So — here we are again — back on the blog. I miss blogging. I know no one reads blogs anymore, but whatever — when I started blogging in 2003, no one even knew what a blog was. I miss the form, the small writing, the engagement with the everyday, and having some ownership over my own content. Social media didn’t fill the same niche for me as blogging. I think I was here blogging away before Facebook was even really a thing, and now that I’ve killed off my FB account, here I am again. I like Instagram, and…
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The political chaos we’re facing has me thinking about the anthropocene. Well, to be fair, almost everything these days has me thinking about the anthropocene, and climate change, and the ways we keep talking about changing our lives and lifestyles but no one actually does. But what is the anthropocene? And why is the term itself causing such consternation? The anthropocene is a term proposed in 2008 and accepted in 2016 by the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London, the folks who set the definitions of geologic eras, to describe the era that comes after the Holocene. We have…
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It’s sunny and in the mid-40s out there today, and so it’s wash day. Long-time readers of this blog know how fanatical I can be about my clothesline, but really, if you’re looking to reduce your carbon footprint, giving up your tumble dryer is one of the easiest ways to make a huge impact. Plus, your clothes will be all airy and clean and won’t smell of horrible detergents or those nasty dryer sheets that I’m sure are giving us all cancer. I have an essay forthcoming in the next Dark Mountain entitled “Clothesline at The End of the World”…
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This herd of elk has been hanging around all winter. They woke us up Monday morning at first light calling to one another — you can hear one “cow call” on the video (over my windshield wipers/car engine). We’ve had varying numbers in the yard — this big group, one even bigger, and then a core group of about a dozen. We both woke up late one night a few weeks ago — clear skies, full moon, and two dozen elk bedded down right outside our bedroom windows. It was magical. Like a big interspecies slumber party.
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It’s Monday, which means my weekly session with the planner. About a year ago, I started deliberately planning my week — paid work projects, creative work projects, things I wanted to make — and started setting deliberate goals. My big goals for last year were to finish and send out essays for publication, and to get the mystery novel I’d set aside back on its feet again. Sitting down every Sunday or Monday and taking stock, then setting goals for the week has helped enormously. I started out using the Passion Planner which I particularly liked for it’s large size and…
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In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh takes on the question of why climate change, the great challenge of our time, is entirely absent from the modern novel. One of the novel’s many tasks is to take on the human stories of social change, and if you only read modern novels for information, you’d think the greatest crisis modern humans are facing is that husbands and wives seem to hate one another. One reason for this erasure, Ghosh posits, is the manner in which globalized capitalism has propagated the bourgeois idea that the world is reliable. He looks for instance, at the way…
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I started LivingSmall in 2002 not as a lifestyle blog, but as a political statement. My original tagline was “Thoughts on Literature, Food, Faith, and the Subversive Power of Living Small.” I moved to Montana not only because I could afford a house here, a house I managed this summer to pay off, but because I wanted to deliberately disconnect from the terrifying engine of consumer capitalism that I saw devouring the Bay Area (and pretty much the rest of America). This has always been a political project, and now, as we see the monster who is us — the big…
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If you’re interested in the kind of content I’ve always posted here at LivingSmall — please sign up for my TinyLetter: Is This It? I’ll send you an essay about every two weeks, covering the topics I’ve always covered here: cooking and gardens, living lower on the consumerist scale, the Anthropocene, Climate Change and politics, and how we’re all going to survive in a world that seems to be getting hotter and meaner and more frightening. And there will be recipes, because we need something to keep our heads above water. Please sign up here: https://tinyletter.com/CharlotteMF The recipe from my first TinyLetter…
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So — this quitting my job thing has been slightly more unsettling than I’d anticipated. I’ve worked steadily since I was fourteen — even earlier if you count babysitting (really, who’d let a 10 year old babysit an infant these days?). Anyhow, I’ve always had jobs. I’ve always known where the next chunk of money is coming in from. There always has been a next chunk of money coming in. Currently, I’ve one outstanding invoice. One. It’s been a challenge not to panic. I wasted a couple of weeks spinning my wheels and panicking. Complete with many, many dreams in which…
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Hi everyone — I’m starting a TinyLetter called “Is This It?” Please sign up here: https://tinyletter.com/CharlotteMF I’ll send you an essay every two weeks about life in Montana on the cusp of the Anthropocene, with recipes. First recipe — Peach Jam with Aleppo Pepper, which I made this past weekend.