As in most recent years, I didn't make a resolution. No pronouncement about some goals I would accomplish (and then fail to pursue after the first week of January), no public announcements at all until I was ready to share them once measurable results could be seen. This doesn't mean I didn't have goals, but rather than hoist a banner resolution high above my reach, I set myself to action the moment a goal formed in my mind.
There were four main goals I accomplished this year:
This past week was a whopper, primarily because we in the northeast got walloped with an all-consuming blizzard. About 3 days before the blizzard, my son Gabriel and I were outside at his rabbit hutches getting them ready for foul weather, and we noticed that one of his female rabbits, Soot, was carrying straw and building a nest. We decided to move her from her shared hutch with 3 other females to a private hutch where she could give birth in private. We moved her and waited, but days went by and she didn’t birth any bunnies. I even noticed that she didn’t look pregnant anymore—she was much skinnier.
In the meantime, the Blizzard of 2015 struck. I found myself caring for my son’s rabbits far more than I probably should have. I felt a certain calling to tend to them frequently: replacing frozen water bottles, shoving more hay into their hutches, sweeping 6 inches, then 1 foot, then 2 feet of snow off the tops of their hutches and shoveling it away from the fronts so we could access them. I donned every bit of warm clothing I have and spent an inordinate amount of time tending to the rabbits, giving them extra feed, and cutting cardboard boxes and pressing the cardboard into the fencing of their hutches to create windbreaks. In all this time, Soot didn’t give birth.
Erin Lale
Fellow faculty at Harvard Divinity School posted an open letter to Wolpe in response to his article. It's available on this page, below the call for p...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. The Wild Hunt has a roundup of numerous responses on its site, but it carried this one as a separate article. It is an accoun...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. This one is by a scholar of paganism. It's unfortunately a Facebook post so this link goes to Facebook. She posted the text o...
Erin Lale
Here's another link to a pagan response to the Atlantic article. I would have included this one in my story too if I had seen it before I published it...
Janet Boyer
I love the idea of green burials! I first heard of Recompose right before it launched. I wish there were more here on the East Coast; that's how I'd l...