It's the Sunday before ELL official starts its 2013 session. Robert Best and I arrived last night, and today have been helping set the stage. My main role today was an adventure with two amazing people who I've known for less than 24 hours, Eric Bear and Madison, connecting with people and places in the Chatham area who have agreed or who might agree to supply food to the Lab project. It's looking like there may regularly be 15-20 people for meals, so food production has to be scaled considerably to match the food consumption.

A brave leader on that front here is Eric Bear, who dove head first into conversations at places like Our Daily Bread in Chatham about our project, spearheading the 'art of the ask': a fancy way of saying 'do you have any plentitude, that you could share with us, to support the work that we're doing?'. We're immensely grateful for the positive responses that we've gotten even today, our first day! We took this picture to remind ourselves of the abundance that the universe can bring, all of the food seen in this picture was donated to the project. Local chicken, local beef, abundant greens. Food to last the growing numbers of us here, into the week.