The good life

Ecological sustainability, self-sufficiency, community building, everyday wisdom

"Religions are big slow poems, while most poems are short, fast religions." - Les Murray
"Poetry for me is not work but pleasure, not a career but a second life—a play within a play."- Peter Davison
Math
Dear Miru, Your calculating is improving and you actually like it. We play with numbers together. Two times ten is twenty. Six plus five is eleven. Ten minus 2 equals eight. It is all very playful. You learn how to figure out calculations by making drawings of dots, lines, squares on the whiteboard. You don't ...
Be Farecul When You Ross The Croad
You learn very fast now. Lately, we have been playing "lettertjes omdraaien", exchange letters in words. Even though you don't really get the concept of spelling yet and how several letters make up a word (it is interesting that this mental apparatus is apparently rather complicated; letters are an abstraction, the unit of our language ...
Learning: Definition game
Dear Miru, I taught you definitions and how to describe something without using the word for it. It is a game now, but later you'll understand why that is useful. You are good at it. I asked you to describe an ice-cream and you said a thing that children eat by licking and that is ...
The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself. - Derek Walcott
Learning fun: Odd one out
Dear Miru, Everyday you are a little bit smarter. I try to catch up with you and come up with a suitable game. Today, I play 'The odd one out' with you. I mention four items and you tell me which one doesn't belong in the list and why. You are good at it! We ...
Looking for a web designer
If you have an 'Eye' for the design of Internet websites and have some clear and distinct ideas about how you would redesign the very website you are looking at right now, I'd like to hear from you. I have designed this by myself, so naturally I cannot look at it with the eyes of ...
To survive myself I forged you like a weapon, like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling. (Pablo Neruda)