Diamond-Cut Life

I’m looking today at a confluence of one of my favorite sports — running — and a worthy pursuit that I have done in the past — fundraising. An energetic woman named Linda Quirk at Run 7 On 7 is leading 300 others in running seven marathons on seven continents and raising pledges to [...]

[Read more →]

Guest post by award-winning journalist Colleen Kaleda:
My husband and I recently bought a 96 year old house in a close-in neighborhood of Northeast Portland. If our land could talk — oh what would it say? Perhaps that it wants to shed its excess pavement.

Our sidewalk still has hand-forged steel rings where horses used [...]

[Read more →]

Happy Fourth of July! It’s our nation’s birthday. I’ve posted Ideas for celebrating below, based on this basic life-principle we all tend to forget:
A nation starts its life in the beginning as land, as earth — before people arrived to populate it. And that land, the soil, water and things that grow on it, are [...]

[Read more →]

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision yesterday to slash Exxon’s punitive damages for the Valdez oil spill back to a fraction of the original ruling is immoral. We should be outraged that the Supreme Court is essentially excusing Exxon from making reparations, and not consume this as just another piece of ordinary news.
I deliberately use that [...]

[Read more →]

The following is a guest post by Jim Meyer. Diamond-Cut Life welcomes your topical submissions. If you would like to write a guest post, please contact us.

Let’s get frank about the current pressures on the US lifestyle and environment as it’s been constructed up to now: A lot of people are getting [...]

[Read more →]

My carpool-pals don’t just help me save gas money and carbon emissions, they also pass good information on to me. Thanks to my baseball-loving ‘pool, I’ve learned about Andrew Brown, the relief pitcher for the Oakland Athletics who uses his bicycle and BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) to get to the ballpark for [...]

[Read more →]

With Summer Solstice and the first day of summer coming up on Saturday June 21, my theme this week will be earth-friendly recreation, or Fun In The Time Of Global Warming.

Professional work tends to keep us up in our heads, thinking so hard we practically get divorced from our bodies. I really hate that about [...]

[Read more →]

Living sustainably takes an ongoing focus. It takes mindfulness. My experience is that all kinds of things, but especially addictions, destroy that mindfulness.
Years ago I was smitten with a man, a man beautiful inside and out, who was — you guessed it — unavailable. I obsessed about him for weeks, neglecting other things in [...]

[Read more →]

A short post having just returned from the Southwest. I’ve learned it takes between 2200 to 3500 gallons of water to support each single game of golf played in a desert environment.
This, in an American West of shrinking aquifers and a world of growing food shortages and record levels of starvation. I’m seeing a real [...]

[Read more →]

Since I’ve been working pretty hard lately, I’m taking a mini-vacation here in Scottsdale, Arizona (next to Phoenix), visiting my friend Jean for a few days. The idea is to make my own little self more sustainable, and sure enough, my spirit is going “Ahhhhhhhhh” in response to the rugged desert beauty, the brilliant sky, [...]

[Read more →]