rimrunner

Over the weekend, I got the news that two members of extended communities that I’m part of had passed on.

Mike Lee, I never met in person. He taught non-classical gung fu—the style developed by my own teacher, Jesse Glover, and there’s a great deal more to that story—in Chicago, and we only ever interacted over Facebook. We had several friends in common, however, from the shared martial arts community of people who knew Jesse, or who knew Bruce Lee. Or both. The man I saw on social media had that mix of genial presence and essential physical confidence that I associate with many of the martial artists and fighters I’ve known. In the memories and stories posted by family, friends, and especially students, I was brought back to the passing of my own teacher twelve years ago—not least because he appears in many of the photos and videos that people shared.

I often say that meeting Jesse was one of the most fortuitous events of my life, even though I didn’t properly appreciate it at the time. He was a remarkable man, an excellent teacher (I borrowed several of his techniques for my own library research workshops), and while I never had the drive and discipline to be a great martial artist, I learned so very much about self-defense, about myself, and about the life experiences of people very different from me. It was one of the few true mentoring relationships I’ve ever had in my life. Hearing about Mike and who he was to so many brought it all back.

Tara I mostly knew from the Mercury nightclub, which for many years was basically my living room. I loved goth music and the goth aesthetic, and Tara would greet me at the door when I’d go there to dance several nights a week. She was sarcastic and funny, and cared deeply about goth as a community, not just as a club aesthetic. I’d played my own part in supporting that community, helping to subsidize a café that operated in Seattle’s Capitol Hill for several years and became a meeting place to socialize, often before hitting the clubs. But after a time I moved on to other things, mostly stopped clubbing, and chiefly interacted with the Mercury by scrutinizing the DJs’ posted playlists for new music. I’d heard in a roundabout way that Tara’s health hadn’t been great, but it was still a shock to see, through a mutual friend’s Facebook update, that she’d passed.

If you live long enough, you’ll come to a time in your life when more people you’ve been close to will have died than will still be alive. I wasn’t close to Mike or Tara, exactly—as I said, I never met Mike in person, and Tara’s and my friendship was more one of shared context than anything else.

But I’m fifty-one years old, and there’s more of these ahead of me.

(Not our actual tractor. Ours looks like this though.)

Yesterday, we managed to get a Kubota tractor—a big one, with a backhoe attachment—stuck in the mud.

Nine years ago my husband and I bought some rural acreage, most of which is unmaintained woodland. The guy we bought it from had been managing it for timber, sort of, but wasn’t very good at it. (No shade, neither are we.) What we have now is early-stage successional forest with some stands of mature trees here and there, mostly around a large wetland and on some slopes too steep for logging. We also have a number of old logging roads slowly being reclaimed by the forest, though I can attest that once you know how to look for them, this particular bit of infrastructure takes a lot longer to vanish from the landscape than you’d think.

Yesterday we were working on a patch of roadway that we’re trying to keep accessible, both to reach the further extent of our own acreage and enable access to parcels for which this road is the only access. (This concern is mostly academic because nobody’s really using those further parcels for anything except hunting, and hunters tend to walk in.)

This roadway runs along the bottom of a steep hill, at the top of which is where we’re having our house built. This is important because all the runoff from the northwestern side of that hill tends to collect at a particular spot along the roadway. What’s more, there’s a seep nearby; this patch of land never fully dries out, even in summer, when it can go for weeks or even months without raining.

I mention all of this to explain why my husband managed to get the tractor stuck in the mud yesterday. The roadbed we were working on is still pretty solid—it used to hold logging trucks, after all—but off to the sides was all soft mud. He was trying to get around some deadfall that was still blocking the roadway and also pass the truck we’d brought down to haul our tools and other gear.

If there’s a Bingo card for suburbanites trying to adopt country living, I feel like getting your tractor stuck has to be somewhere on it. Fortunately for both us and the tractor, several months ago the guy who did some excavation work for our septic system taught my husband how to use the backhoe attachment to help pull yourself out of such situations. I may have had a minor freakout when one of the tractor’s front wheels left the ground during the operation, leaving me to wonder if the seat belt that, yes, I was wearing would really keep me from falling out if the whole thing tipped over. (My husband pointed out later that his seat, back to back with mine while he operated the backhoe, was even more precarious.)

Yesterday was not the day I found out, thankfully.

The guy who taught my husband that maneuver has since retired and left the state, but if I ever run into him I’m buying him lunch. Today, I’m grateful for people like him helping fish out of water like us.

(Originally posted at welltemperedwriter. You can comment here or there.)

I hadn’t actually planned to watch the Super Bowl yesterday. I have a friend who I watch it with some years, because his household gets really into it, and that more or less makes up for the fact that I’ve never cared much about football. (I feel like an 80s hipster when I say this, but it’s true.) But then another friend wanted to go out for dinner, and we sort of wound up watching the game because we’re in Seattle and every place with a TV had it tuned to the NFL.

As a non-football fan—even one living in Seattle, where Seahawks excitement was palpable leading up to the big day—the main thing I kept hearing about the game was the halftime show, and how outrageous some people thought it was that the NFL had booked a performer who didn’t even sing in English. To the point that those people decided to do their own show.

Which, sure, okay, why not. It’s not like we’re living in a Clockwork Orange reality where someone’s going to strap you into a chair and pry your eyes open while they stream Youtube at you. You can watch anything you want, including nothing.

The purpose, though, was to make a statement: that’s not American. This is. As outrage marketing goes, I guess it worked, though the Puppy Bowl got more viewers than the All-American Halftime Show.

Bad Bunny, on the other hand, doesn’t need that kind of marketing. Whether you’ve heard of him or not (and I really do not understand “I’ve never heard of X” as a metric as to whether it’s notable, especially for those of us too old to be a marketing demographic for youth culture), the guy is the top-streamed artist on Spotify for 2025.

If anything, the NFL needed him, not the other way around. In 2024, the NFL was quite candid about seeking to grow its audience, specifically among Hispanics. And no wonder: the Super Bowl might top 125 million viewers every year, but the final match of the 2022 FIFA World Cup hit 1.5 billion. American football (as distinct from what the rest of the world calls football) might be a religion for many, but if the NFL has a religion, it’s money.

What’s fascinating to me is how terrifying that is to at least some of the people who decided to spend halftime watching Kid Rock instead. I’m giving a pass to people who genuinely enjoy that lineup better, since in a vast and infinite universe, such people undoubtedly exist. There’s no accounting for taste. The rest, though, seem to feel a need to indicate political affiliation through their choice of entertainment. You can tell who these people are because they criticized this year’s choice on the (inaccurate) grounds that he’s not American, when they raised no such objections about The Who, Paul McCartney, or U2.

There is a shared understanding of the moment going on here, though, and you could see it in Bad Bunny’s show whether or not you understood a word of what he was singing. Visually as well as musically, his performance was crammed full of enough history and symbolism to fuel a raft of thinkpieces, annotations, and reaction videos. Especially if you feel like you missed a lot, go looking for some of those. It’s worth it, in part because among the many things Bad Bunny’s show was about, it was about the shaping of identity and how that happens. It was about the America that I was taught as a child to believe in: the one where we’re unified by our common humanity and belief in self-determination and flourishing for everyone, while honoring the diversity of cultures and histories that brought us all here.

The “All-American Halftime Show” seemed, instead, to be a straitjacket, or a Procrustean bed—something inspired less by possibility and potential, and more by an exclusive and constricted definition of what “American” actually means.

That’s part of this country’s history, too. But if it’s a choice between the two, I’ll go with the one that seeks to welcome instead of exclude.

Poachers turned rangers, complicity in tyranny, the colors of marble, bears > Bigfoot, For All Mankind

Francis Annagu’s “How Former Poachers are Protecting Nigeria’s Vanishing Rainforest” explores the lines of tension, conflict, and resolution in taking a conservation approach to a multiuse ecosystem. Buried deep in the heart of this article is one way—probably the most effective way—to turn hunters into rangers: make the latter a more attractive option, especially in terms of pay. That hasn’t answered every challenge, as agriculture and deforestation continue to press on the forest reserve. But that problem isn’t unique to Nigeria, either. Make sure you scroll far enough to see the forest elephants.

Andrea Pitzer—always worth reading—writes in “Love that is Complicit” that whatever our opinions on immigration in the U.S. (my own is that the government has been kicking the can down the road with regard to just, humane, and consistent policy for most of my lifetime), the current situation requires either looking past an awful lot of cruelty to find acceptable, or very carefully not even knowing that there’s something to look at.

In “These Marbles were Never White,” Danai Christopoulou joins a growing number of Greek commentators on the Anglophone world’s ongoing love affair with Greek mythology, in ways that often obscure that mythology’s vibrancy and cultural context. I’m no exception here, as someone who’s called myself a Hellenic polytheist for almost 15 years, and made my own contribution to the body of stories based on Greek myths and legends. Those were my entry points into a deeper appreciation for both modern and ancient Greek culture and language, but Christopoulou’s piece highlights the cost of receiving these stories stripped of their cultural, historical, and linguistic context—which is the way that those of us in the Anglophone sphere tend to receive them. When I visited Greece in 2008, the museum she describes was still under construction. Some years later I visited the British Museum, where the Elgin marbles are still on display—complete with rather defensively worded signage. Hmm.

Jeff VanderMeer’s “Double Take” is the kind of nature writing I’d love to do. Early in his piece on Bigfoot and bears, he says:

I’m zealous about the fact that we don’t need Bigfoot populating the wilderness to find the natural world mysterious and marvelous. The bears often mistaken for cryptids, for example, already exist and capture our imagination for very good reasons.

This right here is why I became a tracker. VanderMeer goes on to discuss what he’s learned about animals from the trail cameras in his yard—contrasting this with purported Bigfoot images on trail cameras in the woods and how none of them seem to reliably be the real deal. One of his interviewees for the article says that if Bigfoot enthusiasts didn’t have Bigfoot, they’d just get into some other conspiracy theory, not into actual nature. Which I think is true, and also sad.

I recently joked that I watch most movies and TV shows months to years after everyone else has already seen them, which is why I only got to the first season of “For All Mankind” in the last few weeks. It’s out on BluRay, and if you have a player, this really is an excellent way to watch it—the gorgeous visuals are shown off to their best effect. The first season takes place beginning in 1969, and they get the tech and attitudes of the period so right, I’d forget I wasn’t watching a documentary (or maybe Apollo 13) until something obviously ahistorical happened. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like the subsequent seasons will get physical disc releases anytime soon, so I may have to pony up for Apple TV if I want more stuff like this.

After a December where it rained so much and so hard that river valleys flooded and levees breached, it’s been weirdly dry in the Pacific Northwest. A near-record streak of rainless days broke a few days ago, but it’s been so warm that the mountains still have way less snow than usual. (That was part of what caused the flooding; instead of snow, all that precipitation fell as rain, which then ran downhill through stream and river courses at flood volumes.) If that doesn’t change, this coming summer is going to suck; mountain snowpack accounts for the region’s water supply, and increasingly dry summers have been making for apocalyptic wildfire seasons. When I moved to western Washington in the mid 90s, smoke season wasn’t a thing. Now it is.

January 2026 simultaneously lasted several months and was gone in a flash. I think the weather has something to do with my distorted perception of time right now; that, and it’s the one thing I’ve noticed lingering for me personally since the first year of COVID. Which is odd, because I spent much of that year running around in the woods, practicing nature connection routines, and in generally living much more by nature’s markers of time than I do now.

Maybe I should go back to that.

The other thing affecting my perception of time are recent events across the country and around the world. I watched the videos of Renée Good being shot more times than was probably good for me, until I realized that more viewings would bring no more clarity. Clarity is a thing lacking from the current administration, which lies like it breathes, reflexively advancing a narrative wherein its every action is justified regardless of the evidence.

I used to think I’d never have to explain why that’s a bad thing, but here we are: even if I were a fan of Donald Trump and all his works (and, to be clear, it’s been obvious to me what sort of person he is since 1989), the immediate promulgation of an unverifiable and in most cases manifestly untrue narrative serves no one—including the current administration, which seems hard pressed to understand why it isn’t more popular. They are creating a situation not only where they cannot be trusted, but where a significant number of people will assume that everything they say is a lie whether or not it actually is. The boy who cried wolf has nothing on this.

Doomscrolling can make a day feel like a year, and there’s no bottom to it.

I did, in the early part of the month, intentionally spend some slow time: reflecting, resting, goal setting. Perhaps that made the month longer, but it was necessary after burning myself out before and during the holidays. My family is going through a hard time that we aren’t really talking about, and dealing with that doesn’t leave much for other hard things. Yet more revelations that the world is run by monsters, for instance.

There was a time, when I was very young, when I thought monsters were fiction.

It’s been a long, dry January, and unlike other parts of the country, we’re still kind of waiting for winter to start here.

Still waiting for the snow, and possibly an avalanche.

Andrea Pitzer, “The Century-Long Year”

Pitzer is the author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, which I recommend reading to anyone who wants to understand an important facet of what’s going on in the United States right now. Her newsletter and podcast are worthwhile; they mirror each other, so you can absorb this content in whichever way works best for you.

This entry is an elucidation of the idea that Trump is less a cause of the U.S.’s current situation, than a symptom. Even once he’s gone—and he will be, someday—the circumstances that put him in power will remain. If that doesn’t sound great to you, Pitzer has some advice at the end.

Bret Devereaux, “Tolkien and Éowyn Between Two Wars”

I always had this feeling that much of what happens in Lord of the Rings was in the intersections between Tolkien’s deep love and knowledge of ancient literature, his Christian faith, and his experiences in World War I. This excellent essay directly addresses two of those things, thus highlighting some key differences between battle scenes in Tolkien’s work and, say, the Iliad (which sometimes enumerates exactly which internal organs a spear impales when it kills someone).

Isaac Saul, “The ICE Shooting in Minneapolis”

There’s tons out there about the killing of Renée Good; this is probably as decent a summation as any. If you’re not familiar with Tangle, its habitual approach is to round up sources from the political left and right that are representative of what’s being said on a topic or story. Note that it does not claim that these are the most accurate reports, just the most representative. I link to this one because I think Isaac is probably saying what a lot of people are thinking right now, especially those who haven’t been anticipating (by which I mean dreading) something like this.

Something that I don’t think is getting enough attention, at least not yet, is just how quickly the Trump administration framed the entire event to suit its purposes. It’s not new for the administration to do this, but they’re getting bolder about it. (Have a look at what the official White House website says about January 6th, if you can stomach it.)

To that latter point, and how we got here, Sherrilyn Ifill’s “Whether It Is ICE or Local Police, the U.S. Has Normalised Anti-Democratic Law Enforcement Practices” is an important read. This week’s shooting is an outcome of something that’s been building for a long, long time.

David Williams, “Ten Reasons to be an Urban Naturalist”

I’ve been a subscriber to Williams’s (no relation) newsletter for awhile now, and appreciate the lens he brings to the natural world with which our cities are enmeshed. Nature’s not out there, somewhere—it’s on our streets, in our backyards, in our homes, and in us. While I can attest that seeing an elephant in its home environment (for example) is an amazing experience, so was the screech owl I spotted outside my house by following a ruckus of crows. What he calls Birding by Butt here is very similar to the practice of sit spot: go find a place to sit on a regular basis, and see what turns up. My city backyard has featured rabbits, cats, robins, raccoons, red-tailed hawks, barred owls, and one memorable season, a junco nest.

Junior Kimbrough, Bellinzonia Blues Festival 1993

I’ve been going through some CDs I haven’t listened to in awhile (and sending some off to donation), and came across a few Junior Kimbrough albums. There’s not a lot of videos of him out there, but I found this one today. This is hill country blues, similar to but distinct from Delta blues. If you like Mississippi Fred McDowell or R.L. Burnside, you’ll like this.

So U.S. forces snatched Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro early Saturday morning, giving the people who make their living explaining this stuff to the rest of us plenty of time to unpack events by Monday. It’s weird to me that the weekend still sort of exists in the news cycle, social media notwithstanding, but the sources I tend to check for coverage of big stories, legacy and new media alike, had their deep dives queued up and ready to go today.

The overall theme is general agreement that Maduro isn’t a good guy, alongside questions as to whether Trump was legally allowed to order the extraction (such a nicer word than kidnapping) and whether that makes any difference. Certainly nothing that happened over the weekend was without precedent (I’m old enough to remember Noriega, though was young enough at the time to not really understand what it was all about), and that’s where a lot of what justification has emerged from the White House rests: we’ve done this before.

What next is a guessing game, but some things seem likely: the existing regime, minus Maduro, will probably remain in charge, possibly with U.S. military intervention; American oil companies will likely move in, at the president’s invitation; this will become another incident in high school history textbooks that the students reading them will lack context to understand until it happens again. (It’ll probably involve some of the same people…yet again, if history is any guide.)

A thing I’ve thought about a lot in the last ten years is what kind of country we want the United States to be, anyway. It’s troubled me during events like the No Kings marches, where a whole lot of people showed up to, in essence, express disapproval—but I saw and heard very little about anyone’s vision for what America, and American leadership, should look like instead. Perhaps we don’t really know.

At some point, though, our own authoritarian-style leader will be gone, too. It’s very unlikely that it’ll be due to the forces of another country literally helicoptering in and flying him off. It might even be through free and fair elections, and a peaceful transfer of power, though there again history gives us cause for concern. We won’t know, until after it happens.

It feels like wasting time to wait until then to start building the kind of country we want to be—especially if what we want it to be is something other than what those in power have been building toward for literal decades.

I watched Wake Up Dead Man over the holidays, and boy howdy did I love it. Like the previous movies in what we can now reasonably call a franchise, Wake Up Dead Man uses murder mystery framing to tell another story that runs alongside and through the murder plot. That story is about faith, what it actually is, what we’re often told it is in America, and how stories shape individual and collective identity. (For more on this, see this excellent Reactor article--though be warned, spoilers abound.) I love what Father Jud says about storytelling when he and Benoit Blanc meet for the first time, about stories being a pathway to truth inaccessible any other way. This is a definition of myth, one that I find personally resonant.

One of the tricky things about myth and story is the way they thread themselves through our identities and senses of self without our conscious awareness. Many of them we grow up with, and even if we consciously reject them afterward, that very conscious rejection is a kind of engagement. I felt some kind of way watching Wake Up Dead Man, because even though people with more currency in the Church than I have pointed out a few ways the movie gets Catholicism wrong, it gets enough right to bring me right back to Sunday school lessons 40 years ago.

And it’s the most important things that it gets right, anyway. The importance of grace, of remorse and repentance to redemption, and that kindness and compassion are neither weak nor passive—all of these are present in the character and actions of Father Jud, and are the best of what I remember from my own religious upbringing. There are principles I can’t help but live by, even though I haven’t considered myself a Christian for over 35 years.

These things aren’t just present in Father Jud, either. The movie spends its initial run time with him because the audience hasn’t met him yet, while those who’ve seen Knives Out and Glass Onion are already familiar with Benoit Blanc. I found Josh O’Connor’s performance and Father Jud’s predicament so compelling that I’d all but forgotten this was a Benoit Blanc mystery when he showed up at a miraculously convenient time. The movie is careful to make the atheist and the man of faith equally concerned with the truth, and then goes on to demonstrate—despite the ongoing argument between the two that eventually reaches mutual understanding—that they aren’t really in conflict. That’s almost a radical statement in 2025 America.

It's also in marked contrast to almost everyone else in the movie. Monsignor Wicks’s congregation—the ones who stick around, at any rate—are all in on his model of faith, and it’s a testament to the people of Chimney Rock (is Rian Johnson also a Choose Your Own Adventure fan, I wonder?) that most of them aren’t willing to put up with it. The ones who do stay have their reasons, and the irony is that every single one of them could find richer and truer fulfillment elsewhere. A few of them at least know that they’ve bought into something nefarious, but…sunk cost is a hell of a drug.

It's not just that, though. The stories we tell ourselves, and tell about ourselves, can divert from the truth rather than leading to it, and that’s just what the story at the heart (as it were) of Wake Up Dead Man does. It’s not even like the classic film Rashomon, where what happened depends on who’s telling the story. Here, it depends so much on what certain people want to be true that they’re willing to kill for it.

The thing about living a lie is that you have to keep lying, and maybe even convince yourself that it’s the truth. That’s the cost, and even Father Jud isn’t exempt from it.

Watching the scene in which Father Jud and Benoit Blanc finally meet, it’s remarkable how, even though Jud is at that very moment in spiritual crisis, he greets Blanc’s presence with curiosity. Their entire initial exchange consists of Jud asking questions and Blanc answering them. It’s a bit of role reversal, really, and toward the end of their conversation Jud says it himself: whether a story leads to a lie, or to “a truth so profound that it can’t be expressed in any other way.” No accident that the sun comes out at that moment, lighting up both Jud’s and Benoit’s faces.

The definition of a sunk cost is that you can’t get it back. But you can stop paying.

(Crossposted from Well-Tempered Writer. You can comment here or there.)

I’ve got a Publications page, but some of the books there are out of print, and I don’t expect people to shell out for single issues of a magazine just because I’ve got a story in it. But the holiday shopping season has started disturbingly early this year, so here’s me getting in on it. Here’s where to get books that I have stories in, including the just-released Shakespeare Adjacent anthology:

Shakespeare Adjacent, an anthology of Shakespeare homages from 2 Jokers Publishing. My story, “Bitter Waters; or, the Villain’s Appointment” (that link goes to an opening excerpt) sets Much Ado About Nothing in a future Columbia Gorge (further) altered by climate change.

Two Hour Transport 2, an anthology of short fiction by writers associated with the SFF reading series of the same name–including me, as well as Nisi Shawl, Karen Joy Fowler, Eileen Gunn, and many other writers I’m delighted to share a TOC with. My story, “Song of the Water People,” is told from the point of view of a pod of Southern Resident Killer Whales who live in the Salish Sea.

From Bayou to Abyss: Examining John Constantine, Hellblazer is a collection of articles about everyone’s favorite morally gray magician. I had great fun researching real-world occult antecedents for the stuff we see John (and others) do in the comic, though real-world occultists would (justifiably) say that I just scratched the surface. Hey, I had a word count. Lots of other fun essays in here too.

Retellings of the Inland Seas, an anthology of short fiction placing Ancient Greek stories, myths, and legends in speculative settings. My story, “The Sea of Stars,” examines how sailors of the 5th century BCE might deal with a communication that seems to come from the gods.

Future Games, an anthology of short fiction on the themes of gaming and sport. My story “Kip, Running,” which originally appeared in the webzine Strange Horizons, is included, along with stories by Cory Doctorow, George R.R. Martin, and Kate Wilhelm.

Share and enjoy!

I was going to get this up yesterday, hence the category, but didn’t finish it until today. Yesterday wound up being super busy, including onboarding for one of those contractor gigs where you have to set up accounts on several different platforms in order to work. It’s a setup that both makes me feel old, and reminds me of my library days when we had four different systems crosswalking just to accurately convey our journal holdings to patrons.

I was also finishing up reading Robert Moor’s new book In Trees, in order to review it for Library Journal. Like a lot of nature-oriented books I’ve read recently, Moor comes in heavy on themes of relationality and reciprocity. These aren’t novel, exactly, but I’ve noticed them getting more emphasis ever since Robin Wall Kimmerer’s excellent and affecting Braiding Sweetgrass, which many of these books (Moor’s included) cite as an influence.

It influenced me as well, both when I first read it and during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, when I managed to escape the stuck-at-home-staring-at-screens phenomenon by taking off for nine months to Wilderness Awareness School. Constant masking and daily temperature checks notwithstanding, it was still a better way to spend those nine months than just about anything else I could imagine. I got to be with people. And trees.

It was an immense privilege, and it shouldn’t be. As people in the Immersion program itself pointed out, having to actively seek nature connection, as though we aren’t all connected to nature all of the time whether or not we’re aware of it, is indicative of a problem, one that has deeply pragmatic and material effects. I do happen to believe that sitting under a tree once in awhile or just noticing the birds outside the window are Good for us as humans, but as I’ve written before, not doing these things makes it so much easier not to notice that we’re driving the world off a cliff. The planet has survived mass extinctions before, but there’s a reason why some writers describe our current situation as the Sixth Extinction. And if we keep going like we have been, we’re going to kill off the species that make our own existences possible. Humans are the most adaptable creatures to ever live on Earth—I feel pretty confident saying that, despite the length of time life has existed on this planet. But whether we can adapt to the circumstances we ourselves are now creating is an open question.

And even if we could, the situation still sucks. I think people know it, too; it’s one reason fake AI stories about wild animals doing charming things are so popular on social media, to my everlasting consternation. My theory goes something like this: so many of us humans are so disconnected from the world in which we live that we view it as fundamentally unknowable outside the narrow slice that we understand. This makes us uncomfortable, so we gravitate toward relatable stories that present realities we find intuitively comprehensible. (This is also why fake news is both so seductive and so prevalent.) But precisely because of that disconnection, we aren’t equipped to recognize the unreality when we encounter it, and the people spreading it have a vested interest in not describing it as fiction.

Kimmerer talks a lot about reciprocity in Braiding Sweetgrass and in her more recent book, The Serviceberry. In its most fundamental and accessible form, this is the simple act of recognition of the necessary give and take within which each of us exists. We live, so we gotta eat. Sooner or later, other things will eat us. From this everything else flows. We exist and participate in a web of relationships whether we know it or not; this is as observable as the raccoons raiding our trash cans. Taking the time to make those observations begins for many of us as a conscious act, but the more you do it, the more habitual it becomes, the more you notice, and the more those connections become a thing that you’re aware of.

It’s a simple, small thing, but it changes so much. Among other things, it rejects the framing of human and planetary survival as a matter of completely abandoning modern ways of life. (Good luck getting people to do that, anyway.) Even people living in places so remote that calling them off grid is to understate the case have cell phones.

The hard part is getting this to happen on a big enough scale to make an actual difference, and creating space for people to do the things that will effect change. One of the first things you notice once you start seeing existence this way is how much capitalism in its current form makes everything into a state of emergency. What better way to ensure that no one has time to even notice what’s wrong, never mind do anything about it? Back in the late 1990s a book came out called Simple Things Won’t Save the Earth. That title was a response to the idea that individual consumer choices would make even the smallest dent in responding to the actual emergency then and now in progress.

So why would such a simple, small thing as a change in perception be any different?

I don’t really know, to be honest. It’s something I’ve been mulling over for at least five years, now, and probably longer.

But I do think it’s necessary, and inevitable. I’m just hoping it happens at a significant enough scale, before it really is too late.