In spring of 2018, I took a forty-day trip, traveling mostly by train, getting off to write and to visit my grown children. For two weeks I stayed among cypress trees in Northern California and walked each day to a shed where I wrote as quail bobbed by. There I was able to write the […]
Racial justice is essential to climate justice. Ecological activists wonder sometimes why we don’t revolt more strongly against impending climate disaster. It may be that our privilege as white people enables us to feel distant from the climate trauma already devastating many people of color, locally and globally. To look at the privileges that distance […]
Enter Joseph M. Marshall III’s book, The Lakota Way: Stories and Lessons for Living, to learn how to live wisely with all our relatives – with mitakuye oyasin (“all my relatives” in Dakota). Each chapter of the book presents a virtue through story-telling, some stories from the beginnings of remembered life and some from Marshalls’s […]
When filmmaker Angelo Loy wrote to offer his film to this blog, we all received an immense gift—the voices of and views from dozens of people in central Africa. As you watch Tropic of Chaos you will come to know a vast region. You will meet people living on Lake Chad’s receding shores who invite […]
As she neared her 90th birthday, my mother began telling us that, in her youth, pneumonia had been called “the old people’s friend.” This friend took them, somewhat gently, over the hill. “I’ve lived long enough,” she’d say. “It’s time for me to go.” Though she had constant joint and nerve pain from a life […]
Illustration by Grace Harnois How my ancestors survived the flu epidemic of 1918-19 has become part of our family’s lore. Can remembering stories like this help us now? Carl, Vera, and Carl’s brother Morris were homesteading in a log house in Polk County, Minnesota, when the winter of 1918-19 arrived. Carl and Vera had […]
We are rocking in our body boats as we adapt to the realities (and unrealities) of COVID-19. In counterpoint, the natural world around us breaths more freely when we humans stop skittering about. Canals in Venice flow clear; the sky over Hunan clears; airplane and car noise decreases. Our hearts rush to those who are […]
