We have a covered patio on one side of our house which is accessed by a sliding glass door. I use it most often to let Goldie in and out of the house to the backyard. The patio was used for exercise equipment by the previous owners, and they left a small, simple hook sunk…
I’m reading my email & letting my brain wander idly in a train-of-consciousness writing… and it occurs to me that the question one of my correspondents asks is a good one: Why do I want to be good? That is, actually, easy to answer for me: I want to be good because being good makes…
Our old apple tree has a few blossoms on it! They look like lovely pinkish froth, almost, despite there being only a handful of them. I hope next year the tree has more blossoms — I remember the apple trees we had in Texas nearly exploded with blossoms each year. To my knowledge we’ve also…
There is a sort of beauty found in terrible weather, which I’d forgotten. It’s nice to remember. Because I don’t currently have a backyard, I walk my dog Goldie twice daily, and I try to get her to a dog park five or six days a week to stretch her legs off-leash and play with…
As I write this I’ve just spent the past two or three hours sitting in the tire shop and waiting for a tire change. It was busy there; fortunately I knew it might take a while and planned ahead so I had my drink and one of my textbooks to read. The book’s cover is…
I’m reading Vandana Shiva’s Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, & Development for an on-line class on Ecofeminism which I’m TAing. The following are two comments made on the class forum at different times. While reading both the book and the forum comments, I was reminded of a study I read about many years ago (which means…
The following is a quick review of an article read for the Ecofeminism class in which I am a TA — yay! I’d like to figure out how to TA more… though apparently you cannot TA for a class you haven’t actually taken. Considering the changeover in classes occurring in my program in the past…
Both Sanday (reviewed by me here and here) and Du are anthropologically trained ethnographers researching indigenous societies. As previously noted, their work offers explicit epistemological modifications of great benefit for a more humane, feminized science. This is not the only valid methodology available, however, to a women’s spirituality scholar, as is demonstrated by the next…
A common assumption I’ve frequently read is that the “worst discovery” made by humankind was agriculture, in that it taught men (not humans) the concept of property. The rather androcentric theorizing seems to be that once men conceptualize food as property which can be hoarded away despite the needs of others, it’s invariably a short…
This has been a very strange semester so far, and I’m less than a week in. Amongst other things, my Women & World Religions comps essay prof did another review of my bibliography, and suggested some changes. I found this odd for two reasons: 1) I thought we’d agreed on the official booklist at the…