Greetings from Alison Wiley here in Portland, Oregon. I'm a writer/doer/thinker who lives happily by putting people, nature and God ahead of accumulating more stuff. Read more →
I write about living with more joy and less stuff. That’s because I live in the United States, where we live generally with a glut of stuff, but not always a lot of joy, because stuff has lots of needs of its own, and sends many people into debt. And it tends to distract us from the [...]
Tags: Colleen Kaleda·Green Empowerment·Nay Shayan·The Community Project: Ethiopia
“This is my home . . . this is my only home . . . this is the only sacred place I have ever known . . . “ We all sang that together last night, performers and audience alike, at the end of the Winterfolk concert, led by the radiant Tracy Grammer. I had [...]
Tags: Colleen Kaleda·Sisters of the Road·Tracy Grammer·Vicki Lind
While the news is filled with the destructive war in Libya, a highly constructive event just occurred in Ethiopia. A Habitat For Humanity trip led
Pretend we were all alive together 300 years ago, or 300,000 years ago. What would we do for fun, in the absence of internet, movies, television, and everything else made possible by cheap fossil fuels? I think we’d do what my friends did with me last night to celebrate my birthday: entertain each other without [...]
Tags: birthdays·Colleen Kaleda·dancing·fun·haiku·Jean Baumann·labor of love·party·risotto·singing·vegetarian
My post on How Does Change Happen? appeared to strike a chord. Juliet Wilson, the Scottish blogger of Crafty Green Poet, wrote in response: “There’s a circularity to it in some senses. Politicians feel they don’t want to make laws that will be unpopular but a lot of people won’t take their own actions if [...]
Tags: Colleen Kaleda·Juliet Wilson
A high-joy, low-consumption pursuit that my friend Colleen Kaleda, a journalist, and I love to do together is write haiku. Her first poem reflects that she and her husband merrily ousted some pavement from their property last summer. Contact speaks to our shared love of community and sociability. Which reminds me: this Thursday Colleen and [...]
Tags: Colleen Kaleda·fun·haiku
Happy Valentine’s Day! In the spirit of romance and soft-edged things, we have haiku today by my friend Colleen Kaleda, who happens to be a professional journalist. Why are Colleen and I so fond of writing haiku together? Because it’s a process of throwing away frippery and non-essentials (and you know how I feel about [...]
Tags: Colleen Kaleda·culture·fun·Grant Macdonald·haiku·happiness·Honduras·life·love·relationships
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 [...]
Tags: Colleen Kaleda·concrete·culture·demolition·development·environment·EPA·land·Leo Reynolds·life·neighborhood·outdoors·pavement
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