I liked your Three Rules, but what about losing weight? I noticed from your photos that you were heavier at one time and not now.

Blimpie

Dear Blimpie,

You’re right, I’m fifty pounds lighter now than I was at my top weight, and I’ve been this size for about twenty years. The three rules have been enough for some of my friends to lose whatever extra weight they wanted to lose, but if they’re not enough for you, here are two more rules that will do the trick.

Don’t feed Santa: Like, skip the sweets.

Free your inner pig: Wild pigs are lean and mean because no one is fattening them up for slaughter with grains and other starchy foods.

All of that being said, I don’t think that losing weight is necessarily heroic. What’s heroic is to appreciate the precious miracle that you are, and to ignore Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and any critical friends, relatives and associates that might opine otherwise.

Do you still do any “hippie crafts” from your book, and what is your favorite recipe from LOTE that you enjoy cooking?

Benny Goodman Fan

My creative energies at this time are mostly consumed with music, storytelling, writing and illustrating. I will probably continue making salads, soups, stir fries, stews, and other vegetable intensive dishes for the rest of my life.

Thank you for writing to me!

Alicia

Sorry to bother you with another question, but when you were still doing crafts, what were your favorites? I read craft books, and there are so many to choose from, I just can’t decide which to try. 🙂

Benny Goodman Fan

Making patchwork quilts has to be my favorite. There are so many cool things you can do, too—print photos and other images on fabric and then frame them with other fabric, tie-dye several fabrics in different sets of colors before you cut them up to use in the patchwork, paint on fabrics with acrylics or fabric paints before adding them to your patchwork, get cheap and free fabric by cutting up old clothing from thrift stores and free boxes or by getting scraps from a clothing maker, embroider, bead, and applique designs and images onto the pieces of fabric before sewing them into the patchwork, use fabrics from other cultures that have wonderful designs and textures, use a variety of colorful buttons to quilt the fabric instead of sewing patterns into it (you can often find collections of buttons at garage sales and thrift stores, too). It’s wonderful to turn other people’s waste into precious heirlooms!

Tip: use fabrics of equal weight and strength. Avoid silks, as they tend to disintegrate long before other fabrics will.

Still peace and love,

Alicia

Tracy Dove paints in Phoenix. Not just canvases, not just mailboxes, not just all over her Volkswagen, the walls of her house and the fences of her organic garden, although she does all of these. Her home-printed hippie coloring books and greeting cards are popular all over town. She has plans to restore a vintage trailer and cruise America with Sisters on the Fly, an association of women who go on fly-fishing expeditions in their vintage trailers and smoke cigars. She has plans to throw a wedding for her artist daughter Sarah Coppen to musician Chris Warmuth at the visionary village Arcosanti. With Kathy Cano-Murillo, she started a women’s art cooperative called the Phoenix Fridas that have group art shows. Last spring, when I lived at her house for a few months, we tromped around downtown Phoenix each first Friday night, when all the galleries were open, with live music played in doorways and off the back of trucks, and bellydancers and fire knife dancers performing in a torchlit parking lot. A party not to be missed! We painted ourselves silly in between.

I painted this last spring 2005. 

Working at my art, I do different things every day, but taking care of my body, I do much the same things each day. My rules of health are: Walk the dog, feed the rabbit and feed the cat.

What I mean by that is: I take a walk (walk my inner dog?), or swim, or dance, or garden, or do yoga, whatever kind of fun I can muster that will get my body pumping endorphins.

To satisfy my inner rabbit, I eat rather piggy portions of dark green leafy vegetables, and other non-starchy vegetables, at least two big servings each day.

Three times a day I feed the cat. Cats like protein, but not a lot at one time. In the Zone books, a portion the size of your palm is suggested.

That’s enough to keep me free of 95% of the health problems that could keep me from doing what I love.

I spoke today with my thirty-year friend Bonnie Mandoe, author of the celebrated cookbook Vegetarian Nights: Fresh From Hawaii. She’s been renovating old adobe homes in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and is excited about embarking on a half acre farming venture on her land. So, excited, in fact, that she is about to have a gallery show of her oil paintings of the irrigation of pecan orchards. Bonnie’s brimming with plans to start a CSA farm.

Community supported agriculture (CSA) is a system inwhich consumers subscribe in advance to a local organically certified farm, giving the farmer capital for operations and feedback from consumers, and giving the consumer a weekly or twice-weekly box of whatever the farmer is harvesting.

It’s the next best thing to growing it all yourself, or growing some of it and bartering with your neighbors for the rest. It’s better than buying organic at a farmers’ market in terms of knowing exactly what is going into your food. Still a farmers’ market beats a health food store for prices and often for quality and variety, and you can get to know the vendors you buy from regularly.

Health food (umm, natural food) stores beat supermarkets for quality of food and certainly for the quality of literature preceeding the cashier. Supermarkets are not particularly concerned about genetically modified organisms in the food, about the use of insecticides, herbicides, and various chemicals used in food processing, nor the use of artificial colors, sweeteners, hormones and preservatives in the products they carry, nor about cruelty to animals. Yet, thankfully, due to customer demand, most now carry some produce labeled organically grown. Unfortunately, that label is no longer representative of once-stringent inspections that disallow the use of chemicals in agriculture, due to pressure from industrial agriculture and chemical company lobbyists.

We will be following with interest Bonnie Mandoe’s progress with her new project!

January 6, 2006, I attended one of the best concerts ever, a jam in celebration of the 50th birthday of avant-garde guitarist Nels Cline and his twin brother drummer/percussionist Alex Cline at Club Tropical in Culver City. They chose only songs with “peace” in the title, mostly jazz and avant-garde pieces. A host of local luminaries played, including saxophonist Vinny Golia and violinist Jeff Gauthier. Nels conducted all twenty-odd guest stars in a send-up of “Give Peace A Chance,” with each player soloing on a verse (in avant-garde style) and everyone playing the familiar chorus in unison.

At the back of the stage, throughout the show, artist Norton Wisdom painted, smeared, and repainted on a backlit plastic sheet. Often collaborating with Nels, Norton currently has a show of his work up at Chouinard Art Institute. And what a night! The club had to turn people away because the room was full, and the audience went wild after every solo and every piece.

I first met Nels Cline in 2000, when his band (with harpist Zeena Parkin) played at the Knitting Factory in New York City as part of the Bell Atlantic Jazz Festival, right before my pal Joe Gallivan’s Rain Forest Initiative took the stage. Last December 22, 2005, Nels recorded mind-bending lead guitar parts on four of my songs for my upcoming CD, What Living’s All About.

When I was born in 1949, the enormous clunky black and white television set had just replaced the radio as the hearth and storyteller of our society. My generation is the first to have sets of identical memories—Howdy Doody, Mighty Mouse, Kookla, Fran and Ollie. Maybe that’s why we, all at once, upon puberty, rolled out of Pleasantville and began living in color. My book Living on the Earth was a case in point.

I bought my first personal computer in 1984, and it, too, was an enormous clunky box with a monochrome screen. Yet, to move blocks of text without retyping or witeout is, for a writer, heaven. I used it to start a wedding business on Maui in 1988, and the business thrived because of my first web site and email account.

I sold the wedding business in 1999 and toured North America throughout 2000 as a storyteller, singer, songwriter and seller of my books, music and art, writing my first blog on a site designed specifically for the tour. Six years later, it’s time to make a new site, with a more constant and inclusive blog, to integrate the colorful, peaceful, sustainable, creative, and politically aware world inwhich I float. The old site still flies, and I am slowly moving its prodigious content here.

I’m also learning from Richard Schave and Kim Cooper how to connect on the ‘net to other bloggers who are living the colorful life, that I might enhance the global network for peace, justice, sustainbility, creativity and diversity. I plan to develop this website as an aggregator (collector of relevant blog posts) that will invite more participation as time goes on. I also will cast my own posts and podcasts upon the wide waters of wonder and see what comes back. Maybe a message from you!