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Vital Signs
I can’t decouple my sense of devotion to where I come from and the concurrent rage and powerlessness I feel over its surging appeal to every type of asshole with money to spend.
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Anti-Extinction Parables
To me, survival in the Anthropocene shouldn’t be measured in whether or not we keep the planet habitable long enough for my generation or the next to be able to fantasize about dying of old age. I’m inclined to measure survival by our capacity to remember, and to let that memory instill in us a sense of respect for our place in the living world.
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Natal Homing
After more than a decade away, I’m headed back to Montana. What’s more, in transplanting to the side of the Continental Divide where the water drains to the Atlantic, this feels like a kind of natal homing.
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Vanishing, my ass
It strikes me as no wonder that somebody like James Welch and something like a festival celebrating his artistic legacy would bring these ideas to the surface for me. As cheesy as it sounds, it’s clear that Welch is kind of this north star that connects and grounds so many people with different lived experiences for different reasons.
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Natal Stream
My experience is that being able to claim that you truly love a landscape means knowing and accepting the hazards and existential threats that come with living in its midst. Even if there weren’t a supervolcano in the mix, where I grew up is pretty damn volatile. It is also probably the only place I’ll ever get to love in any sort of complete, unconditional way.
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Liberate, Deconstruct, Integrate, Repeat
It seems to me that the best way to keep jokes squarely within the territory of self-effacing rather than full-bore self-loathing is to make sure we roast the toxic crock of shit we’re all simmering in at least as much as we roast ourselves. That is, we should have no compunction about making jokes at the dominant culture’s expense.
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My Haunted Scarecrow Halfway House
How does one go about emerging from the haunted scarecrow halfway house? I’ve yet to find a self-help book on this topic and I suspect there isn’t one. Like everything else there isn’t a manual for, I’m inclined to believe it starts with an act of will and you learn the rest in your particular context as you go.
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Wounds of the Anthropocene
The landscape tells us all kinds of stories about previous global die-offs. It also tells us how to live in reciprocal collaboration with other beings. And it also bears the wounds of the Anthropocene. If we operate with the understanding that the land is our classroom and our textbook, surely there are lessons for our shared recovery in even the wounds.
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After Deciding to Stay
Maybe coming up on my first Saturn return next month at the ripe age of 29 is a bit early to jump to any sweeping conclusions, but having gotten out of the woods of one foundational existential crisis (for now), I wonder if this next stretch of years might be less about deciding to stay and more about remembering.
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Spinescent
I still have a scar on my left index finger from an off-target attempt to pick a ripe blackberry back in September. It makes me think that maybe there’s something to this blackberry brand of spinescence — leaving a mark on contact and bearing good fruit in season.
