"Speak Your Peace!" Event based on the Work of Joanna Macy

Taking Heart in Tough Times - An interactive workshop.

Are you feeling a spiritual void and frustrated and sad about social injustice, pollution, and lack of integrity?  Sunny Rehler, who has just returned from an intensive training with Joanna Macy, will offer ways to experience moving from despair to empowerment ! There will be  opportunities to speak from the heart, meditate, sing, and participate in litugy. Further background information can be found at www.joannamacy.net

Sunday evening, May 23, 7:00 PM  to 9:30 PM. 

At Ahimsa Village, 4022 S. Eagle Valley Rd., Julian, PA

RSVP to bob@ahimsavillage.org, 814-355-0850 if you plan to join us.

Donations are welcomed.

Opening mid-June our community Green Shop!

Our Local Fresh Food Alliance project is opening in mid-June The Green Shop, a farm stand on Rte 220 Alt near the glider port. It serves as a community outlet for local produce, plants, flowers, crafts, baked goods, products of Teen Entrepreneurs, and as a yard sale. Vendors and customers wanted!

Surplus produce is donated to local food banks, shelters, and soup kitchens.

Voluntary work is available, and for unemployed persons, there is work in exchange for produce or pay.

Next to the Green Shop is our 8' x 4' demonstration raised-bed garden, showing how much produce can be grown in a small closely planted area on top of any surface. The free demonstration workshop building this garden happens this Saturday, May 22, 1 to 3 pm. Please phone Deb 814 353 1270.

These projects are part of Appalachian Zen House's Local Fresh Food Alliance activities.

We are looking for a 2010 Teen Summer Camp Assistant!

Is this for you? Examples of blogs on our 2009 camp here and more.

To enlarge this image click on it. Thank you!

Being a Worry Buster – Neighbors Helping Neighbors

Who said “Hey! Isn’t this just the best thing we’ve done in a while?”

Members of Appalachian Zen House joined a dozen members of Martha and Julian United Methodist Churches for a morning of work for neighbors who had requested assistance - weeding a steep bank and covering it with a mulch with strong whisky aroma, shifting furniture, using donated carpet to mulch a nursery of young trees intended for the ball park, painting shutters, and cleaning up the community garden.

We enjoyed:

• meeting new delightful neighbors (in addition our current door knocking activities  in the local trailer parks, pubs, and other local venues, about our Local Fresh Food Alliance)
• a wonderful church breakfast of eggs, toast, crispy bacon, muffins, fruit and coffee,
• learning about local activities and resources eg where cheap clean compost is available,
• receiving a luminous spring green Worry Busters T-shirt each,
• being donated a strip of carpet to make floor mats for our camp and for meditation,
• promoting face-to-face our teen summer camp, and Local Fresh Food Alliance,
• being able to volunteer to give government-supported free summer lunches to children and teens at a nearby trailer park,
• learning that the only fresh vegetables the kids eat are carrots, cucumbers, and celery,
• meeting the minister who runs four of the local rural churches in series each Sunday.

We didn’t enjoy initially:

• an encounter with poison ivy – but the outcome was less itchy than expected.

Certainly! We will be returning to bust worries with our Methodist neighbors again in the fall.

Launching "The Local Fresh Food Alliance" - Bald Eagle Valley

It is about looking at who we are, our talents, delights, and experience, and matching it with the need at this time and place.

Or as Roshi Bernie Glassman says, "Look in the refrigerator to find how to cook the meal!" (Or perhaps look out the back door if you have come to our "How to Make and Grow Your Own Raised-Bed Vegetable Garden" free demonstration workshop on Saturday May 22, 2010!)

So we take great pleasure in launching for the enjoyment of many --

 

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Appalachian Zen House donates our first garden

An enjoyable morning was spent by members of Floating Lotus Zendo and The Local Fresh Food Alliance as they constructed a raised bed garden at a trailer park in State College and filled it with a truck load of rich black gold (compost) ready for planting.

We are hoping this garden will serve to inspire neighbors and visitors to grow their own fresh delicious free vegetables stored at peak condition and nutrition not in a refrigerator but right outside the back door.

Make and Grow Your Own Raised-Bed Vegetable Garden

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