Living in Season

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey The most soothing book I’ve ever read. It moves at a snail’s pace. Small in size,...

I’m in the middle of reading Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project . In fact, I’m in July. I thought the book sounded annoying: too chipper...

Thursday, June 23 is Corpus Christi, a Catholic holiday that arrived on the Church calendar fairly late ((the 13th century), a holiday devot...

Lately I’ve been thinking about driving more kindly. It doesn’t come naturally. I have a lot of friends who are angry drivers. I hate riding...

The first day I smelled the scent of spring in 2011 was Monday, January 10. In the past I've always associated it with an unusually warm...

I wanted to list my Top Ten Books of 2010 as I did in 2009 (and I will—see below, if you’re impatient). Then I realized I wanted to write m...

I've seen many spiderwebs in the last few weeks. At first, I thought I was just noticing them more, perhaps because of a trick of the au...

I asked the students in my current Slow Time class to take a version of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a test which categorizes p...

For years, my holiday calendar contained a reference to the silent, gliding dances of the Bon Odori perfomed during the O-Bon festival in Ja...

Thinking about the fact that this new moon, the sixth new moon of the year in the Chinese calendar, is known as the Lotus Moon. I took this ...

I like to think of Fourth of July as a secular version of pagan Midsummer festivals. Like many historical holidays, Fourth of July se...

In my latest newsletter, I mentioned that I was overwhelmed by the prospect of writing eight or nine articles every month for my Living in S...

I took the train to San Francisco to take a one-day workshop on distilling essential oils from plants with legendary herbalist, ...

On May 14, I attended the Environmental Writing workshop sponsored by the Burke Museum . I especially enjoyed the workshop taught by Lynda M...

The habit of ignoring our present moments in favor of others yet to come leads directly to a pervasive lack of awareness of the web of life ...

You know how much I love Lent . I love how it resonates with the energy of spring, with its encouragement to shed bad habits, to make room ...

It was a goat willow tree that launched My Year in Flower project back in 2008 when it dropped a spent blossom on my head as I walked past w...

My New Year's practice is to make a collage that represents the experiences I hope to enjoy in the new year. For the past few years, I...

At the end of the week, I went away for a three-week mini-retreat which I created and orchestrated so I could have three friends help me fig...

This new year I’ve been feeling really bogged down by all of the clutter in my house. I thought I would get it all cleared out during the we...