Diamond-Cut Life

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’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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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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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 [...]

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I was delighted to find this morning that Andrew Brown, the Oakland Athletics pitcher who was the subject of my recent post on cool commuting, wrote me in response. When he says some of his fellow A’s are now also using BART,  I’m impressed as always by how much we influence those around us with [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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, [...]

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