2020 in Solar Power

  Given everything else that 2020 brought, Don and I are grateful to have moved into our zero-energy home before Covid grounded everyone. When everything shut down last March, my son and daughter-in-law, school principals in Miami, packed their four-year-old daughter Soraya in the car and drove to Indiana to stay with us and work […]

Cultivating Outdoor Life

Much as we love the house with its energy superpowers, it’s still just base camp for what we’re really doing: enjoying, learning from, and prospering the little corner of earth we live in. Every day brings new insight—about wildlife, about tools, about how things grow. And just for the record, for people who keep asking […]

Moved! Settling in! It’s working!

 Our new home in Henryville, Indiana was completed at the end of July, and we moved in right away. So far, we’ve experienced drought and extreme heat; torrential rain; multiple visitors including our four grandchildren; sunny fall days; nights of stargazing; planting asparagus crowns, garlic, and shallots in our newly made Hugelkultur mounds and finding volunteer acorn […]

Travels and Home

Last Wednesday I was in the little town of Monmouth in western Illinois speaking to a group of faculty and students about food and faith. Monmouth College has a community garden which supplies produce to their food service as well as to the local farmer’s market. They also have a small farm to experiment with […]

Nature Heals the Broken Heart

Here is a short piece I wrote for Presbyterians for Earth Care last year. They do such good work, I’m glad to get to work with them.  I will post some other things soon. Right now, looking forward to visiting Monmouth College in Illinois to lecture on February 20 and Campbellsville College in Kentucky on February 26, preaching […]

Where I’ve Been

Surprisingly, people are still contacting me through this poor blog, neglected now for a year and a half. I’m heartened every time I hear that another church is using Inhabiting Eden for a group study. Obviously, though, I owe an explanation.              Two years ago, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Not unusual—1/3 of all […]

What We Love, We Protect

A few months ago at the public library in Evansville, Indiana, 125 people gathered for a program about building backyard bird habitats, complete with hundreds of photos of warblers and other songbirds, all taken in the presenter’s own yard. She emphasized the need for local and migratory birds to find water, food, and shelter at […]