Back in the 60s when we were a young family starting out, we could just about afford a small house in the flats of Berkeley for $28,500, near downtown and just a bike ride away from Herb’s office at the University.  We brought up our three children there, I wrote...

Hello Friends,Rather than sending you all a new “vignette-type” piece, I am sending the text of the beginning of a new season of my podcast Carolyn North Out Loud. The new season will be coming out shortly, and will be ongoing until I’ve told all the stories I can...

Yesterday, driving out of the farm, my tires spun in wet gravel and I got stuck blocking the road by the goat meadow. No way could I get my car out of there; nearby in the meadow a young billygoat was bleating frantically, trying to extricate himself from the web of...

Breakfast this morning was my usual – leftovers from the night before – which today was a stew of veggies over rice - onions, red peppers and garlic, a delicious way to start the day. As my mouth registered the layered rings of onion, the clove shapes of garlic...

Still in bed on a cloudy morning, hoping for those clouds to become rain, and reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s splendid book, BRAIDING SWEETGRASS for the third time. She makes me feel like I’ve come home. With her, it is natural to settle into what she might call ‘the...

YES! had a chance to converse with Carolyn earlier this month:Where are you these days, and what's giving you energy during this quarantine?I currently live on Wild and Radish Farm in El Sobrante, California, as the first elder in our growing eco-village community....

Here at the farm, we’re still cleaning up the slash from two trees taken down before we began construction - logs and weathering bark and no small amount of rotting debris. Broken concrete and rusty nails get piled by the road for the dump, but all the organic stuff...

Waking up this morning to the election news, I feel like a mountain climber who has dragged herself to what she thought was the mountaintop, only to discover she had just reached a pile of rocks along the way. There is still a long trek before the true summit, but...

for Leah Atwood The way you prepare a sheep for slaughter is to praise her, kiss her pointy face and tell her how grateful you have been to know her, weep while she eats the treat of oats you’ve offered her and then lead her to the pasture where the stun gun awaits....

When I was in my mid-teens and living in Queens, New York, there were two Donalds around, one I knew and the other I didn’t. Donald McKayle was my modern dance teacher and the other Donald was a kid who lived in our neighborhood and went to the same High School as my...