Diamond-Cut Life

Earlier this week I noted that sustainability needs a lot of entrepreneurs, and supplied the first half of my best tips for them, gleaned from twelve years of owning and operating my own business. Here’s the second half. Feel free to add your own suggestions and experience!
Be willing to [...]

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Sustainability needs lots of entrepreneurs. It needs outside-the-box thinkers and doers to help us find new ways of producing, consuming and being of service to each other. I’ll bet that you, yourself, have a talent or idea you’ve fantasized about making a living at.
I spent 1992 to 2004 as a small business owner, designing and [...]

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I’ve read that the average wedding in the U.S. costs $20,000. (I wonder how many fights ensue over getting it all paid off?) Portland’s green wedding of the year, that of our friends Noelle Studer and Eli Spevak, was long on community, short on materialism. The joy and vitality were palpable.
Here Eli and Noelle [...]

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I had an exhilarating swoop into the heart of the diamond-cut life Saturday night when I bicycled all the way home from my mother-in-law’s house.  (For newcomers to this blog– welcome! — the diamond-cut life is happiness chiseled down to its essence, with excess consumption stripped away).
I felt free and strong as an eagle bicycling from far [...]

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Living here in Portland, Oregon, I’ve become aware that we have the highest percentage of hybrid cars of any city in the nation. I’ve also observed that Portland General Electric (PGE) has the largest renewable power program in the country. (Disclosure: I’m married to Thor Hinckley, the manager of that renewables program.)
The new piece is [...]

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Having noticed unusually high readership of my last post How To Save Money On Gas, I’m going to soon write a sequel with more tips on that topic, including from readers, via comments.
But man does not live by gas alone. We need our spirits to be fed, too. Enter poetry. This poem of mine, a [...]

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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 [...]

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I got up before dawn this morning and went running at first light in Mount Tabor Park, near our house. Near a 100-foot tall Douglas Fir tree, I heard unusual scrabbling noises, so I stopped in my tracks to investigate.
I saw an adult raccoon spreadeagled on the tree at about waist height, looking over its [...]

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I am blessed to be in a truly happy marriage. My husband Thor and I take deep delight in each other, and deep trust. But my life has certainly not always been this way: I’m a survivor of two divorces, many more break-ups, and staggering amounts of emotional pain.
My, how things can change. Specifically, [...]

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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 [...]

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