A Father’s Legacy Provides Lifelong Inspiration for Natural Living

Reader Contribution by Crystal Stevens
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My father was a master carpenter and sourced a plethora of brilliant ideas for DIY building projects directly from the pages of Mother Earth News magazine. My favorite among these projects is the swing set he built for my sister and me when we lived in California. Succumbing to cancer after a lengthy battle, I reflect here on a father’s legacy and how he gave me lifelong inspiration for natural living, which moved me toward my career as an herbalist.
While inspiration cannot always be physically traced, I am certain that the streams of words I heard from my father’s voice while my head was pressed against his heart, along with the smell of his morning coffee filling the air, inexorably educated me about the environmental issues facing society. This physical imprint inevitably moved me on a profound level to take action as an adult and buoyed me toward becoming educated and informed by reading Mother Earth News.

While Mother Earth News began publication before I was born, my life as I know it today is attributable to the inspiration I found in the magazine over the years. One of my earliest and most vivid childhood memories is sitting on my father’s lap as a young girl in the 1980s reading the magazine together. He would read aloud while I studied the pictures of passive solar building, vegetable gardening, sheep shearing, building a sugar shack and a beautiful array of other topics. Those images — along with the camping trips in the mountains, the whitewater and canoeing excursions, and our family trip to Alaska — have been etched in the catacombs of my childhood memories, sculpting the person I have grown to become.

A Father’s Legacy Provides Lifelong Inspiration for Natural Living
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