heatin' up

Texas, oh Tex. I'm fond of you, but you're a fickle minx. Cold as sin one day, hot as blazes the next.  As early as March you marched along like it was high summer and now April's confounded at how to react. 90 degrees all arriving at once never sees me complaining, but after so little rain it's criminal. What's a poor plant/animal/person to do? At least the okra won't complain.

Ah yes, the okra, because with spring skipping so quickly into summer, what better to do than to dirty hands and knees in pursuit of turning field into food? With any luck, a few short months will bring a tide of tomatoes, and genuine apprehension at the growing ranks of squash, melon and nightshades.

I'm thankful then, that these unnaturally sultry days have been equally filled with beer tasting, tree grafting, river wading and lazy cycling, before any new latitudes or time constraints crowd out the splendor of summer-esque lazing. For now, it's all tweaking bread recipes and vegetable garden vigilance - there's thieving venison and nosy armadillos as far as the eye can see - that happily fills our homebound time, wrestling with government forms between punches. (Dough, not deer, for those of you with soft hearts and overactive imaginations.)

It's rough, but someone's gotta--
Hell, who am I kidding?

Life 'tis sweet.

Here's a few shots around the family homestead's high points - porches, creek beds, wooded valleys, pecan tree fields and perhaps even a new garden bed or two. Dappled sunlight or full blast of rays, it's nice to feel the orb's warmth on my shoulders as I weed and wander. Skin exposure's finally lawful, legal and so perfectly seasonal once more. 

We may not be here long, but for the moment, Texas, you're doin' just fine. 

BEFORE

AFTER

- xx

permaculture dreamin'

Eat food?  Then you need to watch this.

I mean it.  No pleas or petitions cloaked in pretty turns of phrase, just fact.  You need to watch this.




Permaculture calls itself a quiet revolution.  A revolution of actors too enthused to wait for government support or mass movements before they act.  A revolution that believes small changes lead to big.  A revolution of idealists bent on saving the world, and of realists who understand that their role in salvation begins within their immediate spheres of influence.  It's quiet because it's led by people at home, not corporations, politicians or pedagogues.

But I think it's time to get louder - starting with me.

My love and I have a dream, and our dream is this:  a small permaculture farm buried in the wilds of the Northwest.  Some ducks, some goats, maybe a horse or two.  A bevy of rescued hounds, to be sure.  Just living off the land, as the land wants to live.  We'll grow our food and make our music and learn to weave environments and textiles that we'll grow ourselves.  We'll continue to travel and learn and wander and wonder, for these things are in the blood and cannot be denied.  But we'll do them while living our dream.  Our farm.  Our home.

“The world needs dreamers and the world needs doers. But above all, the world needs dreamers who do.” – Sarah Breathnach

Designing the land courts neither riches nor fame.  It feeds you.  To paraphrase climate expert Bill McGibbon, the one shared asset that farmers around the world have always possessed is the assurance that they can grow their crops on the same land as their mothers and fathers.  The freedom of permanence in an impermanent world.  That assurance is eroding, just as the land erodes and withers from our current growing systems, counterintuitive to mother nature's design.  Systems that make it impossible for her to protect herself.  Systems reliant on one of her most finite resources.

So my love and I want to listen to nature, work with her, not against.  Land should be a dependable legacy; for centuries it has been so.  But land too has a biological clock tick tick ticking away, and humanity's greatest efforts aren't bent toward researching climate renewal or planetary fountains of youth.  Rather, we naively plunder the very earth that sustains us.  That feeds us.
Without consideration, but with consequence.

But what has begun has far from ended.  Hope and research and resolve and revelations and revolutions are alive and well around the world.  We want to join in.  We want to feed, as do millions of others like us.  Feed ourselves, our souls, our families, our communities, our countries, our planet.  Contact our local prison so that those men and women can spend a day in the sun and take with them all the fresh vegetables they can carry.  Have neighbours come to share wisdom and devise experiments, while we feed them from our yard.  Create safe havens for the birds and the bees, the fields and the trees.  Learn to grow orchards, turf rooftops, embroider linens, reduce possessions, watercolor walls, weave grasses, craft earthships, shape guitars, reconsider waste, tin rutabagas, sculpt adobe, reuse relics, preserve ecosystems.  Preserve us.  We'll make the land into an artefact.

The earth will be our artefact.

- xx

[image via cabinporn.com, a great place to drift, dream and drool for hours....]

e[co]commerce

Marketing campaigns drowned inboxes over the holiday season; it was a smorgasbord of sales, wish lists, gift-giving essentials and top holiday presents under $/£100.  As a fashion maven, I can't claim total disinterest when well-curated lists of goodies came rolling in, but this year I asked myself what I could do to buy local, reduce my yuletide carbon footprint and invest in quality for the ones I love.  Some of my top gift ideas for 2013 included:

1.  A Spotify premium account - the gift of limitless song and dance, with no shipping required.
2.  A Kinfolk magazine subscription - it's beautiful, inspired and inspiring.  Plus it drags your recipient away from backlit screens.
3.  Used copies of my favourite novels, picked up at local charity shops.
4.  An all expense paid perusal of Kiva.org, where the recipient chooses how to spend their charitable amount.  A gift that keeps giving and giving and giving.
5.  A local CSA membership and/or urban garden plot - supporting local farmers/gardeners and eating fresh veggies makes everyone happy.  Even more satisfying to grow some yourself!

Fashion however, was trickier.   I wanted items produced within the USA (or Europe for my darling British halves), produced sustainably both in responsible material sourcing and in textile production techniques, produced at a fair wage for the workers who manufactured the garments, and items that were sold at a reasonable price point.  Phew.

Oh, and pretty.  And well-made.  And long-lasting.

My normal go-to is buys from any local vintage nook or charity treasure trove; Etsy.com if I'm scouring the interwebs.  Fashion gifts that focus on reuse and recycling.  On history and storytelling.  On quality and pleasure.  But alas, what if someone on your list isn't jonesing for a Pendleton wool shirt that 20 strangers have kept warm in before them?  If said person is genuinely deserving of a gift... ;)

Enter: Jungmaven, Base Range and Mollusk.
All of these alternative businesses have made environmental ideals and local production part of their mission statement, and all of them produce beautiful quality garments.

Jungmaven 
Jungmaven's aim is to get everyone in a hemp t-shirt by 2020.  A pretty sweet goal, as hemp is a carbon-negative, dense growing crop AND a durable fabric that will last you years longer than any cotton throwaway tee you pick up for a fiver.  Best selling point?   These tees are impossibly soooooooooft...

Base Range [Basic Aesthetic for Sustainable Easywear]
Based in Portugal, this environmentally-councious brand sources all of their materials from organic farms across the continent and produces them in small, family-run factories near their main office.  Their philosophy, "To create simple, accessible garments that exist somewhere between modern culture and the natural world".  Simple, organic, stunning and forever wearable? I'm hooked.

Mollusk
Founded on the unruly shores of San Francisco's Ocean Beach (and L.A.'s Venice Beach), Mollusk is a haven for surfers that sells clothing made in nearby Oakland from US-sourced materials.  Even better, it serves as a community space for visual artists, musicians, woodworkers and other local craftspeople whose products are all made or inspired by friends and neighbors, united in their task of capturing the beach bum way of life and spirit of the sea.

 

(Honorable mention goes out to A Peace Treaty with its breathtaking scarves and jewelry made by artisans in conflict zones and Free People's Maheya line, which is hand-crafted using all natural dying techniques and ethically sourced materials.  Shop imports that make a difference!)

- xx

  

rising waters

The US is frozen.  Ice and snow have claimed the land.  The continent groans under its weight; the people slide along its surface.

Meanwhile, the UK is underwater.  Floods upon floods upon floods upon floods.  Entire counties held hostage by rising currents and grey skies.  

I know all of this is bad.  It is a symptom of our planet's disease, and only we can be blamed for the infection.  It is global warming's repercussions in the now, not the future.  It has caught too many unaware, lost too many homes, disrupted too many lives.  It's a tragedy - an overwhelming, intimidating, accusatory, rallying-cry of a tragedy, and I can only hope it's the missionary that will convert us from complacency to action where our fragile climate is concerned.

And still.  It's beautiful.  Really, truly beautiful to behold.   

We took a little jaunt, my love and I, to visit a lake that we've only addressed as our old friend River.  The Severn has no banks, no restraint; it frolics over towpaths, resting on benches and defacing the signs.  It kicks and sprints and curses and cheers its way across playing fields used to a different kind of sport.  It stops in at nearby pubs to marvel at hardened regulars and herd them slowly home.  

Bundled up warm in our flannels and wooly best, we watched it gurgle and scheme.  Lovely with light.   Giddy with freedom.  No small task to coax that wild thing back between its banks.  

Troubling though, that I post this to the rhythmic patter of still more water...

- xx

shearling coat, quilted patchwork flannel and boots: all vintage

tank and beanie: free people 

jeans: rag&bone denim

food for thought

I was fascinated by the cloud the farmer kept anchored to the door of his shack: 

"It's very docile," he explained, "and we milk it three times a week. That's all the land needs." 

- Rafael Perez Estrada

(all photo and video credits to Whole Larder Love and Rohan Anderson)

I entreat you to check out my most recent beloved, admired and firmly, deeply appreciated electronic mentor, Rohan Anderson. A wise friend recommended I check out his blog WholeLarderLove, and I have been happily devouring away ever since.  
(Sadly with eyes alone, something my tongue and belly have yet to forgive me for.)

Rohan is not your typical preacher of the 'hunt, gather, grow' lifestyle.  Let's explore his atypicality, list-style:

1.) He actually does hunt, gather and grow.  All of the time.  He hunts game, gathers wild herbs and fungi, grows heaps of vegetables and designs the means to jar/can/dry/smoke/cure them to feed himself and his family in a sustainable, seasonal manner.  He meets his meat before it's meat to create self-accountability in his consumption practices.  

2.) He is a gifted photographer.  His images of his food and processes are a mixture of authenticity and ingenuity that make you yearn for a simpler, fresher, cleaner way of life and nostalgic for your grandparents' youth.   

3.)  There is nothing macho or chauvinist in his attitude toward his outdoor endeavours - his blog is perfectly readable and highly recommended for every gender/race/sexuality/nationality/religion/person.  Basically, if you like earth, you'll like him.

4.) He is raising his children to be responsible consumers.  They know that pork comes from pigs and carrots from the ground.  They even fed that piggy themselves before he fed them, and they planted the seeds that grew their carrots.  We're all old and stuck in our ways, but children?  Children keep us accountable.  They will right wrongs, fix mistakes and constantly improve, improve, improve our future.  Kids are powerful.  Powerful and awesome.  That's why it's so refreshingly reassuring to hear of kids being taught how to feed themselves from the ground, not the grocery aisle.  

5.) The man has a mission.  Loud and proud, he affirms his need to reduce, simplify and save the earth from human destruction.  He addresses climate change, rampant consumerism, convenience eating, carbon footprints, unsustainable food production, record-level waste, and disconnect with the seasons, nature and earth itself.  He doesn't lean on witty anecdotes, although he's anecdotes aplenty.  Nor does he overly romanticise former golden eras of simplicity - after all, the man preaches from the same electronic non-reality that you and I inhabit.  Instead he embodies a beautiful blend, the best of both.  A bit of technology, a touch of the hand-made.  Reusing plus innovation.  The past and the modern, coexisting.  

Balance.  Intention.  

Thought.  

Do you really need an electronic blender and a food processor (and a coffee grinder and a hand blender and a juicer and a George Forman Grill, plus your microwave, toaster and kettle)?  Could you soak beans by hand instead of buying tins?  Could you slow cook something simply by cooking it - slowly?  How about bouquets of radishes, figs from your own tree, or non-proverbially 'going fishing'?. 

His drastic lifestyle change to self-sufficiency serves as a loose guide, a constant process of trial and error that he uses to inform and entertain.  But not to impress upon anyone.  Not to admonish or prescribe universal tenets that must be adhered to.  Its harshest consequence is its unwitting habit of acting like a mirror, reflecting our poor environmental practices in comparison to what we could do and inspiring us to better.  No harm in a little self-reflection, right?  

Basically, the man offers articulate, well-informed and rational arguments about making our planet better.  Then he passionately exhorts you to do the same, whether he comes out and says so or not.  I, for one, want to try.  Especially if it means that I get to make my own chorizo or grow my own berries.  It's not just food; it's food for thought.