. . . though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater. —Haldir of Lothlorien, The Fellowship of the Rings I’ve had a large helping of grief the last five years, though it was broken down into many smaller griefs: my father’s death, the dissolution of my marriage, the end of a long friendship, my brother’s death from brain...
Park University hosted the 2018 MiddleMoot in Kansas City, the first in the metro area and the second after a moot in Waterloo, Iowa, in 2017. I was fortunate enough to be allowed, and even...
Edges have always compelled me to go and stand on them, even if they scare me. My favorite word is liminal (on the threshold, intermediate, transitional). One question I’ve been asking myself...
Boulder, Colorado, can be a delightful place to live—if you just moved there with buckets of money, or if you relocated years ago when housing prices were more reasonable. This month I visited...
India was a place I’d wanted to visit since I was in my twenties, and when I finally arrived at age fifty-three I had a difficult time getting used to it. Almost all the public spaces I passed...
Today was a long day. I woke up and thought, as usual, that I really must buy some cereal. —Senior year journal, Georgetown University, 1984; photograph from Epiphyte B&B, Cow Bay...
Recently I bought a facial cleanser in plastic packaging. I didn’t want the packaging, but I did want the exfoliating cleanser. I had been using a bamboo washcloth to clean and exfoliate my...
Last year I moved back here after living in Colorado for thirty years. One day I was standing at an intersection on the east side of town. A man across the street in a large vehicle yelled, “Do...
“Environmental restoration” sounds serious, doesn’t it? And difficult! But it doesn’t have to be. I fervently believe every American can do something to heal...
Where better to get look for natural, organic, biodynamic, or sustainable wines than a health food store like Nature’s Own in Kansas City? That’s where I found Stemmari Nero...
I get some weird reactions when I whip out my reusable utensils. When I used them at a picnic recently, my friend inquired, “Aren’t you going to use what’s already here?”...
This is post number 3 in my series, the Love Conversation About Conservation (Loco About Conservation for short), and my second post about chocolate. The idea with Loco is that you tell me what you...
This is post number 2 in my series, the Love Conversation About Conservation (Loco About Conservation for short). The idea is that you tell me what you love, and I will tell you how to green it...
This is Post number 1 in my series, the Love Conversation About Conservation (Loco About Conservation for short). The idea is that you tell me what you love, and I will tell you how to green it. Here...
I moved back to Kansas City in February 2016, thinking I would probably buy a car at some point, but it’s June and still I haven’t. The work I’ve had since moving here has not...
When we first arrived in India, we stayed in New Delhi, the planned city the British built in the early twentieth century to be their capital in India. We were near Connaught Place, designed to be...
When our guide Sudhir mentioned the “aha” moment, our cynical brains said, Oh, yeah? We arrived at about 10 am, late enough for most of the smog to have burned off. The air was terribly...
Tanjung Puting National Park in Indonesia, which Todd and I visited in October 2015, was permeated by smoke. Parts of Indonesia get hazy every fall as farmers burn their fields (an ancient practice...
We saw lots of dogs and cats on the street in Asia, but they were not pets in the American sense. Most of the cats on the streets of Jakarta looked scrawny, and many had oddly short tails. At first I...
Jakarta, a city of around 10 million people, has a couple of central districts where tourists like to stay, namely Kota (the old Dutch quarter near the harbor) and the area farther south around the...
Jakarta was our first stop in Indonesia and our first Asian city, and many people seem to think it’s a dump. But I liked it. One of my favorite things about Jakarta, and Indonesia in general...
At the last minute I emailed Emma Healey of Money Can Buy Me Happiness to see if we could meet while Todd and I were visiting Christchurch. I knew her from the Blog Brilliantly group on Facebook, but...
We spent two and a half days in Wellington, and what I remember of the city is a swirl of sights. Our location was ideal, just one block from Cuba Street, in a building that used to be the Hannah...
Xtreme Zero Waste in the small community of Raglan, on the central west coast of the North Island, was one of three places I knew I had to visit in New Zealand. It is a community organization similar...
Todd and I toured the Hobbiton film set while we were staying in Hamilton, a quiet city south of Auckland on the North Island. We drove down winding roads (on the left!) until we saw the sign for...
