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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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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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Serotiny
Maybe I’ve been waking up on the right side of the bed lately, but I’m finding it easier to center the miracles in mundanity rather than the seeming inevitability of full-on ecocide for a change. And I guess it’s easy to feel a sense of solidarity with that stuff because it underscores the value of an ordinary life, and certainly makes me feel a sense of belonging just by virtue of being here to participate and bear witness to it all.
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The Strange and Unusual Afterlife of Self-forgiveness
For much of my life, my brain would do this thing where it would make a quick jump to thoughts of self-annihilation whenever I sensed abandonment. It seldom happens anymore, mostly because I have made a point in recent years to cull out vampiric friendships and be hyper-selective about who I trust. It also doesn’t hurt that I have reduced my level of expectations for human behavior to a misanthropic low. And I probably can’t discount the fact that, besides not really trusting anyone, I’m otherwise healthier overall than I’ve ever been. Even so, if I’m in A Mood®, I’ve…
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Belonging — with, not to
Something really wonderful graced the internet last month. It was this trail camera footage from December 4 of a wolverine spotted outside the northernmost developed area in Yellowstone: I don’t know more than any member of the public about the precise location of that trail camera. My final tour as an NPS seasonal in Yellowstone — when I might’ve learned such inside info from a coworker or old friend working among the wildlife biology ranks — was over six years ago, and all reporting on the trail camera system that captured the wolverine indicates the primary aim of that motion-activated surveillance…
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A Resurrectionist Streak
I’ve always had an uncomplicated affinity with the time of year I was born, but not for uncomplicated reasons. Although my birthday never falls exactly on winter solstice, it’s always within two or three days and feels like the most natural event to attach myself to for time-keeping purposes. And in the past few years, I’ve fashioned a loose mythology to explain (mostly to myself) how the timing and conditions of my birth translated into some of the dispositions that started crystallizing in my adult life. The first I noticed was a clear attachment to the opposite solstice. I didn’t…
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The Snags
I’ve been spending a lot of time with past versions of myself this year. It’s not a new development by any stretch, but it has taken a surprisingly healthy twist in 2020. In 2019, when I knew I was coming up on the end of an eight-year stint on the East Coast, I recall expressing to a friend that I’d be leaving behind a lot of dead versions of myself. At the time, the tenor of that statement was similar to the kind somebody would use to describe an estranged person in their life as dead to them. The implication…
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Carrying Capacity
I still tend to fare better when there’s plain evidence of a complete living order, and not just the systems humans have imposed on it. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
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The Stony Remains of Shantyville
If my theory about bars being a proxy measure for livability in Montana has any teeth, it seems like the path forward to an improved Shantyville that’s livable for regular folks is paved with, yes, residential housing, but also bars.
