The Radical Roots of Community Supported Agriculture
Summer 2022, Issue #108
CREATING A PLAY GARDEN: HOW TO BUILD WELCOMING OUTDOOR SPACES FOR CHILDREN AND ADULTS
Faith Collins
Some passions can lie dormant for years, sleepily lifting their heads from time to time until they finally get the chance to explore and be explored more deeply. For me, gardening is one such passion. I’d had occasional veggie boxes and planted flower bulbs here and there, but it wasn’t until I started working in early childhood education and creating nature-based play spaces that my passion really blossomed.
As a Waldorf child growing up in an urban-rural interface in the Midwest, I spent endless hours interacting with the natural world: pressing flowers, making crowns from leaves or dandelions, catching fireflies, crawdads, and sunfish, creating caterpillar habitats, building miniature dams and canals in the creek. Now, living in Colorado, the attitude towards nature appears to be very different. Here, there is a distinct doctrine of “look, but don’t touch.”
“WILL WE WAKE FOR PITY’S SAKE?” HEALING THROUGH CHOICE AT INNER FIRE
Beatrice Birch
Inner Fire, Inc. is a licensed, not-for-profit, proactive, healing community in Brookline, VT, that offers striving individuals the choice to recover from debilitating and traumatic life experiences. These individuals struggle with difficulties that typically lead to addiction and mental (soul) health challenges, creating the need to strengthen oneself on a deeper spiritual level but without the use of the mind-altering psychotropic medications. Inner Fire supports striving individuals who want to avoid medication in the first place, taper to a level that works for them (which could mean off), and supports those still reeling from the horrendous withdrawal symptoms of the benzodiazepines.
THE MOMENT OF DIAGNOSIS: MAINTAINING THE INTEGRITY OF THE “I”
David Tresemer, PhD
A person sits across from you—you as a licensed professional or life coach or mentor or elder or friend—and asks in words or in a tone of voice, “What’s wrong with me?” A list of symptoms pours out, intermixing with this question. Then comes a very important event: the moment of diagnosis. You name a construct. You gather all the symptoms together in a bundle and give that bundle a label.
The word diagnosis comes from “gnosis”—knowing—and “dia”—parting a vague lump into two, the essential and the non-essential, discerning what is the truth at the core and separating that from what isn’t true. A diagnosis can guide you in how you will help to make the symptoms go away, which is why the client is there, right? Not necessarily. We have to look closely at that moment of diagnosis.
