Follow Your Own Path
You can’t really follow someone else’s path through life, certainly not step for step. But a part of us always wants to try. “Other people, in whatever context they are found, are a tough place in …
The Gift of Troubled Times
These are undoubtedly troubled times. A pandemic combined with social unrest, unsavory politics, and extreme weather — the personal turmoil seems acute because we’re all going through this at …
The Book That Explained Patriarchy to Me
If you’re born into a system, and so are those who raise you and live around you, it’s very difficult to recognize the system — until someone finds all the research on the time before the system …
For the Love of Composting
If anyone mentions composting in my presence, my face lights up and I can’t help but exclaim, “I *love* composting.” My enthusiasm for the practice sends the words tumbling out of my mouth …
Should the Earth Have Legal Rights?
Does the Earth need legal rights? No, but we need to give them to her. The worldview indigenous people have held for the last, let’s say, 15,000 years has finally made it into our modern …
The Transcendence of Mindscape Painter, Richard Mayhew
“What value does ethnicity have to do with one’s universal creative consciousness?” ~ Richard Mayhew, Transcendence This is the question Richard Mayhew, a landscape painter of mixed African American …
How I Learned to Not Hate Crickets
A cricket is a tough bug to love. I say this despite knowing they’ve been revered as symbols of good luck in cultures around the world. Their cheerful chirping has made people so happy throughout the …
Ocean As Mother
Rachel Carson has forever changed the way I see the ocean, and I don’t know how she did it. I was going to give you some passages depicting the ocean as a mother: who unceasingly circulates her …
How Marie Kondo Helped Me Hear My Heart (this is not about tidying)
If you’re not used to listening to your heart, it can seem like a real mystery. Or at least it did to me. Sometime after I entered my 30s, I became deeply despondent about life. I was struggling with …
What If There Isn’t Anything Wrong With You?
It’s easy to look at what other people are doing and think you’re failing, or defective, or somehow just wrong; what’s hard is to listen to your own heart, and to trust it. I spent most of my early …