Dear friends!

Here is the Sara and Yonah update since we’ve returned.

Landing in NY was a big shock to the system. Here is the first picture we took, on the train back from the airport—it seemed strange at the time…

The first thing I did when I got back was to look for work, and my first job was playing wedding music on TV for DOG WEDDINGS. It was totally surreal and stupid, and the farthest thing from our Lotan experience that I could possibly imagine…

Now we are already here almost a month, and hardly a day goes by that we don’t wonder how things look on Lotan. Are our compost piles curing? Are the camels done? Have Ryan and Sheera moved in to the dome? Is the garlic in the raised bed ready? Is our orchard doing well? How about that Neem tree that we helped at the end?

The first thing on our minds was to start growing things in our apartment. Sara planted two garlic cloves which look happy after 3 weeks:

Here is Sara in her nice working corner, near the sunlight and surrounded by the plants we’ve been growing. Notice that she is wearing the Captain Compost shirt, and that she hasn’t moved from this chair in about 4 weeks, as the thesis for her doctorate is in it’s final stages (sometimes I get her to eat a few crumbs of bread)

For Valentine’s day (February 14th), I got her a tiny little collection of five beautiful red composting worms. We somehow managed to keep them alive for more than 2 weeks. Don’t you love my new hairstyle?

However, we’ve finally upgraded to a full-size worm condominium. We have about 50 worms, and hopefully they are reproducing happily, though they don’t pay rent. They seem to be eating well. We also got an extra surprise with the worms: The soil that they were in contained fly larvae, which have been hatching in the bin—about 10 every day. We don’t mind them—they are quite slow and stupid and easy to catch. Along with the cockroaches, it’s nice to think that we have a whole ecosystem in our kitchen.

We had our first potluck dinner with friends from all over, and we told them all about permaculture and Lotan, of course. The next one is coming up in 2 weeks! We will hopefully start a tradition of “presentations,” beginning by talking all about composting. I’m hoping that the worm bin will be a hot topic of conversation.

Also, I found out about a permaculture group in NY. Apparently it meets every week. There is a certification course happening not far from our house (30 minutes walk), and I offered to volunteer help if they needed. At the moment it is so cold here that it is difficult to imagine anything growing at all. It has not been above zero in many days.

Here are two terrific books that I wanted to tell you about:
“Plan B 2.0” by Lester Brown, who I think is a social ecologist. It’s a fantastic and complete report on the effects of the global economy on the environment, and a detailed description of what can be done about it. It’s a very optimistic book written by someone who is very familiar with the many sides of the problem. The author is president of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington DC, and thousands of copies have been given to heads of state, congressmen, senators, etc. Let’s hope they read it.

“The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien is the Vietnam War book that I mentioned when Jacob gave his amazing storytelling presentation. It talks a lot about the ‘truth’ in stories, and it’s just a beautiful book.

Contact Lotan Center for Creative Ecology

Mark Naveh
lotan-ecocenter@ardom.ardom.co.il
Tel: +972 8 6356811; +972 8 6356935; +972 54 9799033
Toll free (while in Israel): 1800 2000 75