My rabbits are turning me vegan.

Not just because they’re so cute and I can’t imagine eating them. I can, and I do (end times thought experiments). But also because I imagine the efficiency of eating mostly things that they can also eat, eating more of those things or parts of things that they also like and that are good for them.

Taking into account advice from my new local accountant, I’ve decided to form a personal LLC. All my little projects will be integrated under this entity, which will specialize in sustainability systems, and I will save myself a ton in taxes. I will thereby, symbolically at least, fully dealienate myself from my labor; I will be my own boss, like, freals. Plus I love the idea of a corporation that grows and edits words, plant life, and bunnies.

Just planted three Brooklyn italian white fig starts, in a fit of poignancy. they are now lodged in the cat-free zone, my brother’s old room, which has east and south windows and maybe someday a skylight. not a sentiment-free zone: they join the maidenhair fern, Anthony’s jade, the surviving geranium (Sophie’s gift), and the nearly cat destroyed Ithaca snake plant and the killer oxalis from Alika and Christina.

A Michigan Radio series about class, which I learned about through ACM’s Back to Your Senses e-mail.

I have a lead on a chocolate angora named Cypress to serve as mate to Rosa Luxemburg, who has been diagnosed by my chief lagomorphic correspondent as a German blue. Plans to go take a look-see at the gent in White Cloud next Saturday. My friend Jen has become inspired by the winter bunny palace and has made some drawings for some of the improvements that need to be made for general winter bunny mobility and comfort. She’s so awesome. I told her: I’m on this massive deadline, I’m freaking out, and I all I can think about is bunnies and bunny things, and plans for the lawnless garden.

What will happen when the year of the Cat/Rabbit is over?

The hay I got from G has sweetgrass in it. The bunnies smell like it now. On a couple of the colder nights recently I put felt blankets over JB’s and Rosa’s cages. This morning was strangely warm and still rainy.

Here’s what I’ve got on order with Mountain Rose Herbs. Haven’t pulled the trigger yet.

Plantain Seeds		$2.95		$2.95
St Johns Wort Seeds		$2.95		$2.95
Chaste Tree (Vitex) Seeds		$2.95		$2.95
Nettle Seeds		$2.95		$8.85
Milk Thistle Seeds		$2.95		$2.95
Maca Seeds		$3.95		$3.95
Evening Primrose Seeds		$2.95		$2.95
Comfrey Seeds		$3.25		$3.25
Clary Sage Seeds		$2.95		$2.95
Dandelion Seeds		$2.95		$2.95
Catnip Seeds		$2.95		$2.95
Calendula Seeds		$2.95		$2.95
Borage Seeds		$2.95		$2.95
Sweet Basil Seeds		$2.95		$2.95
Arnica Seeds		$3.95		$3.95
Thyme Seeds		$2.95		$2.95
Wood Betony Seeds

Didn’t know what this was the first couple of years it grew here and there amid my long grass, but always liked the look of it. This weekend I found it in a book on Wisconsin wildflowers at Paul’s house, and read that the root can be roasted an used as a coffee substitute.

Verdict: I didn’t roast it long enough. It had a mild flavor, sort of like yerba mate, but with no appreciable stimulant effect.

Russian custom (as performed by Werner Herzog and his wife in Incident at Loch Ness): Right before you leave on a trip, no matter how much of a hurry you’re in to get out the door, sit down and do nothing for five minutes. Stopping to think is never a waste of time.

A farmer I know told me this: Anytime you’re thinking of acquiring something new, ask yourself how many functions it fulfills. If you can’t come up with at least three, you don’t need it. The same principle can be applied to junk lying around in your yard.

If you perform a task at the moment the mood to do it strikes you, you will do it faster and better, saving time even if you disrupt some other task you’re in the middle of. Engage your distraction, and you can motor along all day and get a lot done.

Walk rather than drive whenever possible. You will run into someone who will give you information that will save you the time you spent, and then some.

Something gleaned from Simone Weil: Hard work on spiritual matters (love, friendship, teaching, learning) is futile at best, and often downright harmful. Some tasks require grueling effort, but these are always related solely to the physical world. And I’m beginning to suspect that if I take a look at the spiritual side of even a physical task, that will lead me to the best method of getting it accomplished, which is also usually the easiest. Or even better, I might realize it doesn’t need to be done. I’m also pretty sure at this point that plant growth is one of those spiritual matters that cannot be forced—only appreciated.

Oh yeah, and my favorite advice from an old boss of mine: If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.

Instead of thinking that what I do today is work, I will think of it as creation.  “I’m working on…” –> “I’m making…” Which will necessitate more thought. It’s easy to say, “I’m working on issue nine of the Alert,” but “I’m creating issue nine of the Alert” gets to the heart of the matter, in that it’s not quite accurate. After all, I’m not alone in this. What am I making? Possibly a mess.

Weil spent several weeks as a hired laborer working the vineyards of the Rhône valley during the grape harvest.

Physical work is a specific contact with the beauty of the world, and can even be, in its best moments, a contact so full that no equivalent can be found elsewhere. The artist, the scholar, the philosopher, the contemplative, should really admire the world and pierce through the film of unreality that veils it and makes it, for nearly all men at nearly every moment of their lives, a dream or stage set. They ought to do this but more often than not they cannot manage it. He who is aching in every limb, worn out by the effort of a day of work, that is to say a day when he has been subject to matter, bears the reality of the universe in his flesh like a thorn. The difficulty for him is to look and to love. If he succeeds, he loves the Real. That is the immense privilege God has reserved for the poor. But they scarcely ever know it. No one tells them…. A slight change in these conditions would be enough to open the door to a treasure. It is heart-rending to see how easy it would be in many cases for men to procure a treasure for their fellows and how they allow centuries to pass without taking the trouble to do so.

The love we feel for the splendor of the heavens … for the silence of nature which is borne in upon us by thousands of tiny sounds … is an incomplete painful love, because it is felt for things incapable of responding, that is to say for matter. Men want to turn this same love toward a being who is like themselves and capable of answering their love, of saying yes, of surrendering…. The longing to love the beauty of the world in a human being is essentially the longing for the incarnation.  That is why sins in this realm are serious. And they all come back to one thing, and that is the more or less complete determination to dispense with consent…. What can be more horrible than not to respect the consent of a being in whom one is seeking, though unconsciously, for an equivalent of God? (from Waiting for God)

Weil felt it was a sin to transfer the power of the absolute on to what is not God. It is sinful to become a slave.

thanks for sending this, Dad.

http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/why-mow-the-case-against-lawns/