So much has happened over the past year, Landmark, Community Garden, Japan and on and on. I'm not sure if it's a factor of aging or reverse aging or what. I hear people talk about this time of life as when people slow down and time speeds up. Time is definitely clipping along but life, projects, school, ideas just keep coming, and I'm loving it...actually.

I wish I could keep up with myself. I wonder if just doing a lot of things, fingers in a lot of pots, is an obsession or just an excuse to not do anything well. I am energized by so many things. I love school and am in the midst of many projects and am enjoying being suffocated in the excitement.

Perhaps the thing that's most on my mind, at the moment, is ANETA. That's the acronym for the academy that I'm involved with...not exactly an academy yet. That's the point though: all sorts of ideas, models and excitement. It's truly something on which I could focus in my quest to "save the world."

I sold the goats, grrr...sigh. I miss them but I wasn't able to take care of them, especially when I had to rely on others if I was out of town. So it's bees and grapes for now.

The Secret

Three years ago I got a MacBook Pro for making and editing documentary movies for my classes. One of my aides whose mother is from Taiwan uploaded a picture of an incredibly beautiful Buddist temple. I always assumed that it was in Taiwan, since he visits there often.

Last night I slept in a Buddhist temple in Kyoto and visited two others today. The second one was the same one I've had on my desktop for almost 3 years. Kinda reminds one of the movie,"The Secret" where the guy buys the house he had in the collage on his wall. The pic on the top is the original desktop. The others are ones I took today. Crazy stuff, eh? I wept openly when I rounded the corner of the little lake and got my first glimpse.

It's About Time

We are everywhere doing everything we can in such a short period of time. The past 5 days have found my group in Nagasaki visiting schools, Ground Zero, the Peace Gardens, Christian Churches, Tea Ceremonies, Universities and a recycling plant. All of that plus eating some of the most outstandingly amazing foods I've ever experienced. I also, through an incredible coincidence (do they exist?) was lined up with an LDS family for a home visit over the past weekend. I went to church with them. It was the first time I've been to church in more than a month. It was a good place, a good space, for me and seemed to be a positive experience for everyone.

I have sooo many images I could upload, but am prohibited from uploading the best ones. Those w

ould be the faces of the children at the schools we have visited. They are incredibly beautiful. sitting with them, feeling their energy, innocence and passion for life was/is

transformative.

So much to write...so little time.

One thing that's coming to me about ESD is that there will never be sustainable solutions for sustainable development issues, be they energy, housing, transportation, resource depletion, climate-change, sustainable food supply, world peace or any other SD issue of substance just by teaching it in the classrooms. There are some internal issues that a substantial number of us will have to confront. It will require a shift in our nature or at least in our perceptions of

who/what we are and our place and relationship with everything and everyone else.

It's about time, no?

Thursday we went to a public bath at a hot springs. It waas a little different :) but very relaxing. The meal we ate there reminded me of an Italian wedding. We ate such a variety of foods, including Kobe beef which is the most expensive beef in Japan. We also spent some time at the longest suspension bridge in the world, 2 1/4 miles long. If one picture is worth a 1000 words I'll add a lengthy chapter here.

One pic is a cross-section of one of the cables used in building the bridge. Wactually took an elevator up onto the bridge.

Japan is AMAZING

Actually, its the Japanese who who are so hospitable and proud to do the best they can as they perform their jobs. The airport was unlike anything I've ever experienced, so polite and orderly. Anyway, I'm here in Kobe with the Fullbright ESD teacher exchage. I'm just going to add some pics for now of our first evening here.

Flooding and Such

It's been a crazy month so far. So many things to do between gardening, goats, getting ready for Japan and working with the Forest Service. Today is the first full day off I've had from the FS in 2 weeks.

I thought I'd include some pics of what I've been up to. We've been blasting rocks, repairing roads, filling and laying sandbags (all of which activities are related to our heavy snowfall this year).

April 30-More and More Snow

Just a few pics of what we woke up to and saw this morning. Just what we needed: more snow.

Water is Coming

This may be the worst year ever for flooding in our neck of the woods. There is so much snow pack on Timp (the tallest mountain in the area) which drains right into the two canyons just above us.

I took my daughter Catherine and Nikki, our pooch, up into the hills to have a look at the creek and such. The pictures are: (1. from our house, looking up at Timp; (2. Catherine above the stream; (3. a view down the canyon into the valley; and (4. Nikki getting her chin and ears scratched by her alpha male.

Anyway, we're going to be sandbagging in a couple of weeks, probably while I'm in San Francisco with the ESD Japan Exchange Program. I'm a bit worried. The city is going to put a big pipe down the middle of our street but I don't think it will hold all the water they are projecting will be coming down. So much depends on the weather. I guess we're all in God's hands in that we just have to do the best with the cards we are dealt. I don't think there's a habitable "safe" spot anywhere on the planet. Safety, true safety, has its origins in other spheres. It is reverence and awe of nature's power and fury coupled with a realization that acceptance of its cycles, twists and turns, are just how things are that make me grateful to be a witness and part of it. I will work and prepare to save our house and property, but in the end nature will ultimately have her way with all of man's creations.

Split Hives

I split a couple of hives on Saturday, so I'm up to 7, or back down to 5, depending on how it goes. I hope they all survive. I left them lots of honey.

Square-Foot Gardening SFG

Just had a great presentation on SFG by Alan Silva for our school community garden. It was EXTREMELY interesting and it made a truckload of sense. Check out THIS SITE for more information. I'm still kinda hooked on dirt, rather than "magic mixtures," but it really sounded like something I could use, particularly between the grape rows. It's a fairly portable system and I'm pretty excited to try it out this year.

School and Sustatinable Living

The past five months have been a whirlwind of activity. I've been busy with school and Landmark Forum, church, family as well as the regular chores and duties. I'll include more pictures and information about my own enterprises in the future but what's been happening at school has been transformational, for all of us.

The first 3 pictures are of a service project at a local Hindu Temple where we were helping prepare for the Festival of Colors, or Holi. We were able to begin cleaning up their community garden, clean up after the Llamas and fill bags of dye for the 30,000 expected attendees.






The arena of Sustainable Development has expanded with:
1) my acceptance into a UN-Japan Teacher Exchange that's focus is SDE (Sustainable Development Education;
2) a local Economic Self-Reliance Conference sponsored by Brigham Young University and the Ballard Center where multiple connections and validation for my students' Community Garden project were forged;
3) Common Ground which is the community garden project that my students initiated in conjunction with the AP Geography units on Agriculture and Development and my continuing interest in Sustainable Living.Common Ground is developing into a project in diversity. Almost 2/3 of the participants are Hispanic, which community represents 1/3 of our school population. The students are entirely committed to the project. They even had a write-up in a local newspaper.