November 22, 2018 I am aware that I am sitting in a house on Wappo land, in the Mayacamas Mountains. I am sitting on land that is owned collectively, in a house that is owned collectively, as part of one small effort to live an alternative to the steamrolling system called private property and industrial…
This post will not be complete or even sufficient, but it’s what I have in me right now. Fifteen years ago I spent time on Guam and in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (which together form the Mariana Island archipelago) to help make a documentary about the indigenous communities there and the…
Last night I googled “how to go help rebuild Barbuda” and got not much besides the Prime Minister asking people to be tourists in Antigua, Robert DeNiro pouring money in so that he can build a resort, and an appalling opinion piece out of Jamaica (with lots of healthy comments) stating that Barbuda should take…
Things can be crappy (you want a better word but that’s really how it feels) — crappy, top-of-the-line, end-of-the-line crappy, nothing the way it’s supposed to be, including your feeling of dissatisfaction with words, and then you just go, you go out alone into the dark night and walk up the road and the air…
I spent the weekend raging. Beginning on Friday night, glued to the links I’d followed from Facebook about the Charlie Hebdo murders, I raged against the simplicity of media analysis, raged against hatred, and then, at midnight, sitting up in bed, I raged against my husband for not “getting” politics and race in precisely the…
Yesterday, after my husband and I woke to the sound of our children giggling in their bedroom, but before they came and crawled into bed with us, I turned to him and asked, “What are you thankful for?” He answered, “Pretty much the whole thing.” So there you go. Thank you, whole thing. I guess…
A poem for Flood Wall Street and the People’s Climate March September 21-22, 2014 Today I’m staying in my pajamas because I can. I’m curling back in bed with my computer and checking Facebook, not one time, not two times, but eighteen times while my children are at school. I might bake cookies.…
This weekend a good friend and I spent the day together at the coast. As we walked along the marshy trail to the beach, the air was warm and breezy, the sky shifting from silver-cast to blue and back again, the earth dark and pleasingly mucky, and the herbs and grasses and native flowers all…
Today I walked on the thirsty Earth, and tipped my tongue to the skies. My ancestors tasted the sweetness of rain. Over the past few weeks, I have felt the human energy gathering, gathering, around the idea of scarcity, or disaster. Over the past few days, I have felt the sigh of watery relief rising…
At my Zen center on Monday night Zen student and physicist Chris Gaffney said that some things seem “impossible,” but they happen anyway. Like the way that time slows down when a body is in motion, or when it flows more closely to the earth. There is a small clearing with an old tree on…