February 2026 – Antonia Malchik

–or none

Bohemian Waxwings’ New Year’s Eve feast: Mountain Ash berries

Nearly two decades ago, I had a premature baby. “Had a baby” is a strange phrase, isn’t it? It sounds so simple, like having a loaf of bread, or an itch. Whereas even in the best circumstances there is nothing simple about “having a baby.” My son’s and my circumstances were hardly the best—I’d come down with HELLP Syndrome, an extremely rare and almost always deadly pregnancy-related illness. Its only treatment is delivery of the baby, no matter how underdeveloped they might be.

My son had nearly 8 weeks to go, time he needed for his lungs to develop and time to grow larger than his 4 pounds. But either he came out or I died of liver failure, there was no other choice.

So while I was unconscious, he was taken out by Caesarian section and whisked off to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. I was wheeled to Normal Adult Intensive Care, where I complained all night every time the machines started shrilling at me, and my then-spouse told me, each time, that they were beeping because I’d stopped breathing.

My son, who survived, spent a month in the NICU. That month remains one of the worst periods of my life. For the first ten days in particular, I had no idea whether he was going to make it or not, and nobody involved in his care was making any promises.

I spent a lot of exhausted hours in the NICU being terrified, reading to my infant in his incubator and engaging in what was, at that time, a known but not widely used practice called Kangaroo Care. The NICU nurses had told me about it. Every day they set me up in a nursing rocker chair with pillows for support and a blanket over my shoulders because I was shirtless, and handed my baby over. I held my son for hours like that, skin to skin, his oxygen and various monitors still attached, dangling wires between my arms. His heart and lungs repaired until, finally, he could breathe on his own. And so could I.

Kangaroo Care was first used in hospitals in Colombia, and it was found that premature babies held in this way, skin to skin, actually fare better than babies warmed and held in incubators. In many ways it’s an obvious practice—of course human newborns need to be held!—and in others revelatory.

I recently had a conversation with Ruth Feldman, the scientist who has done the world’s leading research on Kangaroo Care and its effects on health outcomes, about her decades of related work on “synchrony” and the neurobiology of attachment.

It was a mind-blowing conversation that I hope will lead to more, and reminded me of a book I often return to, Rianne Eisler’s Nurturing Our Humanity. In that book, Eisler—better known for her classic The Chalice and the Blade—draws on decades of research on authoritarianism and its adherents, in particular the correlation between authoritarian upbringings and later tendencies to vote for and support authoritarian leaders.

As Eisler points out in her later chapters, it is a continuing folly to assume that how children are raised has little or nothing to do with the eventual shape and character of the society they live in.

These ideas circle around what has become, for me, one of the most pressing problems of our time: the fracturing of societal and interpersonal trust.

A friend recently sent me a New York Times article about artificial intelligence, detailing some of large language models’ (LLMs, which is most of what is called AI actually is) lifelessness and predictability when it comes to written prose. In response, I told my friend that I’ve been thinking a lot about how the widespread adoption of large language model chat tools for uses like therapy, friendly conversation, and editorial feedback is indicative less of the usefulness of the tools than it is of how bedraggled human trust has become.

When you don’t, or can’t, trust other people with your secrets, your heart, your pain, your struggles, or even to give helpful and non-shaming editorial feedback on a piece of writing, it’s the most natural instinct in the world to turn to systems that feel objective, intelligent, and firm yet supportive. Systems that have been trained enough in the ability to predict natural language patterns that they feel real. They also, it seems to me, feel to many people like the kind of nurturing they didn’t receive in early childhood, like the friendships and close human relationships a crisis of loneliness makes little room for.

Where do we put our trust if it seems that all else, especially all things human, have failed us?

I was close personal friends with someone for several years who I know now to be one of the most self-serving, deceptive, and manipulative people I have ever met, someone who has sabotaged good causes and projects and taken credit for other people’s work.

This person has a large public following, speaks and writes passionately on issues that are close to my heart and the hearts of many, and appears at events and in photos with others who are admired and respected. Yet I know from my and others’ experiences that every aspect of the public image this person creates serves only to increase their own status and access to wealth.

How, I have wondered, would most people ever have a clue about this person’s true nature? I can hardly judge anyone else’s ignorance. After all, despite small early misgivings, I spent years in seeming friendship believing this person was who they presented themselves to be.

Between the adoption of and misplaced trust in LLMs and the ease with which manipulative people can twist good causes and good hearts to their own ends, human trust feels like the psychological equivalent of a broken road in a wracked land, crumbling to pieces, pitted with sinkholes and buried land mines, its clear tracks disappearing under dust and the growth of new life.

In a world where anyone can use digital tricks to manipulate and deceive, and those who don’t wish to go that route can simply use their innate abilities to do the same, how do you know whom to trust, or what?

Where, even, does trust come from—our judgment, our experiences, our gut feelings? Or maybe that neurobiology of connection, wired in early childhood to tell us what is safe, no matter how misguided those instincts might have become.

Who knows.

I have said on this newsletter that learning about the Doctrine of Discovery might be one of the most important annual goals for anyone who wants to see a better world. I still believe that’s true, but we need to know ourselves, too.

Outside learning will always hit a barrier if we do not match it with equivalent learning inside each of us.

Over the past many years there have been several writers and thinkers I gravitated toward whom I later become disillusioned with. I’m starting to think that getting to know the answer to “why”—what drew me to them? what did I miss early on?—might be more serious than I’ve given it credit for. I have found, and maybe you have too, that truths I once held close can morph into something unrecognizable.

Do I, or you, trust someone because of the work they’ve done or claim to have done, because of their identity, because of whom they associate with? Is that trust warranted? How do we know?

Maybe we can no more “have” trust than we can have a baby. The moment you have a baby, after all, is the moment you will never fully have that baby again. Over time, they slip away, growing and changing and becoming their own entity apart from us, as they should. Maybe trust is the same.

But maybe research into human connection can show where the broken road of human trust might also, in part, be repaired, so that we can see it clearly, if only for an instant before it disappears again.

When that road has vanished in my own life, I have always been able to turn not to other humans or some digital comfort, but to the living world. In Chasing Nature recently, Bryan Pfeiffer wrote far more beautifully than I could of the power of life in rooting us to where we are:

“Plants are rooted, literally and figuratively. They exist or do not owing to location, climate, bedrock, soil, fungi, microorganisms, and the brute forces of humanity: culture, economics, hubris. Plants are perhaps the most genuine expressions of history and place and community — a natural community. They grounded me as well.”

Like Bryan, I find grounding in the natural world. It’s also where I reorient—to myself, and what I think I know to be true.

I don’t know where this world is going. I know the changes I’d like to see and the healing I desperately wish for—for rivers, for trees, for Cutthroat Trout and Goldfinches, for Elk and Bison, for Long-horned Bees and Caddisflies, and for the human heart.

In the meantime, all I know is that it makes sense to hold one another, and the world, until we can all breathe again.

The North Fork of the Flathead River, northwest Montana.

A few days ago, I was sitting by this river, near a U.S. Forest Service cabin where I went recently for a sorely needed offline, off-grid, off-network recalibration. It’s been too long since I sat in the woods by myself for a few days.

Late October, the larch trees have yellowed, turning mountainsides bright and the woods full of unexpected sunshine even on gloomy days. Larch in autumn is a spirit-lifter, an anti-demon spell, a joyous shaft of light when the world is shifting dark.

It snowed the first night I was at the cabin. I trekked down to the river carrying my coffee the next morning before sunrise, happy despite knowing that in my rush to pack water, food, sleeping bag, and books, I’d grabbed a coat too thin and decided against snow boots—a mistake and I knew it, as the hole in the sole of the thin canvas shoes I’ve been intending to replace reminded me.

Ravens flew down the river and high above the trees, more than I usually see at this place. I could hear more further off in the woods and wondered what was keeping them so social. I wondered that for the next three days and never got an answer. They sounded not anxious exactly, but somewhat like me getting my stuff ready to stay in the woods and my kid packed up to stay at their dad’s: busy, harried, organized but frazzled.

The river at that spot is wide, its rapids gentle but the rushing tumble of water strong enough to be heard a long way off.

I watched some rapids tumbling around opposite bank from where I sat, the burble and leap over hidden rocks tricking my mind into thinking they looked like two otters playing in the water.

Wait, I thought. Those are two otters playing in the water.

I recently spent several days pitting, pureeing, and dehydrating a vast amount of plums picked from a friend’s trees—trees so heavy with fruit that after an hour of filling my bucket, the branches looked untouched. My friend had already picked and dehydrated his own many batches of fruit leather from his other trees, which ripen earlier, but I’d been too busy with the rest-of-life, the crises and plans and bureaucracies and commitments that translate into too little time in the garden and out foraging.

But this one bucket made it into my home, my fingers purpled dry by the slicing and pitting and feeding to the blender—a many bladed monster that, as I texted to the friend I’m renting a furnished house from, looks like something from a horror movie.

In the kitchen now is enough fruit leather and dried apples—from another friend’s August generosity—to see my kid and me through the winter if we’re not too greedy.

How does one get that way? Too greedy. Or perhaps the question is, how does a human, or a whole society of humans, lose perspective on what is enough?

I recently finished Caroline Dodds Pennock’s book On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe, and in it Pennock described briefly the value of cacao beans in Mesoamerica in the late 1400s and early 1500s, which were a form of wealth: a turkey egg or avocado could cost three beans, a small rabbit thirty.

Only the very wealthy could feast with gourds of cacao to drink; when resource-hungry European people came, claimed, and took, they took so much that even just reading about it felt like watching land being actively drained of life: gold, emeralds, brazilwood, cacao, people.

And yet, as many Indigenous people of the time noted after having spent time in the “noble” houses of Seville and Lisbon, no matter how much wealth was siphoned from their homelands, it did nothing to change the circumstances of ordinary European peoples. The poverty of the majority of people’s lives was often remarked on, especially when contrasted with the opulence of royalty and their hangers-on.

How much is enough?

What breaks a belief in kinship and reciprocity—how does one lose the knowledge that it is mutual care, not taking more for ourselves, that gives the best assurance of security?

I’d like to have a functional health care system that doesn’t bankrupt people, and to not worry about food and housing, but beyond a certain point can’t imagine an amount of money that would replace the kinds of relationships woven among people, and between humans and ecosystems, inherent in nature sharing gifts so wealthy that even multiple families can’t use them all—like my friends’ plum and apple trees, or the potatoes and strawberries I grow, or the wild huckleberries throughout the nearby mountains—and in people sharing them with one another.

Maybe “enough” is forever undefinable, guided only by that clear thread of relationship and reciprocity, of what keeps life life-ing.

There were in fact two otters in the river. I watched them for a long time, absolutely filled with delight. They tumbled and rolled upstream, all along the far shore, their sleek bodies and tiny whiskered heads popping out of the water every few seconds, their slim tails flying up to dive back down.

I wanted to step into my real skin, like a Selkie, and swim across the freezing water to join them. I wanted to not feel the frozen ground so acutely through my thin-soled shoes, to be indifferent to the bite of chill wind through my inadequate coat. I wanted to dance a song to Moon that night and to know each Raven by name, and to soar with the Bald Eagle who circled over the river downstream, toward the new-snowed mountains.

I wanted these minutes to be my entire life. I was, in fact, greedy for them to last forever.

Month: February 2026

One truth to rule them all

On greed: how much is enough?