Wendell Berry (born August 5, 1934, Henry County, Kentucky) is an American man of letters, academic, cultural and economic critic, and farmer. e is a prolific author of novels, short stories, poems, and essays. He is also an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and a recipient of The National Humanities Medal. Berry's nonfiction serves as an extended conversation about the life he values. According to him, the good life includes sustainable agriculture, appropriate technologies, healthy rural communities, connection to place, the pleasures of good food, husbandry, good work, local economics, the miracle of life, fidelity, frugality, reverence, and the interconnectedness of life. As a prominent defender of agrarian values, Berry's appreciation for traditional farming techniques, such as those of the Amish, grew in the 1970s, due in part to exchanges with Draft Horse Journal publisher Maurice Telleen. Berry has long been friendly to and supportive of Wes Jackson, believing that Jackson's agricultural research at The Land Institute lives out the promise of "solving for pattern" and using "nature as model." The concept of "Solving for pattern", coined by Berry in his essay of the same title, is the process of finding solutions that solve multiple problems, while minimizing the creation of new problems. The essay was originally published in the Rodale Press periodical The New Farm. Though Mr. Berry's use of the phrase was in direct reference to agriculture, it has since come to enjoy broader use throughout the design community. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Berry

The Real Work by Wendell Berry The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings. Find the whole poem at: http://www.panhala.net/Archive/The_Real_Work.html

Leave it to Beavers by Joel Millman Clyde Woolery's ranch on Beaver Creek outside Kinnear, Wyo., has been beaver-free for decades, but he could sure use their help now. A small beaver colony, he says, would engineer dams that raise the water table under his pastures, opening up drinking holes for his cattle. So the 64-year-old rancher put himself on a waiting list this year hoping state officials would bring him a beaver or two. Wyoming's Game and Fish Commission periodically plucks the rodents from drainage culverts. Beaver backers have a simple creed: Trapping, not killing, "nuisance" beavers, they say, can add value to wilderness reserves and farmland by increasing their water content. That, in turn, restores fish habitats and native plants, which allow bigger species like moose, cougar and elk to thrive. "We call ourselves Beaver Believers because we found beavers do restoration work better than people," says Celeste Coulter, stewardship director at the North Coast Land Conservancy, a Seaside, Ore., group that urges developers to set aside land for beavers. "We can spend $200,000 putting wood into a stream, cabling down logs. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't," she says. "Put in a colony of beavers and it always works." Justin Burnett, a rancher in Richards, Texas, desperately wants beavers. He blames low creek levels for a "red water" virus that is killing his Angus herd. "Since we are in an extreme drought and there are no beavers to keep the water level sufficient, the water is stagnant and becoming deadly," he wrote the Lands Council. "The creek is constantly getting shallower. I just need beavers back at my ranch."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904253204576512391087253596.html

Tiffany Setting by Eric Wills Sergio Guardia never thought he'd live outside Manhattan. But when the Bolivian-born architect and owner of a New York-based firm began looking for an apartment, the price of units in the city forced him to broaden his geographic horizons. And so, after losing a few bidding wars for townhouses and apartments, he found himself across the Hudson River in Newark, N.J., standing before a three-story Forest Hill house that the listing agent told him had been built by the Tiffany family. Guardia hadn't considered Forest Hill, or even heard of it, until The New York Times ran an article titled, "Yes, We're in Newark." The November 2007 story described the National Register-listed neighborhood as an oasis in a city usually derided for urban blight and crime. He found himself walking through the Tiffany house that day, taking in stained-glass windows, intricately designed parquet floors, remarkable woodwork—each room, he says, revealing "one wonderful surprise after another." He was smitten. To be sure, the house had been horribly neglected and needed years of work, but the bones were magnificent. And the structure, just a short walk from a historic park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, was massive—eight bedrooms, 5,100 square feet plus a 1,600-square-foot basement—much larger than anything he could have afforded in Manhattan or Brooklyn. Though Guardia has preserved the house's outstanding details—the marble fireplace mantel, the white built-in cabinets in the kitchen, the stained-glass windows in the living room and baths—he has modernized the interiors with his choice of furniture: A white fiberglass Eames chaise stands in the living room, a marble Saarinen tulip table fills the kitchen. The contrast is pleasing, playful; the Modernist décor helps accentuate the distinguished 19th-century architecture and keeps it from seeming stuffy or dour. Guardia's work is hardly done. Copper trim on the outside of the house, painted an unfortunate green, can't be stripped but can be repainted to resemble its original color. The windows—all 62—need extensive restoration work. A wood deck built onto the back of the house must be demolished. Guardia jokes that the experience of purchasing and restoring an ornate historic house has given him a newfound respect for clients: "Now that I've been through this, I know how difficult and time-consuming it is," he says. See picture and more of the story at: http://www.preservationnation.org/magazine/2011/september-october/tiffany-setting.html

"Louis Comfort Tiffany was unappreciated for years. Now he's appreciated as an American genius. We have to do everything to preserve his windows, to pass them along for future generations. Restoration keeps the past alive."
Barbara Meise, specialist in stained-glass restoration, who has removed, repaired and cleaned the Tiffany windows in Sergio Guardia's eight-bedroom home in Newark, New Jersey

"Beside myself with joy" means experiencing extreme joy. "Beside" was formerly (15th through 19th centuries) used in phrases to mean "out of a mental state or condition, as 'beside one's patience, one's gravity, one's wits'" (Oxford Engl. Dict.), and that use survives only in "'beside oneself': out of one's wits, out of one's senses." "Beside himself. Why do we describe a distraught person as being 'beside himself'? Because the ancients believed that soul and body could part and that under great emotional stress the soul would actually leave the body. When this happened a person was 'beside himself.' This same thought is to be found in 'out of his mind'; and in 'estasy' too. 'Ecstasy' is from the Greek and literally means 'to stand out of.'" From "Dictionary of Word Origins" by Jordan Almond (Carol Publishing Group, Secaucus, N.J., 1998)
http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/10/messages/179.html

Internet Anagram Server and a link to the Anagram Hall of Fame: http://wordsmith.org/anagram/ I put in the 11 letters of my name to find anagrams and there were 9319.