I hate throwing things away. Especially something like this sweater, where most of the piece is still completely in tact and useful, and will be for quite a few years. The combination of the fast fashion clothing industry's crap quality clothes, with our modern day mentally of "if it's broken, throw it out" means that there is a lot of clothing that's ending up in landfills each year.

You know what's kind of weird? Every single one of our ancestors knew how to feed themselves, and preserve foods for winter - except for those fancy pants people who had servants available to do that for them. Nowadays, however, there are many people who probably couldn't even prepare a box of mac-n-cheese for themselves, much less cook a meal from scratch, or preserve vegetables, fruits and meat for the winter.

I’ve been working on myself pretty much non-stop for almost 20 years now. It started when I moved back to California, after living in Spain for 2 years, and I grew super depressed and unhappy with my existence. I thought my life was over at that point, and that it was time to dedicate all of my focus to doing things like “building a career,” “paying a mortgage” and “saving money for retirement.”

In the fall, my mom gave me this old quilt top that her quilting club received as a donation, because she thought I might want to make a skirt out of it. I love doing this kind of stuff and one of the main reasons I wanted to start sewing as an adult was so that I could upcycle old unwanted clothes, or bedding into new clothing.

This past summer, I experimented with growing my own sweet potatoes for the first time. The whole entire process was so much fun for me to experience. I got a lot of joy out of watching a couple of old sweet potatoes grow roots and shoots, then watching those shoots turn into bushy vines, and then harvesting tubers at the end of the growing season.

Over the past year, I’ve been learning how to metalsmith jewelry, and recently, I’ve been spending more time in the jewelry studio, which has required that I tote my pieces to and from my house on a weekly basis. I didn’t have a way to nicely tote my projects and tools around, so I took a trip to a local antique store and found this dusty old carpenter box, hiding in a cramped, dark booth, just waiting for me to find it and bring it back to life.

I've been wanting to experiment with hot composting for a while now, but I'd been holding out on building a compost bin, as this isn't my forever home. After the hurricane, however, I needed a bin to properly process the, uh, we'll say “ingredients" from my composting toilet. And for something like that, I wanted to make sure I did it properly and in a contained fashion.

A couple of weeks before Hurricane Helene, I found this very cool, but very trashed antique sewing machine for free on the side of the road. I’d been wanting one of those things for a long time, but they’re pretty expensive, so if you can imagine, I was out of my mind excited when I saw one for free on the side of the road. 

For a few years now, I've thought quite a bit about modern humanity's complete dependence upon these massive centralized systems that can very easily break at any given moment. Our food system, water system, electricity, internet, cell service, all of it just bam, crash at any moment. During Hurricane Helene, I saw all of those systems break down (excluding food) and they haven't even all come back online almost a month later here in Western North Carolina.

As I shared in my last video, Hurricane Helene devastated the city of Asheville and the surrounding Western North Carolina region. The destruction I've seen with my own two eyes is unbelievable, though I now believe it, as I've seen it right in front of me. I expected that something like this would cause fear and panic and desperation, but I've seen quite the opposite. I've experienced more love, kindness and generosity from everyone I've encountered, than I've ever experienced before.

The city of Asheville and the surrounded Western North Carolina region were devastated by hurricane Helene. We didn't see it coming. We weren't directly in Helene's path and at least since I've lived here, we typically aren't too badly affected by nearby hurricanes, so we weren't prepared for the destruction that we're dealing with today.

I'm a big fan of Steven Pressfield's book "The War of Art." I had an artist recommend it to me 14 years ago when I claimed to be suffering from artist's block. Although the word art is included in the title, the book is really written for anyone who feels blocked in any area of their lives.

I bought a beautiful book several weeks ago that combines three of my favorite things: foraging, DIY and art supplies. It's a foragers guide to natural ink making, and I made ink from pokeberries from one of its recipes. I share the video here!

I'm so excited to announce that I've begun creating and selling nature observation journals! All of the journals are high-quality printed reproductions of my original hand-painted watercolor and ink artwork.

Something clicked inside of me a few weeks ago. I can't really put a finger on what triggered the click, but I can tell you that there were many years of buildup behind that one single moment. In a moment — or so it seemed — I realized that I was done allowing my attention to be captured by all the fun colored buttons on my phone, and the flashing notifications it displays, and the endless stream of content that's readily available to consume all day every day on a gazillion different web platforms.

I had a quick encounter with a small bear in the forest the other day, and it got me thinking about some topics that I discuss in this post and accompanying video.

There was a noticeable shift in the weather at the start of the week, that I wrote about a couple of days ago. The cooler nights, combined with cool breezes during the day were the first signs of fall. Something that really hit me while writing that post, was my dis-integrating relationship with the natural world, since coming to live in Asheville. So I've made some changes to remedy that.

I had some thoughts come up in my meditation this morning — you know, that activity where you're not supposed to be thinking, HA! But the thoughts were more than the typical anxious chatter, or the song that won't leave my head, or the annoying mental replay of my life's worst moments. The thoughts that appeared came from a much deeper place within me. A place that lives beyond all of that.

Our modern day world is one of immense distraction. And most everyone carries around the ultimate form of distraction everywhere they go — their smart phones (which ironically seem to be dumbing us down). Being constantly distracted with notifications for calls, texts, emails and social media means that our ability to concentrate for any significant length of time has been greatly diminished.

The weather has shifted toward fall. I first felt it three days ago — a cool breeze in the air and much cooler nights. I've actually been using my blanket on the couch, and last night I put on a sweatshirt.