A Letter To You

I like to think of winter as a time of rest here on the farm. And now that the garden's covered over with snow, aside from collecting wood, it is. With more time on my hands, over the last few weeks, I've had a chance to look into funding for our up-coming projects. And a few days ago, I submitted a project to Rain Bird's Intelligent Use of Water Award. The award is, in their words, "an interactive grant program that awards funds to water conservation and environmental sustainability projects that promote green spaces. A global initiative, any Internet user can submit a project via the Intelligent Use of Water Awards website at www.iuowawards.com and promote it within his or her own community. All projects can be anonymously voted upon by visitors (one vote a day per project, per individual user), and the projects with the most votes will receive funding from Rain Bird according to their funding category.”

To help us meet our project goals (see goals below), we need your vote! You can vote once a day through March 1st, 2011. To vote:
• Click on the following link: http://www.iuowawards.com/Projects.aspx#search
• enter Amazing Heart Farm into the search
• click on the thumbs up sign to vote for our project
To increase our chances of winning, please pass along this information to anyone you know who might want to help out!

OUR Project Description:
With the help of her husband, community volunteers & a Project Orange Thumb grant through FISKARS, in the spring of 2010, Elizabeth Weller established Amazing Heart Farm, a Certified Naturally Grown CSA just outside of Gettysburg, PA. By harnessing the therapeutic benefits of creative and physical work, we aim to provide a safe space for members of the local community to engage in emotional work and healing, to gain access to community resources and to learn to use personal and community supports while providing themselves, their families and the local community with locally grown, fresh food.
OUR Project Goals:
To irrigate our crops, we currently harvest rain water and overflow from our well from two 275 gallon containers. As we expand our production, we’ll be using more water and we’ll need to have an irrigation system in place. We’d like to use the Intelligent Use of Water Award to build a small irrigation pond that will be store the overflow from our well and to build a corresponding irrigation system for an acre of Certified Naturally Grown vegetable production.

To learn more about what we're doing, please visit the Amazing Heart Farm web-site.

In the mean-time, please vote!

Many thanks,
Elizabeth

Patheos, balanced views of religion and spirituality

Some of you might enjoy reading an article I recently wrote on the Christian liturgical year. It's posted on Patheos, a relatively new web-site dedicated to interfaith dialogue.

greetings from the South

I've been visiting New Orleans, am now in Jackson, returning North on Sunday... It's been three years since my last stay here and my days have been filled with the laughter of old friends and stories of remembering.
Raw scenes torn from my heart.
Wounds bathed deep purple, strengthened orange,
the layers of color healing deep and settling into...me.

My first days here I couldn't pick my camera up, then one morning- alone with the light in my dear friend Joanna's kitchen- I couldn't put my camera down. I spent the next two days filling my memory card with painted doorways and reflecting stars, beaded costumes from the Sunday Indian parade and fences covered in flowers, in each picture trying to capture the deep resiliency bursting through, and pouring out of, this city.
(check out the Kid Camera Project's latest endeavors if you're looking to be inspired!)
But, long story short- in a careless moment, the wrong button pressed, I lost my photos.
(Does anyone know how to reverse formatting a memory card?)
And now I'm back to having trouble picking my camera up, as though each picture I take increases the distance between me and my rememberings, as though my journey-not over yet-has already been erased. The experience has me thinking about my photographs, the space they fill and what it means to me....

And my travels here have me thinking about Home, about my sense of place and orientation in the world, about my move back to Pennsylvania the beginning of May, my desire to root deep, beginning with a garden, to paint walls and open windows, to turn compost and put fresh bouquets of flowers in every room.

"Home is the return to where distance did not yet count," writes John Berger.
Perhaps we spend our whole lives remembering what it means to return...

My Etsy Store

So, I've opened an Etsy Store. For greetings cards. Because I love to write them. And I'm always thrilled to receive them! And, of course, as I prepare to graduate from a Masters program in Theological Studies (so marketable, I know!) and plan to move away from the city, with all of my student loans in tow, I'm kinda nervous (okay, terrified if I must be honest) about the whole money thing... And a little extra cash can go a long way.

I know quite a few of you are seasoned "Etsyers" and I would be grateful for your suggestions. I'm quite uncomfortable with the idea of "marketing myself," but I've gotta dive into the world, visible and exposed, at some point. So why not now?

Please, if you happen to check out my store, send along some feedback! And if you have the time, let me know what has worked for you or . . . maybe just some advice on taking risks, and on making ends meet in this big and beautiful (and did I say big?) world.

Smiles and gratitude,

Elizabeth