hard at work

sometimes it's great to be in community - i can hang out with friends in between work very easily, there's no commute, i can listen to music and am just a few steps away from my bedroom. other times, my larger sphere of friends is enjoying a long winter break and i'm waking up the day after christmas wishing i didn't have to think about labor hours.

don't get me wrong - yesterday was great. despite the lack of traditional religious views around here, the folks that didn't travel for the holidays gathered together to prepare a really spectacular meal and enjoy cookies, pies, and some christmas-themed movies. but i'm still in hibernate mode, and sometimes that makes it frustrating to chain myself to a computer for hours of work.

of course, i don't Have to work on the computer. but my big project right now is to update and organize the images on the southern exposure web site - that's the seed business that we run out of the community. we sell organic, rare, heirloom, and open-pollinated seeds for veggies, flowers, and herbs. there were images here and there on the site for a small fraction of our 600-some varieties, but most if not all of them were blurry and all of unique sizes. that didn't sit too well with my ocd, so...

these are a few thumbnails of the images i've been putting up. i've completed over 200 varieties so far, and still have many to go. it's a simple, but long and sometimes tedious process. i must admit, doing the flowers section was my favorite part so far - tedious, but i was staring at beautiful images the whole time! i would put more flower pictures, but the ones i was most excited about were ones that i grew out at shagbark, and so you've already seen their pictures. =) it makes me so proud to put images that i took of flowers and herbs that i grew on our web site.

so other than work, i've been doing... more work. but for personal earnings rather than community labor hours. i'm sure you've noticed recent posts focusing more on these spiral moon calendars - it's been a lot of work to get the high-quality scans all cleaned up and processed into a sale-ready product. i'm really nervous and excited to see the pageviews for my henna site climbing now that i've added the calendars for sale. having more of my homemade products sell online kindles the hope that i may be able to do those things as a steady, if very small, source of income.

i'm also thinking about training to become an herbalist. there's an herbalism school near arcata, california that looks really great, and it seems like i might end up on the west coast next summer. i love working with herbs, and have felt deeply fulfilled in the past year when i've harvested wild edibles, identified wild herbs, and made use of wild and planted herbs for teas, infusions, and massage oils. being able to make herbalism a potential source of income feels like an intuitive next step for me. i've been spending a decent amount of time lurking on the forums at susun weed's web site, a vast repository of herbal wisdom.

so that's what's up with me. nothing to take pictures of, really, no beautiful garden vistas. just some cozy and busy winter days... i still miss my cat, still appreciate the support that continues to flow from the incredible nux, and am generally still just trying to remain open, grounded, calm, and attentive to what's going on in my mind/body/energy and where my intuition wants me to go.

how's your winter coming along? what are your plans now that the days are lengthening again?

the varieties shown here from southern exposure seed exchange (from top to bottom) are: pacific beauty calendula, pungo creek butcher dent corn, oxheart carrot, yellow torch tithonia, and persian star garlic.