I know, I know, it's been a long time...

But I'm still alive!  Once a person gets behind on blogging, the amount of things that COULD be said is overwhelming, and one just doesn't even want to try.  But here I am, nonetheless!  I'll deal with my little problem with a random list of things I've been thinking about, in no particular order.  I'm just going to be ok with being a sloppy blogger. 

1. This is my first fall without school in 19 years.  Which makes me feel excited and nostalgic and unprepared and lonely and excited again.  I do miss the grand adventure of learning, every day, as my main task.  Always at this time of year I get itchy to start writing papers, thinking new thoughts, being challenged by ideas that I never would have encountered on my own.  I particularly miss the tactile bits right now: new notebooks, not yet the unorganized chaos they would become mid-semester.  New pencils.  A daily schedule, written out and full of possibilities!  But that's my life looking forward... I mean the "full of possibilities" part, not the "written out."  It is entirely unwritten.  
2. Yeah, about that future... Coming towards the end of something always makes me anxious and day-dreamy about my long-term future.  Brendan and I dream out loud a lot about what we could do.  Start a farm/commune/social justice community?  Organize communities around food availability and intimacy?  Find some community without a co-op and start one?  An apple orchard?  An off-the-grid house on our own plot of land?  Notice the theme: FOOD.  
3. My amazing friend Amanda asked me recently how I came to care about food so much, and I had a new realization today on that front.  I believe that there are two basic categories of human need: the physical (food, shelter, etc.), and the spiritual (community, nature, pleasure, God).  Food is one thing that can fill both of those needs.  Obviously everyone needs a certain amount of daily calories, but we can become just as sick without our spiritual needs met.  People gather around food, find pleasure in it, get to be outside when they grow it.  Making and eating good food forces us to slow down and just do one thing.  And (of course) food is theologically significant, a major part of Jesus' ministry, the center of Christian ritual in the eucharist.  Ask me someday about a eucharistic ethics of food justice.  Or go read Sara Miles' really really good book, "Take This Bread".  Anyways.  Food.  Love it.  
4. And just for good measure, some things I've been doing lately: harvesting and processing food like crazy--roasting and freezing tomatoes, canning salsa, drying pears, storing potatoes.  Today we picked two bushels of apples from a friends trees, so we'll be elbow deep in applesauce and apple butter soon.  We're almost done putting up a high tunnel (a sort of unheated green house to grow produce in the winter!)  Generally loving up this place all we can while we can.