Beloved
I would spin the sea-spray
fashioning a belt for you
I would braid the rolling waves
to spread a sleeping mat for you
I would weave of the clouds
a shawl to cover the hair of you
I would

Ivan Illich was an influential theorist in the decade I was born. I had heard of his most famous work, Deschooling Society, and it had been recommended to me more than once I’m sure, no doubt because I homeschooled in the 6th and 12th grades. But I had only a passing awareness of the man and his work when I stumbled across Medical Nemesis, his critique of modern medicine and its role in society. I was thunderstruck. Reading Medical Nemesis I discovered a scholarly explanation …

My students and I dug up several promising new Duranta stumps from the same failing hedge I got my last one. Here they are, freshly dug. They’ve all leafed out by now but you can see the character of the gnarled wood better when they are bare like this. I have only the faintest idea what to do with them after this, but at least I have a year to think about it while they put on some growth.

My fifth child started school this year. She’s going to a different school from her siblings. It is a Ma’had Tahfiz, a school focusing on Quran study, that only started primary school last year. Now they have first and second graders enrolled. They memorize Quran in the morning, and have a normal school day in the afternoon. It’s a long day for a little kid, but they have nap time in the middle, and being a much smaller school it is less chaotic. Perhaps the …

The small walfdorf-esque grade school I went to was heavily into drama. We used to do several plays a year with the whole class. Mostly they were mythological themes: the Norse saga, the Krishna story, the Gilgamesh epic. I loved it. When our school principal’s daughter opened up an acting school in Royal Oak, I and a bunch of my schoolmates signed up. That led to a few auditions and a couple of very minor local jobs, mostly commercials, a couple of which even paid …

Two-Year-Old Future Muezzin in Action

It is often my job to gather ingredients for the meal from our garden. Our ginger has lately done well enough to allow some occasional harvesting. Considering we use it in virtually every meal I doubt we’ll ever be self-sufficient but it’s nice to eat from your own land when you can.

Living in Malaysia and not making bonsai is like living in Minnesota and not snowmobiling. You’re just not taking advantage of what is on offer. With a 12-month growing season, plenty of sunlight and rainfall throughout the year, the slow, slow pleasures of bonsai come just a little bit quicker.
It took me years to come around. I thought bonsai was for people who can’t appreciate the natural beauty of the plants growing all around them, that it was cruelty to trees, that it was …

The mighty coconut palm provides an afternoon’s entertainment. The fronds (Malay: pelapah) dip low enough that the kids can grab them and sling themselves into the air. After an hour or so of swinging the frond is swung out and hangs limply from the trunk. It’ll take a few weeks until the next one has grown to the right size and position for more swinging.

It’s a fact. According to the FAO, Americans waste as much food at the table as South/SE Asians lose in their entire supply chain from farm to table! Put another way, individual Americans throw away 10-15 times more food than South/SE Asians. And that wastage is one driver for the global rise in food prices. Reading articles like The New Geopolitics of Food, you find a lot of concern over for instance the masses of Chinese who want to give their children a taste of milk, …