotion, and therefore she has a wonderfully fresh perspective on my life. I rather like knowing her. I do think you will as well.
Be a gardener
Being alive to the real world around us, seeing the love and the connection and the magic, is all we need in life, it is all we want. It is the meaning of life.
May 14, 2025
Tax Day
I believe we are careening toward a biophysical and cultural crisis that will very likely destroy money — along with a great many other things. But I also believe that we are falling toward abundance again.
April 17, 2025
Craft should be useful
Making home is what we do, how we live, who we are. But for a while now I have been growing increasingly uneasy with craft for craft’s sake, or perhaps craft to relieve the acedia that is bound up with modernity.
April 10, 2025
World Water Day
So learn where your water is flowing from and where it is flowing to. How do you affect groundwater viability when you turn on the tap?
March 24, 2025
How to heat a home?
The most direct route to heat is also the least toxic, most reliable, most durable, and most sustainable within Vermont — and that’s heating with wood.
March 12, 2025
The meaning of Lent is limits
Now, what does this have to do with linking a life to place and to season? What do ethics have to do with ritual? How does a seasonal round of celebration put limits on our behavior? And are those limits what we need?
March 5, 2025