Antonia Malchik

Walking composition

Good news! I’ve finally finished the first messy, painful 10,000-word draft of the first full chapter of No Trespassing, on land ownership. After several attempts to structure it around the ranch in eastern Montana where my mother grew up, I came at it from a different direction—starting with a paper I’ve been wanting to share with you all for over a year studying intergenerational economic mobility in Florence, Italy, from 1427 to 2011.

Now begins the messy, painful process of overhauls, edits, and revisions. This isn’t an easy process for me. I have a particular kind of work ethic—a quintessential Taurus personality if you prefer that framing. I like deadlines and assignments and really prefer working with an editor who can both collaborate and push back. Doing this book project without one feels like walking on thin air a lot of the time. Or onto the narrow bridge over the abyss out of Khazad-dûm. I don’t like heights. Or having flaming Balrogs in hot pursuit.

But whether on my own or under contract, a book is always a sustained slog with moments of piercing joy. Thank you all for continuing to walk this path with me. It’s you who ensure those moments of joy come more often, and find their way into this space.

5% of last quarter’s On the Commons revenue was given to the People’s Food Sovereignty Program. This quarter’s 5% will be given to Messengers for Health.

Audio version. Apologies for my voice being a little shaky. I was so cold!

When I was fifteen, I had my first major experience of culture shock. My family had just left the Soviet Union, where we’d been living in Moscow for several months. We exited the country as we’d arrived, by train and nerve-wracking encounters with Soviet customs and border patrol. There is a woman somewhere on this planet who lives in my memory standing forever at the door to the train car, weeping as she watched the customs officers carry away the violin she’d been playing.

Back in Helsinki, Finland, outside of the Iron Curtain, I had a minor meltdown brought on by the ice water and cloth napkins in a restaurant. To this day I can feel the strangeness of it, leaving a country where sometimes there were sausages in the supermarket and mostly there weren’t, and my younger sister and I quickly learned to find the growing line whenever we smelled bread; to one where ice water and cloth napkins, much less restaurants people ate in and customs officers who didn’t confiscate everything of value, were considered normal.

The real culture shock came a few days later. My younger sister and I were sent to stay with our oldest sister, who was at college, while our parents moved our life back to Montana. One day we two younger ones went for a walk to a grocery store and found ourselves wandering around the aisles confused and weirded out, unsure how to think about all that food we were looking at, all that choice.

When I was thinking about writing this, my mind kept trying to insert the word “abundance” in that line rather than “choice.” There’s so much! Look at all those cereal boxes! All those varieties of sliced meats! All that bread and you don’t even have to stand in line for it!

During the time we lived in the Soviet Union, my sister and I didn’t go to school. We had Russian lessons most mornings for two or three hours, and then wandered the city on our own. We often ended up outside a metro station, where people sold trinkets or Bazooka gum from small tables, and babushkas sold roasted syemechki, sunflower seeds, wrapped in newspaper cones, and there was a marozhonoye stand that sold soft, almost tasteless ice cream in soft, almost tasteless cones. When I had some kopeks in my pocket, I’d buy sunflower seeds, or fresh bread if we happened to come across a sidewalk kiosk that was selling some. There wasn’t much else to spend money on.

It was surreal to walk the aisles of an American grocery store again and see the stocked shelves. I was too young to understand that experience fully, or to understand that choice has little relationship to abundance, especially if the choice is a mirage created by advertising, packaging, and small tweaks in sugar and salt content. All I could say was that something felt wrong. All that choice, and yet all I saw was emptiness.

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Hunting season is almost wrapping up here for me. I haven’t been out that much and haven’t yet brought anything home, but no matter what my hunting seasons look like, they always make me think a lot about abundance.

Last week I was out in a new-to-me spot that a friend introduced me to. I didn’t see a single deer except for a buck we passed on the drive in, which I waffled too long on stopping for until he ran off, but I got to spend a couple of hours watching a flock of chickadees being busy and at least another hour watching a tree’s respiration mist off of its trunk into shafts of sunlight, which I’ve never really observed before. Like some kind of avant-garde film except it’s life, not a movie, right there in front of you: a tree, breathing.

Like the woods around here often are, it was utterly silent. Soaking into that lack of noise is indescribable. To sit by a big boulder surrounded by tiny spikes of juniper moss, an occasional raven call overhead, and falling larch needles that sound like the lightest, gentlest rain. Trees exhaling into the last of autumn’s sunlight.

And I saw something that for the first time in my hunting years made me wish I had someone next to me to share with, just for a few moments: a squirrel digging up a mushroom and running across the forest floor to take it up a tree. A squirshroom in action! (For anyone new here or who missed that post, an explanation of squirshrooms is in the post about my Master Naturalist course.) I’d never heard about squirrels’ mushroom habits until a couple months ago and suddenly they’re everywhere.

Hunting season usually caps off my frantic finishing-of-garden-tasks with a break of snowfall in between. It hasn’t been snowing enough here—when locals complain about the snow, my reminder is that without it we don’t have rivers, or water to drink, and it’s not all about our human comfort or desires anyway—and I’m behind in my gardening tasks. We finally got the carrots stored away, and I’m about finished with the potatoes that my spouse dug up. I hope to have more luck with them this year after losing most of last year’s potatoes to winter’s deep freeze-thaw cycle.

A kind person in town—a subscriber here!—let a friend and me pick as many apples as we could manage from her trees, and I spent many hours peeling and coring and slicing, with my dad’s help before he went back to Russia, and now have many servings of dried apple stored away for when winter starts to get serious—same for peaches, skinned and pitted and sitting in the freezer next to the huckleberries, which I made a concerted effort to pick far more of this year, along with a few grouse whortleberries, all of which I’m trying not to break out too early. And the jars of chokecherry jelly, which are a complete pain to achieve because there’s no easy shortcut to processing chokecherries, but which, come January, will evoke summer with more heady mustiness and memories than even the most perfect peach.

All of these things, the hunting included, take time, patience, community efforts, intact ecosystems, clean water, attention, and care. They also take human lives free of violence, oppression, and inequality. They take a kind of unquantifiable abundance and richness that can only be destroyed, never replaced, by aisles of cereal boxes and flavored yogurt and sliced lunch meats and all that is required to create and maintain the systems that make those full, empty grocery store shelves possible.

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A couple days ago I was watching sunrise over the train yard in the early morning, and a long set of cars with double-stacked containers labeled Amazon Prime rolled past. I’d be preaching to the choir here to go on about the pointlessness and waste that consumption represents. About all that’s bent and broken in this world to force it into temporary consumer “choices” loaded into those containers.

I could quote from many books to illustrate that point. From Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse or Edward Posnett’s Strange Harvests (which I really liked and think about a lot) on what happens to abundance when cannibal capitalism turns its sights on commodification; or from Abdullah Öcalan’s The Sociology of Freedom, on the 5000-year history of the powerful requisitioning “surplus” labor, resources, and time for its own purposes of accumulation long before capitalism came onto the scene to streamline the process. Or from one of the many articles I’ve read and podcasts I’ve listened to recently on seed-saving and food sovereignty.

Instead, I wonder if you could quote from your own life. Find the spaces in your memories, or in today, where abundance feels real, or what you’ve consciously turned away from because you know it’s a false replacement. What you wish you could change, what you’ve found intractable when trying.

No matter how much we read or study, it’s never a replacement for lived experience.

The train cars reminded me of that feeling long ago, walking around a grocery store full of what was called food and feeling confused, unsatisfied, and, I realized many years later, sad and lost. The realities of life in the Soviet Union are nothing to romanticize—starting with the lack of food and expanding quickly to lack of anything like true freedom—but our particular life there had elements that I missed when they were gone: time to wander and to learn, time for long and aimless walks, time to eat sunflower seeds and watch the river, time to think about what it means to be a person, and what it means to be free.

After all that, please feel free to engage in some good-natured ribbing over this evidence of how much candy we went through during the first couple years of Covid. This is NOT all my kids’ doing. There’s a reason I avoid those aisles at Costco, especially the jelly beans, but at least the empty containers are great for carrot storage.

Walking composition

I’ve got a new interview about the physical and social importance of walking on philosopher and former professional baseball player Greg Hickey’s site KineSophy: The Ethics of Human Movement. It gets back into some of the fundamentals of why I think walking and walkability matter more than most people think they do, how walking makes us human, and why I wrote A Walking Life: “Show me a world where we truly have the choice to walk or drive—and by walk I mean walk safely and pleasantly, not having to cross dangerous highways or busy intersections or constantly breathe in automobile exhaust—and you’ll show me a world where we have some freedom of choice about our mobility.”

In addition to the audio version of this essay below, I’m working on recording the Introduction to No Trespassing. I wanted to do it at one of my favorite creeks, but it’s a bit of a drive to get there and back. Speaking of No Trespassing, next chapter of the book is taking a long time, partly because I’m working on another big essay for a publication that intersects with the subject and want to make sure that they cover different territory, so to speak. Thank you for being here—your support helps with all of that!

Audio version, recorded at a public beach on the lake my town is built around, along with ambient noise and my random commentary.

Until a few days ago, I’d only walked a labyrinth once in my life, in 2017, while working on A Walking Life. I’d been on the Norfolk coast in England to visit a sea-pounded shore where fossilized hominin footprints between 800,000 and 900,000 years old had been found. The last chapter of the book is about those footprints and that journey, including the long, absurd saga of trying to reach the coast by train and bus; it’s also about my unintended stumbling across a labyrinth laid out in the courtyard of Norwich Cathedral, and what happened after I decided to walk it. That was the first, and until recently the last, time I’ve met myself in a labyrinth.

On a recent afternoon, “people-d out,” as I said to an old acquaintance, I bailed on the final hours of a conference to venture out to a distant labyrinth someone told me about last year. It’s open to the public but built on private property. Driving toward the house from the highway reminded me of coming in toward the Rocky Mountain Front from central Montana: bending along rural roads up into the hills, snow-dusted mountains in the distance; passing, strangely, a yard full of bright blue peacocks pecking away in the grass.

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There’s a reason the shape of a labyrinth is ancient beyond imagination, and a reason they’re found all over the world. I don’t really want to give the reason a name, mostly because I don’t have one, but I felt it that first time, walking one outside the nearly 1000-year-old cathedral in Norwich, the town where the farmer Robert Kett was executed in 1549 for leading the Norfolk Rebellion, one of England’s most violent, desperate mass revolts against enclosures of the commons. The sign erected in Kett’s honor 400 years later has inspired much of my writing about the commons and private property, but at the time I was still immersed completely in walking, and writing about walking.

I’d spent a while in the cathedral, thinking about the generations of footsteps that had worn the stones now smooth under my own, before wandering outside and coming across the labyrinth. Encountering it was a lesson to me in the limits of learning via books rather than experience, as I wrote later (I’ll caveat the “less spiritual than she is religious” phrasing here with reference to an essay I wrote last winter about questioning my self-described atheism):

“Although I’d read as much as I could about labyrinths, including Reverend Lauren Artress’s Walking a Sacred Path, I had never actually seen one. And I hadn’t, to be honest, been all that interested. As a person who is less spiritual even than she is religious, if that’s possible, I tend to be skeptical of any spiritual or religious practice that claims to put us in touch with the divine, much less with ourselves. Walking a labyrinth, I thought, might contribute to my research but wouldn’t actually do anything.

I believed that, that is, until I walked one.

There weren’t many people at Norwich Cathedral that day. I joined four or five milling about the labyrinth, but instead of walking straight into it, I felt compelled, and I still have no idea why, to circumambulate the outside first. While walking, I began to form a question, one drawn from a personal existential struggle I’d been caught up in over the previous year or two.

I wasn’t prepared for what happened when I entered the labyrinth. I carried my question in with me, and as I began walking responses came—not direct answers, just thoughts—pulled from somewhere deep inside, a psychological place that I have only looked into at certain points in my life when all other answers have failed. A place of the heart but also of the soul. And as these responses rose up to meet my conscious mind, my feet slowed down of their own accord. I didn’t choose to slow down, not in the way we usually understand choosing—my feet dragged, as if being drawn down by the ground, as if responding directly to the gravitational pull involved in each footfall. I became acutely aware of how each lift of the foot and step forward related to the grass and dirt and rocky crust and molten core beneath.

I tried walking faster, as an experiment, but each time was pulled back, so I let my feet take the lead and examined the responses of darkness and light that came up to meet me.”

It was eerie to be walking through a labyrinth more recently and find that similar responses pulled on my spine, feet, and thoughts, as if I were stepping back onto a path I’d been on only moments before, though it was almost exactly six years to the day since my feet last wandered a labyrinth. 

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This time, too, I first walked around the outside of the labyrinth before entering, once clockwise and once counterclockwise, forming an existential struggle into the shape of a question, or as close to a question as I could get. 

Maybe we all have the same questions in different shapes and words: How do I untangle this knotty mess of a human, knotty mess of humanity? What good can I do, can my work do, amidst the violence and pain inflicted by those with the most power? My question wasn’t exactly that, but it intersected with those, wrapped also amidst some personal problems—it all feels connected. I suppose it always is.

I was the only person there for a while until a trio of much younger people showed up to run across the circle and take selfies. “You’re messing it up,” one of them said to another as they crossed through the pattern. “You’re doing it wrong.” There probably is no wrong way to walk a labyrinth, I thought, trying to keep my attention instead on that same energy I’d felt once before, slowing my footsteps so much that for one long stretch I was barely walking forward at all. 

My feet pulled back and were eventually moving so slowly I could barely comprehend it, much less want to control it. I stopped and took off my shoes and socks, letting the snow-chilled mulch and fallen leaves bind my feet to whatever it is that comes to life in these winding paths. I tried to ignore the awareness of how weird I must look to the trio of twenty-somethings, moving with aching slowness and barefoot. If you think about it for a moment, which I wasn’t able to do until drafting this essay, the whole concept of taking selfies to post online is weirder than walking barefoot.

That first time in the Norwich labyrinth, I hadn’t gone barefoot, but the experience was still similar.

“This part of who I am as a person, a human, knows that this connection to the ground is real. It feels the thin places of the world, the shiver of being closer to some kind of otherness. . . .

I took a long time to walk into and out of the labyrinth. People passed me going each direction. I stepped around a woman crouched on the ground taking photos, and two kids leapt from stone to stone around me, and still I walked, stuck with my questions and responses and the pace my feet insisted on. When I finally exited, it was with an eerie feeling of having been knitted back together, not just within myself, but with far more than I could fathom.”

I’d entered this recent labyrinth a little late in the day, leaving me not much more than an hour to walk it. I used up most of that time winding my way in and reached the center about fifteen minutes before the place’s posted closing time. As I put my shoes back on over cold-numbed feet, I felt saddened at the thought of rushing out, resenting the idea of having to be efficient with time dedicated to existential quandaries and presence.

The unraveling of problems, selves, the world, and humanity need more time than this. All of our time. As I walked out, I tried to maintain the connection I’d found on the way in, the aliveness that came from the ground through the feet and up the spine, and unnameable «whatever it is» that gave me some kind of guidance as I walked more and more slowly through the turns and curves of a space shaped to unwind the self.

“Hi there!” called a voice, startling me as the sun disappeared behind the mountains.

“Hi.” 

“We close in five minutes,” the woman said, sounding a little impatient. I tried, only partly successfully, to ditch disappointment and hang on instead to what I’d found. To the small reassurances that showed a way forward, an opening, some kind of way to be in this human-ravaged world. To see if the walk outward could help shape a way for the raveling I know we all need. 

A few days later I was listening to an interview with the Sakha singer Suor, or Snow Raven*, and was reminded of the labyrinth and that craving for more time, for all the time in the world, as she described her childhood in Arctic Siberia and the quality of silence that allowed her to learn how to mimic the animals of her home. We all need that, I thought again. The time, the silence, the simplest, most denied freedom to be our most present in the world, for the world.

It’s really what that last chapter of A Walking Life is about, the ways in which we carry the world and ourselves, and especially griefs larger than anyone should ever have to bear, one slow step at a time.

I had to accept the uncertainty and answer the property owner, hoping she would leave me alone for those last few minutes. Leave me to gather together whatever wholeness I’d been given, long enough for me to keep in touch with it a little longer, to have something articulate or tangible to bring out into the world that exists beyond the thin places.

“Thank you,” I said, waving at her. “I’m on my way out.”

* This YouTube channel looks like the kind that would try to persuade you that alien lightworkers walk among us in a hot minute—apologies if I’m misaligning them—but Snow Raven came across as someone with generosity of heart and spirit. Listening to her demonstrate animal language, teach the interviewer how a true yodel is created, and especially hearing her sing a traditional Sakha song about an hour in, is lovely.

Walking composition

Audio: I’ve had a few conversations recently with friends who are having trouble reading. Even I’ve found myself reading far fewer books this year. Maybe it’s burnout, maybe it’s the internet, maybe it’s Covid. I have no idea. But I’m trying something I’ve been wanting to include for a while here, which is reading these essays aloud for anyone who’d rather listen than read. I can’t promise to do it every time, but I’m going to try.

Threadable reading circle list

Short stories we read for the Threadable* reading circle on the commons, identity, and belonging in science fiction and fantasy (links are only given when the story is available online):

1. “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience,” by Rebecca Roanhorse

2. “Folding Beijing” and accompanying essay “I Want to Write a History of Inequality,” by Hao Jingfang

3. “Bloodchild,” by Octavia Butler in her short story collection Bloodchild

4. “The Book of Phoenix,” by Nnedi Okorafor

5. “Cloud Dragon Skies,” by N.K. Jemisin in her short story collection How Long ‘Til Black Future Month?

6. “The Heart of the Museum,” by Tang Fei, in the anthology Sinopticon: A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction

7. “Robert Greenman and the Mermaid,” by Anjali Sachdeva in her short story collection All the Names They Used for God

8. “The Red Thread,” by Sofia Samatar in her short story collection Tender

9. “How to Survive the Apocalypse for Native Girls,” by Kai Minosh Pyle, in the anthology Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction

*Threadable is a social reading platform where people can read and comment on books and stories together. This is a continuation of a previous reading circle I led for Threadable on the topic of land ownership.

Walking composition

My Threadable reading circle of identity and belonging in science fiction and fantasy short stories is wrapping up, capped by my two favorite stories among selections: Sofia Samatar’s “The Red Thread” in her collection Tender, and Kai Minosh Pyle’s “How to Survive the Apocalypse for Native Girls” in the anthology Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction. (I’ll post a full list of the stories in the Research & Resources section.)

Samatar was recommended to me by Stefanie, a subscriber here, and I had so much fun reading the short story collection Tender that I ordered her novel A Stranger in Olondria. “The Red Thread” is a spare story set in a future that might or might not be post-apocalyptic but definitely isn’t the world we live in. It hints at a clash between those devoted to a borderless, mobile world, and those who fight for something more fixed—neither, though, clear about who gets to belong where. “Belonging, Fox. It hurts,” wrote the main character to her lost friend. Samatar is one of the best fiction writers I’ve been introduced to in a very long time. Thanks, Stefanie!

I can honestly say that I’d read a full book by any one of the writers in Love After the End, they were all so good. And they break the genre out of its decades-old stifled mold. “These stories include a relationship with the land that isn’t common in science fiction stories,” one reviewer wrote of the anthology. “They assume a greater responsibility for protecting the Earth than I’m used to from a dystopia.”

I chose Pyle’s “How to Survive the Apocalypse for Native Girls” because of the difficult—to me—way they write about kinship and acceptance. “You always gotta ask yourself,” said one character, “who is being excluded here?” If we could make our worlds, our communities, from scratch, what would we choose to guide us, and how? This story was a little gutting for me, and compelling, and I would love to find some interviews with the author about it because it poses some very difficult questions. In the meantime, I’ll be reading more of their work.

5% of last quarter’s On the Commons revenue was given to the People’s Food Sovereignty Program. This quarter’s 5% will be given to Messengers for Health.

I went away to a Forest Service cabin earlier this week and caught up on a lot of offline work and also a lot of offline-self. Usually when I do this, the work gets many hours of determined focus. It still did, but I also spent probably two hours a day, maybe more, just sitting by the river. That’s it. Sitting. Listening. Or hearing maybe. Listening indicates more intention than I want to imply. Every time I thought, “I should go back to the cabin and get some work done,” the river’s flow and ripple answered: “But why?” I watched a dipper play and eat at the edge of a sheltered pool near the shore for a whole hour. I took a video of him but he made me laugh so much I couldn’t hold my phone still.

There were some mice at the cabin. At least, I used to think they were mice. Every time I’ve stayed there, they started racing around the ceiling over the bed after it got dark. But this time I had left my tea strainer on top of the cooler out on the porch—so as not to attract any mice inside, though I should have known better than to leave any food attractants outside—and when I went out in the morning the strainer was gone. Packrat, I thought. Probably. I’ve never seen mice droppings inside this particular cabin, and the droppings outside are larger than regular mice would leave. And I’ve never known a mouse to steal a tea strainer.

I moved the cooler further away and used coffee filters for my tea, and that night listened to the animal scurry around the ceiling and through the walls when I went to sleep. I got up later to watch Moon make Her way across the mostly overcast midnight sky, and the next day went back and soaked in the river again, both physically and metaphorically, letting the rippling water run through my mind and wash out all the detritus that’s been piling up, refreshing some old channels and carving out new ones.

I wondered what you’d find besides my tea strainer if you scouted out the packrat, how many shiny little moments of people’s lives are holed up somewhere. If they, too, sat by the river and left less tangible shiny moments behind.

The Master Naturalist course I’ve been taking finished the week before I went to the cabin. It was more intensive than I was prepared for, but packed with interesting information, and more importantly, provided a way to do exactly what I’d taken it for: to better get to know this land and all the beings I live among. We learned birds, tracking, macroinvertebrates (I’ve written about them before, but I do love caddisflies so much, one of my favorite creatures, and I got to see many of them), and plants. We talked about the Swan Valley’s ecology and long history of human relationship, and the difficult task of widening the window of tolerance for people living among realities like grizzly bears and long winters.

And I learned that squirrels dig up mushrooms and then place them on tree branches to dry for later consumption. I decided to call them squirshrooms. Squirrel mushrooms! Come on, isn’t that the coolest thing you’ve ever heard?

It’s been decades since I did anything like “school,” and many years since I worked 9-5 hours in an office. Sitting for two hours in the mornings watching slideshows devoted to learning about genus and species and the like was pretty taxing. And I know myself well enough to know that I don’t learn science well via lectures or even reading. Things stick in my brain or don’t. The only way for me to get them to stick better is to get my hands involved. I only really learn by doing, which I think is true of more people than realize it about themselves.

Lack of embodied, hands-on learning is one of the things that bugs me most about modern education, especially when it comes to math and science. It’s why I co-created and help run a math games program for third-graders, because too many people think they’re “bad at math” when in reality our most natural way to learn math—through our hands and eyes and experiencing the world—is taken from us at a far too young age.

Science is prone to this, too. I remember how disappointed I was when my son was in 5th grade and looking forward to learning science in earnest, only to find that it started with drills on how to set out objectives, form hypotheses, run experiments, and properly keep a lab notebook.

There are reasons those methods are important, but for most of us laypeople science should always start with getting muddy. It should end that way, too.

In fact, that goes for all learning. Even all creativity. That there is a picture of me smelling mountain lion pee. I kept going back for more because I couldn’t quite shape words around what it smelled like. The two sensory details that get overlooked in most writing are smell, and the feel of the air. “How would you describe it?” I kept asking the leader of our course as I went back down to smell again. “It’s almost skunky but not quite, almost a metallic undertone . . .”

“Funky,” she finally said. It is. It is funky. Like skunk, but also a trace of the iron smell of blood.

You wouldn’t know this if you didn’t get your nose down into it.

Like everything else in the dominant culture, science teaching has to tick some boxes to be considered acceptable. Learning classifications, species, differences in habits and characteristics in a very specific, head-centered way—people have to do it because that’s what’s accepted and rewarded, and for practicing scientists it’s necessary.

For me, maybe for most of us, true learning happens through experience. I can learn all those classifications, but they’ll only stay in my memory if I relate them first to being in the world: smells, sounds, embodied experiences. I learn backwards, in a way, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find that a lot of other people do, too. The couple hours a day we spent in the classroom won’t stick in my head, but the subtle sign of a mountain lion marking will because I’ll remember the smell of that urine and everything that was associated with learning it.

That’s what science always was to begin with, a way of further exploring and understanding the world we live in. It was, and should be, about curiosity and care and love for a place enough to know it really, really well—with an understanding that our own human lives depended on the health of the rest of the living world. Abdullah Öcalan (the former Kurdistan Workers’ Party leader and a Turkish political prisoner since 1999) wrote about this a bit in his book The Sociology of Freedom:

“The sole purpose of knowledge and science was to ensure society’s continued existence and provide it with protection and nourishment. . . . The profound severing of science from society, and from women in particular, also meant its detachment from life and the environment. . . . In social nature science was understood as divine,”

a reality that he wrote of as being coopted and corrupted by civilization’s monopolization of power and surplus.

When we gave our final presentations at the Master Naturalist course, I started mine by talking about this idea of “widening the window of tolerance,” which is a phrase I’ve often heard in wildlife conservation. While teaching tolerance is necessary, I don’t think it’s sufficient to the task. If the rest of life’s only chance at survival is determined by what certain humans will tolerate, a truly thriving world will continue to diminish.

What’s needed are more relationships with science that do what this course did: rebuild a sense of humans as part of life, integral to it. This sense hasn’t disappeared, as most of us here know; it’s just diminished and damaged. The more energy we put into re-enlivening human beings and human understanding, the less need we’ll have to rely on the narrowing allowances given solely by tolerance.

Science can still do what it originally did: infuse each of us with a sense of belonging to the world we live in.

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Over the six days of the course, we hiked miles. We walked through a marsh and a fen. Some of you have probably walked on fens but I haven’t. It was amazing, disconcerting, like being on a paddleboard but it’s the entire ground that’s wobbling. We waded rivers and got down in the dirt.

We found prints of mink and muskrat and spent ages unraveling a story of tracks in a muddy field: grizzly—two, we realized—wolf, mountain lion, coyote, raven. All of us dancing around the tracks from one grassy tussock to another trying not to step on them, kneeling in the mud to measure lion tracks pressed into moss-covered mud and determine whether the canine prints were wolf or domestic dog; speculate on where the animals had gone and what they’d done while they were there.

Watching caddisflies scurry part way out of their shells to scoop in more material, and then standing in the river to spot more of their little casings stuck to rocks. Smelling the grapefruit-pine scent of grand firs, which I’ll always associate now with their flat needles and that one curvy, rutted mountain road that made several of us carsick.

These things will stick with me in a way that learning from a book or talk never would. They lingered with me for days, long enough to bring them up to the cabin, where I applied some of the new knowledge, along with things I already knew, to a place I’ve come to love for many reasons. For the time and peace it gives me, for its ability to bring me back to myself, for the river and moonlight, for memories and associations. For the packrat and her possession of my tea strainer.

Most of all for the place itself. For the fact that it exists, whether or not I ever get to go there. For the river that I can hear in my head right now, whose sound and feel I’ve come to know in all her seasons, who will continue to flow, I hope, long after I’m gone. And for all the life thriving around her, whose existence isn’t dependent on my detailed knowledge but might be dependent on all of our understanding that, just as they’re part of the river, we’re part of them.

I let my phone record for about 25 minutes as I sat by the river earlier this week. It’s just a recording of running water. I think there’s a bird in there somewhere, and some wind sounds because I didn’t bring down my fuzzy windscreen that I usually use to filter the wind in recordings. But if you need a bit of peace in your day and want to let this play while you do things, or do nothing, it’s here. The photo is right from where my phone and I were sitting.

Walking composition

I’ve been fully immersed in a Master Naturalist course (through Swan Valley Connections—thanks to the inimitable Chris La Tray for talking about how awesome they are; I’m sure he’s written about them at some point), and was planning a post about grizzly tracks, the grapefruit scent of grand firs, caddisflies (among my favorite creatures), and the colonization of science, but on the morning of the third day of the course, I got a message from my father that his cousin Zhenya had died.

It’s been months since I wrote anything here about Russia. I’ve been pretty immersed in Montana both physically and mentally; I also have trouble knowing what to say. Because I have close family there, there are too many things I have to write around. Here in Montana, I can say whatever I want about Putin. They can’t. Many of the things I think and say are illegal there. This is a reality that those of us who’ve only ever known freedom can have trouble grasping, a reality that for various reasons was always part of my upbringing. You learn to live dually, split your mind, develop careful boundaries of trust, and often learn that trust just isn’t possible.

Although much of the English-speaking world has stopped talking about the invasion of Ukraine, anyone who pays the slightest attention to Russia’s current reality and the centuries of history in Eastern Europe* is worried. I’m worried.

But we all, also, live in the ebbs and flows of personal and public concerns, and today I’m setting aside geopolitical worry to honor a personal loss. Zhenya and my father grew up more brothers than cousins. In Russian, the words for “cousin,” dvoyurodnyy brat’ or dvoyurodnyy syestra, contain the words for brother and sister. Partly because of how close my family there is, and partly because of the culture, his daughter Irina and I have always considered each other sisters rather than distant cousins.

Zhenya—Yevgeny Yassin—was a public figure in Russia, an economist with respect and influence. When the Soviet Union collapsed, he was involved in forming a new government and eventually became Minister of Economics. For many years he was the academic supervisor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow (not pictured above; that’s Moscow State University). He had strong opinions about the promises of the free market and the failures of communism, opinions that took the rise and power of Russian oligarchs to shake. And he was a stalwart advocate of human rights, something his daughter, my sister-cousin, continued: she ran a humanitarian organization in Russia until Putin outlawed it several years ago.

Zhenya was also someone who made me feel more loved and welcomed than almost anyone else in the world. Even though I didn’t meet him or any of the rest of my Russian family until I was fourteen, he made me feel like we’d known each other forever, an integral part of a close-knit family despite the fact that I could barely communicate in the language. He often called me maya malen’kaya mat’, “my little mother,” because he said I looked like his mother. One of my middle names, Evgenia, was given to me in his honor. It’s one of my lasting personal sadnesses that I haven’t been to Russia in over a decade, and lost the chance to see him once more.

When my grandfather in Leningrad died in the late 1980s, my father was still living in exile, unable to return to the Soviet Union after leaving in 1974. I doubt I’ll ever forget that day, the call from my aunt on our party line phone in Polson, starting to understand for maybe the first time what it means to be separated from your family, forever as far as you know. The kinds of fractures it creates. The kinds of bonds it tries to cut. I don’t know if there’s a greater evil humans inflict on one another than forcing families apart. It is something that Russia, like all other places with imperial ambitions, has excelled at throughout its history, particularly when it came to Jewish people, which my family were. My parents’ story has a little more choice in it, but in the end the Soviet authorities still told my father he could leave with my American mother and my older sister, or stay, but if he left it would be forever.

That Zhenya always managed to make me feel like we’d never been separated, never seen our family fractured, is a quality that today stuns me with its loss. To make people feel that welcome in the world as part of your nature is something I wish I could live up to.

My stepmother’s great-aunt, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, lived for many years in exile and lost her daughters to starvation and the gulag. Like millions, her life in Russia was defined by suffering. And yet what she created in return was poetry, of love and life and a piercing view of the world:

“I am happy living simply:
like a clock, or a calendar.
Worldly pilgrim, thin,
wise—as any creature. To know

the spirit is my beloved. To come to things—swift
as a ray of light, or a look.
To live as I write: spare—the way
God asks me—and friends do not.”

Zhenya didn’t have a simple life, but he, too, cultivated a sharp mind while spreading love and liveliness all around him amidst the realities of the Soviet Union. He is one of the many people who taught me, unintentionally, that what is worthwhile in life is always simple. Maybe a few shots of vodka and debates over politics and economics and literature long into the night. But most of all, that where our true human potential lies is in laughter, hugs, a meal, stories, some good friends, a much-loved family, and mourning the loss of the same. In our connections to one another.

I heard once that who a person is, their fundamental human self, is defined in part by who claims them. Who their people are. Zhenya gifted me that, a profound sense of belonging to people. He will be mourned by many, his public service and accomplishments lauded in newspapers across Europe. But me, I’ll light a candle tonight, and feel the loss of his ready smile, his keen conversation, and how easily he made me feel like I belonged.

The morning that my father’s message about Zhenya came, I drove again the too-long route to the Master Naturalist course, watching sunlight strengthen above a mountain range, rising through cloud cover just thick enough to hide its full brightness but thin enough to spread gold across the sky. A flock of Canada geese winged overhead in the direction of the sun, and as I watched, a few of them somersaulted in the air, wings folded, their flips in that golden light the kind of pure earthly joy that arrives, also, in the smile of someone you love.

*Two good books on that region I read recently were Neal Acherson’s Black Sea and Orlando Figes’s The Story of Russia. I also still recommend Konstantin Kustanovich’s Russian and American Cultures: Two Worlds a World Apart for a closer understanding of Russian worldviews.

Walking (& Sitting) composition

Note: I’ve created one extra section in this newsletter where I’m collecting references and resources on all aspects of ownership, the commons, and commodification. It’s not something I’ll email out, but I’ll add to it regularly and it’s there for your use. Feel free to share, send suggestions, and ask questions.

Important regarding subscriptions: Three real-life friends who are paid subscribers to On the Commons have told me that their payments are showing up as coming from Medium, not Substack, which obviously looks fraudulent. Both Substack and Medium use Stripe for payments. I intermittently contract with Medium, so my account has both platforms on it—the payments are still for Substack, but for some reason are being labeled Medium. I’m trying to resolve this issue with Stripe. It seems like a coding issue, and if it’s affected you, I apologize. Fingers crossed a real human works there, somewhere, and can figure it out.

If they can’t fix the problem, I’m not sure what the best thing to do is. I have Venmo, I guess, and PayPal, and a post office box . . .

Or we could just abolish capitalism. Can’t take that long if we all team up, can it?

When I moved back to my hometown—secondary hometown, I call it, where I graduated high school—almost ten years ago, I was moving back for the community. The pace of parenting expectations on the rural fringes of New York City’s orbit, where our kids were born, was exhausting, and I’d been homesick for Montana for 20 years, since I first left for college. I didn’t feel alive anymore, going through the motions of working and parenting and trying to connect with a place I didn’t understand that also had a hell of a lot of poison ivy and humidity and Lyme disease-bearing ticks. So I came home. It wasn’t as easy or straightforward or quick as that, but it’s one of the things I’m most grateful for, that I got to make that choice.

Every time I go on a hike with a friend or pick huckleberries or drive some unnamed gravel road, there’s this flood of gratitude that’s almost absurd. Like gratitude with a thick buttercream layer of extra gratitude. I get to live here, and walk these mountains. I get to slow-breathe the smell of a trail covered in sun-warmed pine needles, and the sharp scent of those same needles in the spring when winter hasn’t yet let go. I can take my kids places where we watch meteor showers with no discernible light pollution. I worry about mountain lions and my aging knees, and spend November hours when I’m meant to be hunting watching chickadees deep in the woods instead.

High-mountain lakes the same indigo-blue of sky the moment it’s losing the last of the day’s sunlight; hillsides smothered in beargrass and grouse whortleberry—how could I not feel gratitude?

Stand on a mountaintop where the air is silent and a hawk soars overhead and look across to ridges draining into gouged-out tracks; imagine what they’re like as spring thaw sets in. Think about the kind of water-force it takes, over how many years, to scour a mountainside into the form of a pastry blender.

Walking composition

Those who’ve read the introduction to my book No Trespassing will know of the Badger-Two Medicine area in northwest Montana and the 40-year fight to retire oil leases there. Two days ago an announcement came out that the last remaining lease is being retired. This article in my local paper details the purchase agreement over the lease; I hope to hear more while attending the Glacier-Two Medicine Alliance’s annual Gathering in a couple of weeks.

5% of On the Commons revenue this quarter will be given to the People’s Food Sovereignty Program.

I was working on an entirely different essay this week partly about staying at the American Prairie with my sister and her family over Labor Day weekend—which has become an annual ritual for all of us—combined with something that’s been on my mind a lot and that came up in the comments last week, which is the question of, “Who gets to say no?”

But that essay is currently at 4000 words and I could see the prairie section needed to be removed along with other heavy revisions. Plus I linked to the more comprehensive essay I wrote about American Prairie two years ago (then called American Prairie Reserve), and if you’re relatively new here I do recommend reading it. It has much better photos than I took this year, and gets into what I think is one of the least-understood sources of societal tensions: identity. In American Prairie’s case, cowboy and settler identity.

This current essay was exploding at the seams and it was about time to go dig potatoes and pick some cucumbers for dinner anyway and then the Neighborhood Bear Report text thread popped off with news of a black bear and three cubs in the adjacent four-acre nature preserve, which has a lot of apple trees. The Neighborhood Bear Report is always a source of good humor (except for that one time the guy at the end of the road sloppily shot at a bear who was getting into his outdoor chest freezer and ended up just pissing the bear off) and sometimes cute photos, and also prompts my annual season of “Should I really let my kids walk to school?” The answer to which is always yes. We’re all at far greater daily risk from people inattentively driving enormous vehicles around anyway.

So that one will wait for another day. Who gets to say no is integral to colonialism, imperialism, exploitation, and extraction, and is a question that matters enough to explore fully, though in less than 4000 words.

It is related to something that’s been on my mind, which is slightly Montana-specific but I think in the end applies wherever you live: who has a say in shaping community.

A couple of days after I returned from my trail crew in the Bob Marshall Wilderness, my sister and I attended a meeting at city hall scheduled to cover Montana’s new law regarding cities’ required Growth Policy plans, and its limitation of public comment on developments after plans are adopted. It was sobering to listen to—and to see the statistics of median home prices, rents, and incomes from 2007 compared to now—and heartening to see the huge turnout. There is a lot of work to be done and I hope people manage to maintain that level of engagement.

Afterward, I went and pulled up an interview that journalist Kathleen McLaughlin published almost exactly two years ago on rural gentrification and small towns in the American west, with author of Pushed Out Ryanne Pilgeram. That interview has stuck with me and I think of it often, especially after meetings like this one:

“It seems like we aren’t asking what communities want, we’re waiting for developers to come in and tell us. Even when the city (of Dover, Idaho) tried to push back, the developer took them to court. . . .

We need to plan for growth, and for climate change, people who do remote work, people are going to come to Montana and the West. I think we’re at this moment where people can see how fragile the service economy is and we have to build communities where everybody has a place.”

During the Q&A portion of this meeting, one woman took over the microphone to ask if people from outside our city’s zip code would have a say in the Growth Policy and then asked if “we” really want people from “outside” (aka “them”) to have a say in the town’s growth. Thankfully, a woman in the front row responded immediately: I work here, she said. I’d live in town if I could afford to but I can’t.

What does it take to build communities where everybody has a place? It probably starts with one where everybody has a say.

A few weeks ago my father, younger sister, and I were hanging out together and rambled into telling funny stories about houses we used to rent when I was growing up. We lived in Belgrade, Montana, until I was 10, and after that moved around frequently enough that I attended 6 schools in 6 years and my sister says we moved house 13 times (I only kept count of schools, not homes). Each of those rental houses had its own idiosyncrasies, creating its own set of quirky, colorful memories.

One of them was a place outside of Polson, down a little hill—the kind of place where the directions included “turn left at the second potato barn.” Our phone was a party line that always seemed to be occupied, and we hadn’t had a phone much of my life before that (we first got a landline when I was 9), so I’d ride my bike two miles over hilly gravel roads to my nearest friend’s house, where we read Anne of Green Gables and played basketball in her family’s alfalfa field.

My sister and I shared a tiny room with concrete walls. It was almost brutally cold. Probably more so for her since I had a mattress and she slept on a foam mat on the floor.

My father was telling us that the reason the house was so cold was that its only heat was an inefficient wood stove in the main room, and the only type of firewood he could find when we moved there was damp birch, which to put it mildly burns like crap. Not to mean any disrespect to dung fires. I’m sure they’re more effective.

We were laughing about that house and how cold it was, and the tiny one-bedroom apartment we briefly lived in in Chico, California, when we all stopped and I said, “There’s no way we’d be able to afford that place now.”

And we couldn’t. The housing prices where I live—across the county, not just in my currently insanely expensive town—are astronomical. I’m guessing that we probably wouldn’t have ended up homeless. We might have, but my financially stable-enough grandmother often helped us out. Maybe we could have moved into her tiny house in Great Falls, but no way could my family, living on food stamps and the free lunch program as we often did, have afforded rent right now, much less down payment for a mortgage.

Too many people who have the power to make decisions about inequality, poverty, housing, and all the rest of it have never faced caring for children without a roof over their heads, never had to choose between medicine and food, never been subjected to the exquisitely contemptuous social dismissal that comes with being poor, much less without a home—never experienced being a political tool, but never a human being worthy of mutual respect. They’ve never felt the seams of a ragged safety net rip, never known what it’s like to live without that net at all, never tried to survive in the economic cracks of a society. Some of them don’t even believe those cracks exist.

There was an article in The Atlantic a few weeks back profiling some changes in zoning laws and approaches to housing in Montana that—I say this with all possible respect that I once had for The Atlantic and continued respect for the editors I’ve published with there—idiotically claimed something along the lines of “Montana might have solved housing.”

The article featured a number of recently passed laws, some of which are needed (I’m all for density and infill and rethinking what people mean when they say “neighborhood character”), but most of which are simply a wish list from developers and those who profit from real estate transactions. None of these laws will show whether or not they have improved—much less “solved”—our dire housing situation for years to come, nor did The Atlantic bother to interview even one person who’s, say, had to move away permanently due to rent increases, or any unhoused person, or anyone living in an RV or camper in a family member’s yard. The Missoulian had a good critique of the article (though I object to the defamation of chokecherries in the headline):

“Positing that a simple ‘let developers do what they want’ policy will fix Montana’s housing crisis shows the thinkers can’t see over their own castle walls.”

The law under discussion at the Growth Policy meeting was one of those. While it promotes—one hopes—intensive community engagement in development of a growth policy and development vision, it then prohibits any public meeting regarding specific developments once the Growth Policy has been adopted. My understanding is that, if the development fits within a city’s growth policy plan, city staff are required to approve it and no public discussion is allowed.

I can see the argument for this being that it then prevents people from turning out to NIMBY down, say, an affordable housing development. But it also prevents people from being able to object to, say, a low-rent apartment building being torn down by an absentee developer to be turned into “lifestyle condominiums,” which is currently my least-favorite local development followed by the second and completely unnecessary “boutique hotel” being built downtown.

Some people whose opinions I often turn to supported this law, so I’m reserving some judgment. But fundamentally, we will never solve problems of inequality by giving more money to the wealthy, nor will we solve them by blind faith in a free market that expects profit-seeking will eventually persuade developers to build places people can actually afford to live in.

Trickle-down economics hasn’t worked in the 40 years since it was first grafted onto the American psyche, and trickle-down housing isn’t going to fare any better.

My sister asked probably the best question at the meeting, which was whether or not the state would strike out any Growth Policy regulations our city adopted that the state legislature didn’t like, and the answer was that nobody knew. It was a necessary question because the last time my city passed measures to get developers to include a percentage of affordable units in their developments, the state legislature promptly made that measure illegal. Which really means that any city’s Growth Policy plan is only good so far as it can meet with state legislative approval. Given the current legislature’s track record, I’m not loving our odds of “solving” anything. If I’m wrong, I’ll gratefully eat my words.

If you’re in Montana, this law applies to where you live. If you have time and/or energy, I encourage you to start looking into what your own place is doing with its Growth Policy plan.

If you’re not in Montana, well, community engagement still matters. It often doesn’t go anywhere. It’s often frustrating to the point of breaking my own exhausted brain. I understand why people give up. Societal trust has been broken and eroded across the board, and I personally find it rare to meet people at any level of government who are willing to listen rather than just wanting to tell you what they think. Truly listen, not just nod along to show they’re “listening.”

But I’ve also been involved in local civic work for a good few years now, and I know who shows up at these meetings every time, whether it’s the planning board or the board for the dog park. For the most part, it’s people who are willing to deal with the tedium and the finicky details and the sacrifice of time because they’ll benefit. And having attended and participated in these things for years, I can only pass on Pilgeram’s advice that she shared with McLaughlin two years ago:

“For places like Butte or Helena or Hungry Horse, one of those places that’s the next to fall, organize now. Build a group of concerned citizens who do the work of meeting regularly, who have a vision, who show up at city council meetings. So much of this happens in the dark, but it’s important to have a group of people who are willing to be witnesses and are willing to speak up, to essentially pretend to have more power than they have.”

I’ll add to that encouragement to read this op-ed in my local paper by the person who runs the Flathead Warming Center, the low-barrier houselessness shelter I’ve talked up before. She’s one of my personal local heroes and is probably the first person I’d turn to for input on what people actually need:

“We urge the [County] Commissioner to stop grouping everyone who is unsheltered together and labeling this group without any genuine attempts to understand the difficult and complex issues that the homeless community experiences. We implore him to stop implying that those struggling in our community must have a character flaw, only needing to find purpose in one’s life. This is a hurtful narrative that furthers the stigma of mental illness in our community. We invite him to listen to — and learn from — what is actually happening.”

If nothing else, maybe we can all be witnesses in our communities. Failure is possible, but so is success.

There are possibilities for more, if we’re patient and persistent and keep showing up for the places we love while working harder to ensure that everyone’s voices are heard and everyone’s needs are considered. Listen to people who know where the cracks are not because they’ve read an economic theory about them, but because their bones know what it’s like to try to shape a life within them.

Driving home from American Prairie toward the Rocky Mountain Front. Who could ever tire of this sky?