It's the End of the World As We Know It, and I Feel Fine

Yes, I've probably been reading too many books like The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight and The Long Emergency. I don't buy everything the doom-n-gloomers are predicting, but I buy enough of it to know I want to be moving in a different direction than over the cliff with the rest of the people in this crazy contraption we call our society.

It's not just these two books, or others like them, either. Maybe the journey started a decade ago, when my husband and I read Your Money or Your Life, joined a Voluntary Simplicity discussion group, and decided to change our priorities in life. Most likely, it started even earlier, with my punk rock years of revolt and rebellion, learning to take everything society handed me as truth and turn it on its head, examine it, and decide what I really thought about it. Even before that, I probably have my crazy (I say that in an affectionately good way) family to thank. My co-op shopping, tofu-serving, ERA-shirt-wearing, democrat-voting mom, and my strong-willed, independent-minded, build-his-own-Ham-radio Republican dad.

Whatever it was, the handwriting on the wall about our way of life is getting larger and bolder by the day, and our family has been on a path to become part of the solution for some time, but that path is looking more important as that handwriting gets easier to read. All of our priorities are being re-evaluated from this angle, from whether to plant more azaleas or landscape with food-producing shrubbery like blueberries, whether to invest money in a good tandem bicycle, learning how to raise chickens, turning our sloped lot into a series of raised garden beds, and building community with neighbors and friends. The decisions we make in our every day life matter more than they might've ever mattered in the history of humankind. I think about them every day, and now I get to write about them too. So welcome to the Blue Skies Urban Farm Blog.