“If you’re here with us unfaithfully, you’re causing terrible damage. If you open your loving to God’s loving, you are helping people you don’t know and have never met. Is what I say true? Say YES, quickly.”
- Jaladin Rumi

The path I try to walk in my own life is one of meaning and ethics. Making whatever I do meaningful for me, and ethical toward others. The heart of my life is the hearth - family and home, community and friends, and the land we share with the rest of nature. We’re blessed to live on 10 gorgeous acres in the middle of 7000 acres of state forests lands in Massachusetts, and to have a retreat on 25 acres of roadless land adjacent to 3 million acres of wilderness in Minnesota.

On the homestead, we enjoy the fruits of the land, making our own cider, maple syrup, gardening, building saunas and sugar shacks, cutting our own firewood, and trying to live as simply as we can with 8 year old twins.

Community is key, and we share the gifts of our land with neighbors, and share the ethic of the land too. I’m often asked by local moms to bring their sons over to work on the land with me. As we pick apples, tap trees, cut firewood or build my latest project, we talk about their dreams, aspirations, fears and issues. I get strong young backs to help me with my labors, and they get mentoring and sympathetic witness from an adult with none of the parental baggage. Not a bad swap.

We also strive to walk the talk we espouse on Greenopolis. We create half of our electricity from solar, which has saved nearly 30,000 pounds of CO2, and buy green power for the rest. We heat with wood from our own property in a highly efficient masonry stove. Our home has 10 inch thick super insulated walls, and is designed to capture as much sun as possible for solar heat. On a sunny day in the dead of winter, the house is warm with no need for the woodstove. Our back up heat is biodiesel, and I run my tractor on it too. Friends and colleagues come by our place to take notes, get inspired, and sometimes just to sit in the sauna, sip some homemade hard cider, or taste a little maple syrup over ice cream. We often swap labor and ideas on each other’s projects and lives.

We recycle nearly everything at our local transfer station, complete with a “free store” for useable, but no longer wanted goods. It’s also a great place to pick up the local town news. We compost everything, and over the years have built the poor New England soils in our garden into rich black humus. Nice to walk outside in the growing season and pick lunch, fresh and organic. And I do fish a bit, and shoot the occasional turkey and deer to round out the larder. I’m not a vegetarian. Yet.

And in the evenings we can go to our local brew pub, where I play my Martin guitar and sing once a month, and get a fresh pizza and salad with local greens from Seeds of Solidarity Farm, and some local brews.



Yes, saving the world everyday on Greenopolis is a dream job. But hearth is where the heart is.