Wednesday this week started as a great day. Eva and I usually spend Wednesday mornings together, and after getting up we went over to a local café that’s perched on the banks of a waterfall to meet a friend who’s just relocated back to our area. Then we headed south to Stillwater to drop off a book I recently published at a bookstore to see if they want to stock it,...

I met Kenton Whitman last summer in the middle of the woods in western Wisconsin.  We had both signed on to help a local herbalist put together a “back to nature” festival and were meeting up at the site to discuss details and tour the grounds.  He and his intern at the time, Brett, pulled up in a van shortly after I did, and when we all came together in...

Cheryl Strayed wrote a book a few years ago called Tiny Beautiful Things – It’s a book based on her stint as an advice columnist known as  “Sugar” and it’s full of people sharing their heart wrenching experiences and asking advice.  It’s full of stories about the things that make being human so hard, yet at the same time, can hold...

About five years ago, I got the idea that it might be fun to make a seasonal calendar of farm photos for my family who had just ramped up their gardening game, offering a small CSA to the community and getting back into farmer’s market selling after some time away.  And then for awhile I thought that instead of a calendar, maybe I’d make it into some...

There’s a place just outside a little river town in the St. Croix Valley called Bluebird Hill Homestead. It’s a “place where people go to breathe a deep sigh of relief and let their spirits shine” in the form of community gatherings, youth camps, adult classes and personal healing and/or mentoring.  Heidi and her family moved back from Hawaii...