These snowghosts! I like to think of them watching over the winter-quiet ranges all the way to Glacier National Park (the peaks of which you can see from here on a clear day) and beyond.
Winter is my most joyful time. It came late this year. We didn’t get significant snow and it was barely what I’d call cold until a little over a week ago, when usually we’d have feet of snow by December, or at least mid-December.
Winter is being driven out of much of our lives. Being aware of the shift in temperatures and the decreasing snow packs and number of snow days breaks my heart; trying to pretend it’s reversible at this point would break my brain. Maybe we find our sharpest, brightest shards of humanity in loving most fiercely what we know will be lost.
Last Sunday I shortened my usual early-morning routines involving coffee, greeting the morning air and sky and ground, writing by candlelight, and some other rituals, and threw my ski gear into the car to meet my sister and father up on the downhill ski hill just outside of town. It had been dumping snow for over twenty-four hours after weeks of winter being just out of reach and, while everywhere was still gray and foggy, my spirits were soaring. The Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated” blasted too-loud in the car as I joined the line crawling uphill to chase a powder day.
By the time I’d finished making coffee, my phone had already gone off with texts from friends with ideas for the day. “Anyone want to join for a ski around Loon Lake?” “Snowshoeing in Glacier?” “Good day for a bonfire! We’re going to hike up the forest service road and roast brats.”
Not everyone where I live is a winter-lover. By March, many minor exchanges are guaranteed to have a complaint about wishing the snow would stop, or the inversion layers would lift and Sun make an appearance. But aside from difficulties that many have with the near-perpetual gray skies, which can bring on an undeniable depression (not for me but for many people), I’m fortunate to feel surrounded by people who, like me, seem to come alive in winter.
I love the cold and snow of these months, and mourn their passing even while delighting in spring. The long, dark nights are like a blanket to wrap up in. The overcast skies for weeks on end don’t bother me much, though I do find a surge of energy overtakes me that one day in February when Sun comes out, and the three nights I’ve seen Moon in the past month—I’m looking at Her right now!—have brought me pure, intense joy. The beauties of winter, which Freya Rohn portrayed lovingly in poems and photo-poems in The Ariadne Archive, work their fractal way through my imagination and attention like so much flower-frost on an old window. The magic of winter is unparalleled, from the fox tracks my niece and I part-followed on our route to school last week, to the sun halos that burst out every few years on the ski mountain.
Sun halo and sun dogs, from 2021
Nothing makes me believe more in something more about our existence than Nature herself, Earth herself, Moon, Sun, trees, rivers, ice rime on a ponderosa pine, coming across a snow-covered bear den or snowshoe hare tracks when out hunting, a glorious sundog following me all day around a ski mountain—all of it, themselves. No matter where we originated in this world, there have always been forces and delights and entities to remind us that what we call creation or life is always in the process of becoming, and astonishing us. To feel humble before it all, and love for it all, might be our greatest calling.
This weekend has been bitterly, unbelievably cold. I’ve experienced this kind of cold before but not often. Thursday and Friday nights were around -58°F (-50°C) with wind chill, and it was very windy. Saturday morning dawned with -31°F (-35°C) even without the wind, but there was no wind, and with Sun making a rare appearance it was one of the more beautiful days I’d seen in a while.
Frostbite is a real issue, as is hypothermia. So are cabin fever and depression. I take all of it seriously. After spending Friday mostly crawling out of my mind with near-claustrophobic irritability from staying inside, on Saturday I dragged a heavily bundled and face-wrapped kid out for a walk, and then spent an hour by myself sliding around the neighborhood on cross-country skis a friend had lent me for a couple of weeks.
This friend and I had gone cross-country skiing on a nearby lake before the cold front came in. Her dog romping free across the ice and snow, we sh-slshed among silent woods under a rumpled silver sky for a little over an hour, sometimes talking, sometimes just skiing. I haven’t felt that good in a long time, like I was convalescing from a severe illness and was rediscovering what it was like to move my body through the world.
I’ve been meaning to get back into cross-country skiing since moving back to Montana nearly ten years ago, but with kids and work and life in general, haven’t managed much of it. Luckily, most of my close friends are avid cross-country skiers and started getting me out last year. Skiing is one of my favorite things to do, whether downhill or cross-country, but the environmental impact of downhill skiing, which I started doing at the age of two and enjoy more than almost any other activity, has been weighing on me for years. From energy consumption to broken wildlife habitat to the economic inequalities that tend to explode in ski resort towns like mine, it’s a lifelong pleasure whose real-life impacts are impossible to ignore. Even most ski wax contains endocrine-disrupting PFAS chemicals.
Cross-country skiing brings similar joys without nearly the impact (not to mention cost), and is something people have been doing without chairlifts and heavy-duty boots for centuries. Some of my favorite scenes from Sigrid Unset’s trilogy of novels Kristin Lavransdatter, set in 14th-century Norway, involve Kristin strapping on a pair of skis and heading off into the woods alone.
There are bigger changes to make than giving up downhill skiing, but I’m looking forward to shifting more of that time toward those quieter snow-graced days. For however many years we continue to have snow to treasure, I hope to spend more days sliding quietly across land and water untouched by grooming machines.
Silent lake-skiing under a rumpled sky
Who knows how many true winters my part of the world has. All I know is that I’ll welcome every one of them, every hour toward Solstice added to beloved darkness and starry nights, visible or not, every flake of snow that makes it from the clouds to land on laden spruce trees, every story told in an animal’s tracks, every footstep or glide of skis, every frosty breath and peek of Moon from overcast skies, every ice crystal refracting light to result in a sun halo, every single moment of creation that persists in living and creating despite the worst that humanity tries to throw at it. Every bit of it that reminds me I am an evolved animal capable of living joyously on a planet very much alive, and that I intend to do so.
If you don’t know much about the Doctrine of Discovery and want to learn one thing of true importance this year, I’d make it that. You can start with any one of the resources linked to below, or Mark Charles’s powerful TEDx talk on the doctrine and the false message in “We the people.”
The doctrine is not ancient history. It’s a subtly hidden 500-year-old idea with tremendous and lasting global power. It takes the “I took it; now it’s mine” underpinnings of ownership further to “I saw it; now it’s mine.”
You can also read two of the original papal bulls (translated from Latin) comprising the doctrine for yourself, as well as a translation of Bull Inter Caetera of 1493 with introductory commentary from the Doctrine of Discovery organization:
“The captivity of individualism in the West leads many to reject the possibility of institutions and systems inflicting social harm that requires a social response.” —Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery, by Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah
Do you ever wonder how land comes to be privately owned? I wonder all the time. It’s the whole reason for this newsletter. I’m interested in other forms of ownership, too, but it’s land ownership that gnaws at me day in and day out. How can you wander at will, let your feet roam, if your path is constricted by roads built to serve cars on one side, and “No Trespassing” or “Private Property” signs backed by laws made to serve landowning classes on the other?
Living in North America in particular, both the sense of entitlement that comes with owning land, or property in general, and the recency of those ownership titles make the question of “How did this land get turned into real estate?” a sharp one. Considering the shape and flavor that predominant American history narratives tend to take, it’s curious that very few people who live on this continent, in this country, have any idea of the answer.
The Doctrine of Discovery, which was articulated and hardened into U.S. law through the 1823 Supreme Court case Johnson v. McIntosh, is not the basis for all private land ownership, which began centuries, if not millennia, earlier. I’m writing No Trespassingbecause I’m interested in that older, deeper question of ownership. But the doctrine has been adapted to enable colonial land theft throughout the world over the past 500 years, and continues to form the basis for injustices related to land and resource rights—putting the desires of an oil pipeline company over the health of a river, for example.
Sarah Augustine, author of The Land Is Not Empty and co-founder of the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery, summed up the doctrine as having “legalized the theft of land, labor and resources from Indigenous peoples across the world and systematically denied their human rights” for over five centuries.
The “doctrine of discovery” is a set of papal bulls issued in the 1400s, in which the then-pope gave official Catholic blessing to Portuguese and Spanish monarchs wishing to claim land they’d “discovered,” as well as all of that land’s resources and people. A pope issues a declaration or bull today in the 2000s and much of the world might not notice, but in the late 1400s the Catholic Church in Europe was nearly all powerful. These documents gave express permission for the thefts, oppressions, and genocides that the monarchs of Spain and Portugal were already eager to pursue. Bull Romanus Pontifex, wrote the introducers to the Papal Encyclicals translation,
“is an important example of the Papacy’s claim to spiritual lordship of the whole world and of its role in regulating relations among Christian princes and between Christians and ‘unbelievers’ (‘heathens’ and ‘infidels’). This bull became the basis for Portugal’s later claim to lands in the ‘new world,’ a claim which was countered by Castile and the bull Inter Caetera in 1493.”
The first bull was Dum Diversas, issued by Pope Nicholas V in 1452 on behalf of King Alfonso of Portugal. The second, also for Portugal, was Romanus Pontifex of 1455, granting King Alfonso the right
“to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens [the word used for Muslim people at that time] and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ . . . and the kingdoms, . . . possessions, and all movable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”
In other words, it granted the king of Portugal the right to appropriate all said kingdoms, possessions, etc., that Alfonso’s representatives happened to come across, and convert them to the crown’s own use and profit, including people.
Bull Inter Caetera was issued in 1493, using similar language to grant the monarchs of Spain ownership of around half the world. No matter who was already living in lands they came across, the representatives of Spanish and Portuguese monarchs had official church license to claim them—and the military backing of their respective countries—on behalf of their kings and queens.
It’s vital to understand the Doctrine of Discovery’s impacts—not just the bulls’ contents or their contemporary effects at the time, but the way the doctrine shapes our world today. In the introductory episode of the Mapping the Doctrine of Discoverypodcast (created by Indigenous Values Initiative), the hosts said that,
“The Doctrine of Christian Discovery is essentially the key to understanding so much of what ails us today in the world. The Doctrine of Discovery is quite simply the Doctrine of Christian Discovery—that is, the relationship between how religion justified and encouraged the taking of lands by European monarchs and the Vatican from Indigenous peoples around the world,”
along with the claiming of resources and permission to extract, and carte blanche to commit genocide of and enslavement over any non-Christian peoples, as long as said lands weren’t already “owned” by a Christian prince.
Inter Caetera was issued shortly after Spanish (formerly Aragon and Castile) monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella had funded the heavily indebted merchant Christopher Columbus’s explorative journey across the Atlantic Ocean. By all accounts deeply devout Catholics, Ferdinand and Isabella had only just reclaimed the kingdom of Granada from the Muslim empire, and in 1492 had ordered the expulsion of all Jewish people from Spain following the edict known as the Alhambra Decree. (I recommend Patrick Wyman’s book The Verge for an in-depth and readable history of this time period.) Their rule was a project of brutal conquest and Christianization at almost any cost, a project and brutality Columbus was heavily involved in.
The power granted and emboldened by these documents cannot be overstated. As I said above, land ownership and land theft didn’t start with the doctrine, nor were they limited to Portugal and Spain—the Charter of the Forest pertained to English land enclosures and rights of the English commons starting in the 1200s—but they empowered a hyper-driven and even more violent colonialism through holy decree. With the pope’s bulls in hand, the representatives of Spain and Portugal undoubtedly felt that their god was on their side.
The “Doctrine of Discovery” found its name through references in later centuries’ legal cases—most famously Johnson v. McIntosh, in which Chief Justice John Marshall slipped in “civilized” to equate with “Christian” and wrote that discovery of land was equivalent to ownership of it. For European nations embarking on a project of discovery and conquering, he wrote,
“it was necessary, in order to avoid conflicting settlements and consequent war with each other, to establish a principle which all should acknowledge as the law by which the right of acquisition, which they all asserted, should be regulated as between themselves. This principle was that discovery gave title to the government by whose subjects or by whose authority it was made against all other European governments, which title might be consummated by possession. . . .
the rights of the original inhabitants were in no instance entirely disregarded, but were necessarily to a considerable extent impaired. They were admitted to be the rightful occupants of the soil, with a legal as well as just claim to retain possession of it, and to use it according to their own discretion; but their rights to complete sovereignty as independent nations were necessarily diminished, and their power to dispose of the soil at their own will to whomsoever they pleased was denied by the original fundamental principle that discovery gave exclusive title to those who made it.”
“Discovery gave exclusive title to those who made it.” Therein lies the Doctrine of Discovery’s origin story, and that entire passage will break your brain if you think about it too much.
It should break your brain. If you got on a boat tomorrow and sailed around on whatever ocean is closest to you, and came across an inhabited island you’d personally never heard of, you might be able to tell yourself you’d discovered it. If by “discover” you simply mean you saw or observed or found something new to you, by all means, go ahead and say you discovered something.
Does your sight of that land, your “discovery,” go further? Does it give you rights of ownership over the island and its people? Why wouldn’t you say they discovered it first, since they’re living there?
But maybe there’s gold, or timber, or cinnamon trees—something you want to make money off of, which you can only do if you claim the island and everything and everyone on it as yours to control. You have to come up with some reason why you, and not the people already living on the island, have the right to benefit from what it offers. “Discovery” must be mangled to mean something more than it does. It must equate to possession.
So you make a ruling that you’re more “civilized” than the people of the island and therefore your discovery has weight while their being there, their existence on the island, doesn’t. You come up with a doctrine that gives rights of ownership not to the people inhabiting a place but to the most recent person to come across it: you. And you back that ruling with military force.
This precedent is still being used. It was referenced in a U.S. Supreme Court decision denying sovereignty to the Oneida Nation in 2005, which was defended on the basis that invasion and colonialism were part of history—done with, in the past, supposedly—while at the same time referencing a doctrine that continues to do harm through legal opinions like this:
“Under the ‘doctrine of discovery,’ . . . ‘fee title to the lands occupied by Indians when the colonists arrived became vested in the sovereign—first the discovering European nation and later the original States and the United States.’ . . .
standards of federal Indian law and federal equity practice preclude the Tribe from rekindling embers of sovereignty that long ago grew cold.”
In other words, the “discoverer” of land retains the ownership right to it, no matter who was there first, or whether or not land ownership existed as a system before the “discoverer” landed there, or even how extensively and violently the Oneida Nation’s sovereignty rights had been suppressed over the last 200 years.
That’s a legal opinion not even 20 years old that relies on the idea that “I saw it; now it’s mine” is a justification for ownership but that already being there isn’t. In his TEDx talk on the Doctrine of Discovery, Mark Charles said that it was “quite possibly the most white supremacist Supreme Court decision written in my lifetime. And it was written and delivered by Ruth Bader Ginsburg.”
Johnson v.McIntoshstated outright that Native Nations could not own land; only European nations—and after them the United States—could. Part of that 1823 opinion contains the following baffling language:
“It has never been contended that the Indian title amounted to nothing. Their right of possession has never been questioned. The claim of government extends to the complete ultimate title, charged with this right of possession and to the exclusive power of acquiring that right.”
That language is all the more baffling because there is a long history of treaties defining coexistence, and even of land purchase transactions of a kind in some places, during the centuries of European presence in North America before the United States existed. Though it’s not so baffling when you consider that John Marshall, who authored the opinion in the case, was himself a well-known land speculator. He and his father owned vast tracts of land, and anything the Supreme Court decided about land ownership rights would directly affect Marshall’s own fortunes.
Legal cases like this one are a reminder that, just because a law exists and can be enforced, doesn’t mean it’s just. If the right of possession had never been questioned, as Marshall claimed, then why was it overthrown simply because a European happened to land on a continent they’d never seen before?
The role of Christianity, and the power of Christian nations, can’t be ignored in the doctrine’s formation. Johnson v. McIntosh didn’t refer directly to the papal bulls giving rights of ownership to discovering Catholic nations, though as legal scholar Peter d’Errico has written, Marshall “was undoubtedly aware of them.” Those bulls never applied to England (which hadn’t been a Catholic country since the 1530s), but England’s rights of ownership were fused with its own Anglican brand of “civilized Christianity.” In 1578, Sir Humphrey Gilbert was granted a charter from the English crown authorizing him to
“discover and take possession of such remote, heathen, and barbarous lands, as were not actually possessed by any Christian prince or people,”
and the Cabots were granted a similar charter in the decades after that.
The first episode of Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery laid out the entanglement of missionary Christianity with the belief in entitlement when it comes to Christian (and eventually white, European, etc.) claiming of resources:
“The Johnsonv.McIntosh decision, in which the doctrine of discovery was essentially moved from this Catholic principle of land-taking, conquest, and domination, into a Protestant state-building contest. . . . At the time, Catholics and Protestants literally hated one another. They were killing one another. But on this issue of Christians appropriating everything non-Christians had, they agreed on that principle. After it becomes this principle of law, of property, then this becomes literally the law of the land in U.S. property law. Every law student during their studies is introduced to the Doctrine of Discovery.”
“calls on the Christian Church to address the extinction, enslavement, and extraction done in the name of Christ on Indigenous lands,”
and it’s why the authors of Unsettling Truths do the same. Co-author Mark Charles is Navajo and a Christian pastor, both of which are central to his values and worldview.
Last spring I attended a day-long webinar on the international consequences of the Doctrine of Discovery, with presenters from the U.S., Finland, South Africa, India, and New Zealand, among other lands. Steve Newcomb, author of Pagans in the Promised Land, showed how almost every current battle in the U.S. between resource extraction and rights of land and ecosystems, such as Standing Rock, can be threaded through legal precedent to end up back at Johnson v. McIntosh.
Former Chairman of the Yakama Nation JoDe Goudy shared the Nation’s statement that
“. . . the religious, racist, genocidal, fabricated doctrine of Christian discovery . . . the legal fiction that Christian Europeans immediately and automatically acquired legally recognized property rights in our lands upon reaching the Americas . . .
This doctrine of domination and dehumanization—Christian discovery—is not welcome within Yakama Territory, and should no longer be tolerated in United States law.”
The doctrine’s effects are vast. Johnson v. McIntosh gave justifying language to anyone in the world who wished to perpetuate the project of colonialism: take the land, claim ownership over it, and profit from the gifts it holds, no matter what the consequences to anyone else.
These documents are important. They’re important historically because of what they set in motion as European empires spread out across the planet. They’re important because, through the U.S. Supreme Court, they gave license to ever more ravenous land theft in 19th- and 20th-century North America, and were then referenced for similar ambitions throughout the world.
And they’re important because their influence still defines relationships of colonialism today. They’re one of the bases for nearly every claim of absolute land ownership or property right—gold or lithium mining in a place where people have relied on a healthy ecosystem for millennia, for example—and are much of the reason that it’s so difficult to defend the rights of life and well-being over the right to extract and profit.
I’m reminded of a recent interview with physician and sometime-activist Gabor Maté, in which he said to his interviewer,
“You know what [the Canadian government] hasn’t apologized for yet? We have not apologized to Indigenous people for taking their lands and their resources and their forests and their rivers and their oceans. Why haven’t they apologized? Because they’re still taking it.”
“I saw it; now it’s mine,” backed by the violence of state power, justified that taking, and with it came sets of values over how land, food, water, and everything else is used, shared (or not), and cared for (or not). The doctrine carries within it a hunger for profit and a near-obsession with the right to wring dry every drop of life itself in the pursuit of wealth. Along with more ancient systems of power and hierarchies, it defines how humans are allowed to survive in and relate with our world. We still live under that rule, and while a few benefit from it, none of us can be protected from its effects in the long run.
When I was 19, I watched my father walk into a meeting room with the Chechen mafia.
My father has run a small coffee roasting business in Moscow, Russia, since 1992—or ran it for 30 years, until Putin invaded Ukraine and also made it illegal for U.S. citizens to have any part in managing a Russian business. Those three decades have had so many wild and surreal stories that I could probably make narrative out of nothing but “running a coffee roasting business in Russia” for the rest of my life. I was there at the beginning, watching my parents and their co-venturists from Montana Coffee Traders rent a building aside the mud-grooved roads behind the Komsomol’skaya train station, where wild dogs roamed and people were always trying to bum papirossi off of me—tiny, harsh cigarettes. I didn’t smoke.
In 1995, I had just finished my first year of college, where I also worked as a barista at a small coffee shop and roaster in St. Paul, Minnesota. The business in Russia was building its first coffee carts: small, mobile espresso stands that they would place in supermarkets around the city. I was there to train some of the employees on how to make lattes, cappuccinos, stiff Americanos—not stiff enough, at first, for all the new customers annoyed that the flavored sugar syrups were non-alcoholic.
The Soviet Union had collapsed shortly after we left the country in 1991, bringing down the Iron Curtain that had kept my father in exile for 17 years and opening up the country to free-market enterprises like this coffee roastery. Oligarchs started claiming the massive profits from state-run enterprises like oil fields and steel factories almost immediately, and the mafia moved in on small businesses shortly thereafter. There was no way to do business in Moscow without dealing with a mafia until years later, when the police figured out their own corruption and bribery mechanisms and took over the mafia’s role.
In the years between when he had to meet regularly with Igor from the Chechen mafia, and when the Moscow police had his phone tapped, my father said something to me that I’ve never forgotten: “How do you do anything as a person of integrity in a corrupt system like this?”
My father’s company has managed to remain solvent throughout decades of social and economic upheaval. It’s stayed small, and still employs many of the people who started there, a small raft of security and honest work in a country where both are scarce. He is also a person of integrity and honesty, whose ethics have been pushed and challenged throughout every single one of those years, into choices that have no right or wrong answers, only a hopeful contemplation of what does the most good.
A flock of what I think were Bohemian waxwings kept me company the entire two hours I spent wandering the Old Highland Cemetery outside of Great Falls.
Last week, after a research trip to meet with the archivist at the historical museum in Great Falls, Montana, I joined my family and some friends at a hot springs for solstice. In both Great Falls and at the hot springs, Moon showed up and I can’t tell you how relieved I was to see Her. Especially driving through the mountains toward Great Falls and the prairie and farmland of eastern Montana, out of the low gray skies that are a near-constant in the winter where I live. I hadn’t seen Her, or the stars, in well over a week. I stopped the car at several points to stand in Her light, a moonlight waterfall. Moonfall.
There was something other-worldly about it, by which I mean this-worldly. The this-world that too much of most of our daily lives washes out and hides from us. The this-world I soak in when I go to forest service cabins or my stepdad’s cabin, far from any electricity, especially electric lighting, where the stars can show their brilliant, miraculous selves.
I was re-watching The Hobbit the other night, and remembered all the nights, so many nights, I’ve spent in my life under unfiltered starlight, alone or with family or friends. I’ve always thrilled to the elves’ love of starlight in those stories, which I think was described more fully in The Silmarillion but which Tauriel’s lines in the movie bring to life so beautifully:
“All light is sacred to the Eldar. But what elves love best is the light of the stars.”
“I’ve always thought it was a cold light, remote and far away,” said Kili.
“It is memory,” Tauriel responded. “Precious and pure. Like your promise.
I have walked there sometimes, beyond the forest and up into the night. I have seen the world fall away, and the white light forever fill the air.”
I have seen the world fall away. That is what happens when I’m out there those nights, walking out or simply looking up when sleep leaves for a time to linger in starlight; and at dawn and twilight when the sun rises and sets as if he has all the time in the world—which he does, far more than this world itself has—and the times I’ve seen Moon come up from behind the mountains, as if She were gathering all of existence in Her light. A world that feels whole, one you can wander without fences or property lines, borders or walls, greed or war.
From the hot springs, I drove my younger kid to the Bison Range instead of going straight home. It’s just far enough from where I live that I hadn’t taken them yet, though I knew they’d love the place. We saw bald eagles on the drive in and out—four in total, very active; it’s always awesome, in the older sense of the word, to see them that close—a cluster of buffalo on a distant hill below the low fog line, and a kestrel taking off from a fence post in front of us.
My kid asked a lot of questions about the land and the bison, questions I couldn’t answer without entangling myself in inadequate language. They know about invasion and theft, and the museum at the Bison Range did a much better job than I could ever hope to of describing the history of that specific land, the buffalo herd, and the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes’ relationship with all of it.
Trying to tell these histories without using the word “own” is difficult, though it’s made easier with someone who already understands the sheer wrongness of ownership, as my kids both do—instinctively, somehow, on their own, having arrived at that belief. Maybe they got it from living in a place where “No Trespassing” and “Private Property” signs are ubiquitous and it’s hard to understand why you can’t just walk where your feet and mind wish to go. Or maybe this is an understanding that is innate to most people, and we have to be taught to think differently. To say, “The federal government used to own the Bison Range and then gave it back to the CSKT” makes absolutely no sense, especially without including the rest of the story, the original theft of all that land, all this land, and more. How can you give back, much less own, what was never rightfully yours in the first place?
The wrongness of it can’t be told enough, or in enough ways, and one of my biggest struggles with the work I’m doing here is finding effective ways to explain, for people who don’t already get it, that wrongness—of ownership itself, and more specifically what it means to take land that all rely on for sustenance and survival, and turn it into private property, into capital. It’s like a rift in reality that many people can perceive but far too many can’t, and I don’t know that we can make much progress in the world until they do.
There’s a display at the museum that shows the effects of the Dawes Act of 1887, also known as the General Allotment Act, which forced reservation land into individual private ownership and demanded that any reservation land not subsequently owned by individual Native Americans be open to white settlement. The display shows the erosion of land by mostly white settler private property claims more clearly than anything I’ve ever read. It’s startling every time I look at it, even though I know that history, and even without considering the travesty of justice that “reservations” are to begin with.
There is no owning here, no gentle waves of agricultural settlement that are ubiquitous in U.S. history stories. There is only taking. Like everywhere else in the world where “landed property” is a legally protected value. There is only theft, violence, and the power to defend it. Visiting the Bison Range is a reminder of this, and of what all this land could be again. A world made whole.
Sunrise over the frozen river last March from near the cabin I stay at most often.
Every year there is a Luminaria near where I live, down by the footbridge that rests over the river. It was begun in honor of people I care for deeply and all the others who care for them, and one another, here. It’s about the only part of the Christmas season I enjoy, and I’ve been grateful every year since I moved back that it’s there, keeping connected all the people who comprise the heart of this community, a place and people that most visitors never see.
This year I had heard a rumor that it might be the Luminaria’s last because event permitting has become difficult. After saying hello to whole bunches of my favorite people, faces I couldn’t recognize in the dark but whose friendly gaits and voices were familiar, I handed my kid my phone to take photos of the candlelight glittering off the water and settled in for conversation with the person who’d started this tradition, asking him about the permitting issue.
Considering what has been happening in Substack-world regarding monetized publications by Nazis, this person’s explanation felt almost ironic: in late 2016 and early 2017, my town was terrorized through an online neo-Nazi hate campaign, with people in the Jewish community specifically targeted for death threats, including months of personal phone calls and emails. I don’t really want to go into it more specifically again. I wrote some about it and its effects on me here (trigger warning for anti-Semitism), but, as is the case with her response this week to Substack’s Nazi issue, Anne Helen Petersen’s reporting on what happened, from when she was still at BuzzFeed, remains the best I’ve seen.
The reason that getting a permit for the Luminaria is difficult now is because the city revamped its block party and event permitting process in the wake of the threatened neo-Nazi march at that time. The march never occurred but the threat is ever-present.
Though I was appointed to the Board of Parks late last year, I don’t yet know all the details of how these permits work—we spend a surprising amount of time trying to figure out how to mitigate damage to Depot Park’s grass from the annual Oktoberfest—but am personally very interested in making sure we can keep the Luminaria going.
These gatherings are important. Maybe you have a similar tradition where you are, or one around Solstice, or harvest festivals, or religious or spiritual or ancient practices I know nothing about. Or maybe they exist near you and you’re not aware of them. These traditions create what’s called culture. They bring people into relationship with one another, and into relationship with this-world. The land and water, animals and moonlight.
Like walking, traditions and rituals remind us that we are animals evolved in relationship with this planet, with the life and light that co-create existence.
I was thinking the other morning about my father’s struggles with how to maintain integrity in a corrupt and unjust system, and the struggles that all of us face at one point or another with our ethics, morals, and values, and I remembered something Tyson Yunkaporta, author of Sand Talk, said in an interview once:
“We’re at the beginning of a thousand-year cleanup. What generations to come will need most is good stories, and good cognition.”
Good stories and good cognition. I think about that a lot now, and something
“Are we all also not fireflies, sending coded signals across the continuum of space and time by beaming our light into the quantum of gift we leave behind in our pursuit to build a better world, in pursuit of finding others who can decode the signals, who can see our light?”
Good stories and good cognition are like fireflies, or the lights of the Luminaria, sending signals of understanding and solidarity across the night, their seasonality hinge points as this planet, this-world, makes its annual circumambulation of the sun, whose light makes all of our lives possible.
Not every question has an absolute answer. But we can each of us try to be a firefly, a candle’s small flame, sending our solidarity across space and time. Or at least I can try, try my best to be a light—starlight brought by memory.
My kid took this photo, of the footbridge with its Luminaria lights and their reflection in the river, starlight above. I was very impressed!
I’m going to be republishing some older essays, revised and updated, for the next few weeks, as a kind of field guide to specific commons- and ownership-related subjects that have been covered on my Substack (and copied here) over the last three-plus years. This first essay, “Competence Lost,” is not from On the Commons. It’s from the Winter 2014 issue of the literary journal The Jabberwock Review and has never been published online. I wanted to include it here because, while it’s more of a personal essay, it was also, I think, one of the seeds for the ideas behind this newsletter, No Trespassing, and my first book, A Walking Life.
The snowstorm described in this essay took place in late February 2010, when I was living in barely-upstate New York (Orange County for those who know the area). I’d forgotten how widespread its effects were until I went to look up reports on it, which you can see in the New York Times, CBS Albany, and elsewhere. I forgot to make this comment in the audio version, but it was 3 days before I could get out of the driveway, after a neighbor hitched a ride to his barn a few miles away, drove his front-loader back, and dug everybody out.
Competence Lost
9 a.m.
The tires slipped, eager for the ditch that hugged this steep, curvy section of road. I twiddled the steering wheel, resisted tapping the brake pedal. The car made its way to the flat without heading for either the languid, half-frozen river or the snow-crusted cornfield, and my hand shook as I finally shifted down to first.
“Mommy, mommy, mommy?” The o’s drawn out long, nearing a whine, ma-AWmy. My son watched the snowfall from the back seat.
“Can you sing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’ for me, honey?” The shakiness had migrated to my voice. We reached the end of our road, pitched at an inconvenient incline where it met the hill of the highway. The stop sign was irrelevant. There was no way I was stopping, not until I pulled up in front of our garage. The bald tires of the station wagon protested every time I steered them anywhere but straight, the road so slippery that brakes had become a danger.
It hadn’t looked that bad from the house, when I’d decided to run out for coffee before the snowstorm started in earnest. If the car slid off the road, I’d never be able to explain that idiotic decision to my husband, safe in Toronto on a business trip.
“Twinkle, twinkle, little star,” my son sang. The car waggled its rear end along the highway, eeking as slowly as possible. A plow, its blade raised, passed us going the other direction and the driver shook his head at me.
A journey that should have taken fifteen minutes lasted an hour; we never stopped for coffee. I didn’t dare. My heart thumped in time with attempts to move ever slower; I threw silent apologies at the red light in town where I turned right without pausing. When we got home, I wanted nothing more than to drink something warm and alcoholic, and to curl up in bed, reliving the number of times the car should have slid off the road. But there was my three-year-old son, eager to play, and the five-months-along fetus inside me, not allowed booze.
By afternoon the shakiness had begun to disappear, but it refused to leave completely. Growing up in Montana, I’d spun our rusted-out Suburban around empty parking lots to get the feel of driving on ice. I’d rocked and dug countless cars out of snowdrifts. I’d driven through blizzards so thick that daylight had no effect on visibility. Now I was living in upstate New York, where the difference lay not in the texture of the snow but in the advent of motherhood. Doubt had crept in and stayed, invited during that drive by the constant worry of landing in the ditch and injuring the child in the back seat. The snowstorm felt like a live thing, come to haunt me, to lay its cold fingers on my child and strip away my sense of self.
7 p.m.
The snow came down in thick, fat flakes all day long. My son and I built towers with his blocks, ate scrambled eggs, read Goodnight Moon ten times or maybe twenty. I measured the snow line rising against the deck door and wondered if whisky was healthier for the fetus than stress. I finally put my son to bed and drank a hot cup of chamomile tea before bundling up to wrestle with the snowblower. I’d come to hate chamomile tea during my second pregnancy, but with a little honey it was better than plain hot water.
By the time I got the snowblower started and forded the drift outside the garage, the night was already pitch, the darkness made eerie by continuing heavy snowfall. It piled two feet high and was cemented at the bottom with six inches of freezing rain and sleet that had fallen the day before. It usually took me two hours to clear our five-hundred-foot-long driveway, which cut to our house built in a former cornfield. I could barely see the driveway markers in the snowblower’s headlight, and there was nothing I wanted to be doing less right then than wrangling the gas-guzzling machine with its spinning blades down the driveway—nothing, that is, until twenty feet from the door, the blower sheared a pin. Our route to the outside world was closed off.
When I came back inside, the emotional moorings that had been weakening all day finally broke loose. The lights flickered and flickered again, responding to the outages in the main transformer a few miles away, and I started crying, picturing myself trying to keep my son warm before a fading fire while outside the snow kept falling. Dramatic scenarios that would never come to pass but I couldn’t stop impaling myself on. I sat on the couch wrapped in three blankets, checking the power company’s website every few minutes and crying harder every time the lights wavered.
Buried somewhere in my squishy body and unskilled self are the genes of more resourceful ancestors. Growing up, I learned to embroider using my great-grandmother’s thread, pickled cucumbers in another’s massive crock-pot. When I started learning to ride a horse, I inherited a great-aunt’s saddle. It once seemed to me that if I were to time travel and land at my ancestors’ dugout on the Montana prairie, I’d have no problem contributing something to daily life, being useful. I’d haul water and hew wood, cheerfully clear a trail through snowdrifts to the barn.
I no longer think that self exists. Maybe I’d just freak out, and sit by the fireside rocking my babies, waiting for the loneliness and wind to drive me insane.
After the snowblower gave out, I sat inside staring at the gathering whiteness of the yard and surrounding field, steeped in panic, fighting the bone-tiredness that had possessed me my entire second pregnancy. I wanted to reach back to my ancestors and shake them. Where are my lessons, my skills? Why didn’t you leave anything for me? What happens when the apocalyptic post-oil climate-change future finally heads our way? If it all falls apart, how do I keep my children alive?
Those ancestors of mine didn’t leave much record of themselves. Some photos. A solid barn in eastern Montana that is still intact and in use over a hundred years later. No diaries, no precious letters. Sometimes I browse through the sparse journal excerpts of other women from that time period, looking for the winters, the loneliness, the lost babies. Those who mythologize the earlier histories of those lands both erase the violence inherent in every family with a personal history like mine, and romanticize what life would have been like for them. But there was no romance. There was just life, and hard work. A lot of loneliness, a lot of scraping for survival, frozen cattle, locust-riddled wheat crops, sickened children.
These days, city-dwellers and land-seekers looking for a bit of space, a bit of privacy, air to breathe, are searching, often without realizing it, for what those romanticized histories seem to promise. But we haven’t cut the umbilical cord to modern conveniences and the security they offer: electricity (meaning light and warmth), roads (meaning both escape and connection), and supply lines (meaning food and fuel).
All of which, as demonstrated by the storm that stripped away my self-respect, are easily made inaccessible. The storm left in its wake collapsed barns—four of them within a few miles of us, each standing for a hundred years or more, finally sighing to the ground under the weight of that thirty-six hours of wet, constant snow. It left truck engines blown out, and several communities aching for electricity for nearly a week. At times like these our plump houses set on their own, away from other people, planted in former cornfields, take on an unnerving aspect. They come to represent the past rather than the future.
Overnight three feet of snow, a little more, made the car sitting in front of the garage pointless. What I needed to traverse those five hundred feet were snowshoes and I didn’t own any. In fact, right then, I owned little that was useful. The weather was oppressive, there was no shaking it. The storm’s repeated excitement of panic and worry, its irritation as the snow continued to fall in thick, quiet flakes, was torturous. It seemed almost intentional.
Instinct is to gather oneself in, to fold one’s children into one’s arms and bow one’s head over them. Hoping the storm—whatever storm—will pass over us without notice. Despite my grandmother’s pickle crock and an ability to chop firewood, my upbringing was mostly books and escapism and stories and emotional survival. Nobody ever taught me to do anything truly useful except bake snickerdoodles. Everything else is self-taught and it’s not enough, never enough. To be more, to do more, to grab competence by the tail and swallow it, maybe raw, maybe dripping with blood, that’s what we need to survive what might come, or what we might lose. To tell the elements we see them, and respect them, and are not afraid.
10 p.m.
Before I curled up in bed, I turned the heat way up. Just in case. In case it all fell apart and the residual heat was all we had. I filled up pots of water. In case our option was to die of thirst or freeze to death from trying to eat snow. I mapped out a route to drag my son by sled to a friend’s house a couple miles away. In case the driveway wasn’t clear until spring.
All of which, given the facts, were just plain silly. Even if the driveway stayed blocked, there was no thought of starving, or freezing. Not this time. The fridge was plump with produce, the pantry wedged tight with rice, pasta, beans, and oatmeal, and there was half a deer chopped up and packaged sitting in the deep-freeze. If the electricity went out, it was cold enough in the garage to keep most food, and I didn’t need electricity to light our propane-fueled stove. The basement was stocked with enough canned peaches, tomatoes, jam, and salsa to last a month. And the woodpile outside would have kept us warm enough for a solid week, at which point there was plenty of pre-broken hand-me-down furniture to put under the ax. If I could find the ax and remember how to use it.
But I’d become like an old wheat rancher, rigid in my beliefs, with obsolete fears. That night reminded me that I was tethered not only to the fierce, energetic child sleeping upstairs, but to the incubating little person in the womb who did and did not yet exist. A woman at night, pregnant, is reminded constantly by the discomfort of rearranged organs, by the aches in her back, by the pesky insomnia when sleep is needed most, that her body has been pressed into service.
11 p.m.
Just before I turned off the bedroom light, I opened the blinds. There, lining the driveway parallel to ours, were our neighbor’s big, bright lampposts. I’d been making fun of them for the last two years. Like many of the locals, our neighbors moved out there from New Jersey saying they liked “living in the country,” and immediately turned it into a close approximation of suburbia. They dug a pond, put in a phallic fountain, stripped down their field to achieve a four-acre lawn, and then planted iron lampposts all down the driveway leading up to their spotlit house. It was the lamps I found most irritating. “Drowning out the stars,” I said. “So obnoxious.”
That night, I opened the blinds so I could see them as I fell asleep, their electric filaments burning in the snowstorm. Before daybreak, I woke up several times and searched immediately for the lights leading to the road like they were a signal from the rest of the world. Were they still burning? Were we still here? Had it all fallen apart? But there they were, an anchor to the civilization I never learned to live without.
We had fresh snowfall recently, which was sadly washed out by rain for the next several days, but before it went I took a long walk around town to soak it all in. Look at that light! The photo brings out the blues, but in person it was more shades of gray with blue tint, and this light is precisely why gray is my favorite color. The clouds, the river, the flat light on the snow, the rocks in the riverbank. The way a splash of indirect sunlight gives all of it depth.
It’s hard to believe this river was a Superfund site not that long ago, that its waters were siphoned off and temporarily drained to allow a massive cleanup from a century of contamination from the rail yard. A friend of mine says that when her parents were growing up, the river used to catch fire.
I spend a lot of time thinking about that kind of contamination, what property rights allow and what they steal from the rest of life. But just as often, the beauty of this river snags me, pulls me to pause and sit alongside, dangle my feet in her gentle current. When there’s yet another leak from the rail yard that requires quick containment and a warning to people to stay clear of that area, it’s a reminder of how precious it all is, how easily these gifts are used up and discarded. Yet with a change in perception and a clarification of what we value, it’s just as easy to respect and care for them. The more people I listen to, the more it’s clear how many yearn for a reality that reflects those values. They just want to know how to get there.
For the next few weeks, I’m going to be republishing some older essays. There are many more people subscribing than when I started this newsletter over three years ago, and I wanted to share revised and updated essays that directly speak to what this whole project is about: ownership, private property, the commons, and the book I’m working on. These essays will go out as emails and comments won’t be enabled, but you’re always welcome to email me. I’ll try to continue adding an audio version to each post.
So far I’ve chosen essays from 2020 and 2021 on the East India Company and the dangers of corporate monopoly combined with state military power, the Doctrine of Discovery, an essay on loneliness that feels somehow timely again, and one on dirt, soil, and commodification. Anyone who’s been reading a while, if there’s one that stuck in your mind, feel free to make a recommendation.
I’m going to start with an essay that was in the winter 2014 issue of the small literary journal The Jabberwock Review. It’s never been published online. It’s a personal essay about a snowstorm in 2010 that brought home my own dependence on fossil fuels and roads, and was probably what got me started thinking about both car-dependence, and therefore walking, and private property.
Last week I attended a webinar recommended by subscriber Chad, who writes the newsletter Scientific Animism. It was given by designer David Dylan Thomas and was titled “No, Seriously, F*ck Engagement: Building a More Human Web.” It was billed as being for designers, which I am not, but it was really about capitalism, the insanity and injustices of the systems we live under and the stories that perpetuate them, and what people can do within their own work to forward a more humane world. It was uplifting, challenging, refreshing, and left me with more tangible optimism than I’ve had since attending the Reclaiming the Commons conference last summer.
Thomas ended with some advice about identifying our own values as well as identifying and challenging our assumptions—which reminded me of what one of my mentors told me over a long phone call after I got my first book contract: identify your biggest assumption (about walking in my case) and push at it from every direction you can think of.
Thomas went one step further from that, and I want to leave you for now with his words, one of the more solid pieces of advice I’ve heard in a long time:
“Co-imagine the future with the people hurt by the present.”
I imagine each of us walks with that idea very differently. What do those words mean in your own life?
May you and the weather find peace with each other, wherever you are.
A Walking Life starts with what mainstream news sources call a “refugee crisis.” I don’t like that term any more than I like the term “migrant”—I love the richness that words hold, the worlds they carry, but their ability to flatten is equally powerful. These are shorthands that limit how we think about one another: a crisis of refugees, or a crisis for people who’d been forced to become refugees?
The story was one that dominated news headlines in 2015: people fleeing war in Syria, on foot, stuck for a time in Hungary before being allowed to cross the Austrian border and on into Germany. Vienna, Austria-based BBC reporter Bethany Bell, an old friend of mine, was reporting from the border, where she sent me pictures of the piles of abandoned shoes “worn-out and inadequate to the monumental task they were being given,” I wrote. “In between interviewing refugees, Bell took pictures of bedraggled shoes and a prosthetic leg abandoned on the pavement. Another pile of donated shoes waited to be put to use.” In her interviews, she found an unexpected sense of hope, and, she told me,
“‘for me there was something deeply human in it. For all the things we create for ourselves, the homes we build, the lives, sometimes you just have to walk away.’
Walking is both our first step and last resort when fleeing war or persecution. A refugee doesn’t have the luxury of restraining his step with respect to political margins.”
Journalist Kathleen McLaughlin wrote recently about the line a lot of us living in . . . let’s say “politically challenging” places hear on a regular basis: why don’t you just leave? Which not only, as she points out, ignores financial and other constraints, but also, as she also points out, ignores the reality that harmful or violent politics don’t stop at borders.
The spectrum of who flees, who’s forced out, who’s being put at grave risk by staying, and who stays to fight no matter what the cost, is vast. It’s determined by factors that accumulate and pull on one another and is, in the end, beyond anyone else’s individual judgment. Not everyone can leave. Not everyone is allowed to stay.
All I can personally say is that the story of whether or not one leaves a home, and how, and what level of choice is or is not involved, is the story of humanity. It is in this particular story that my writing about walking and my interest in private property intersect most profoundly, and in ways that often surprise me.
A couple of weeks ago I came across an article some of you might have seen, about a database compiled by The Atlantic of the books used to train generative-AI systems. I figured my book had to have been used, along with the 20 years’ or so worth of writing I have online, since last winter my spouse put my name into ChatGPT and said, “Look! It can write an essay in your style!” (This conversation did not go well, though I think we eventually got to the point of me being able to explain why the last thing in the world I want is a machine to do my writing for me, especially one that’s stolen my work to do so.)
Sure enough, A Walking Life is in the database. It winded me a bit to see it verified.
To be clear, the copyright issue is the least of my concerns. If you want to go to a local library and photocopy every page of A Walking Life and pass it around to people who want to read it, I’d actually be thrilled. That is, after all, how my father and his family read Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet Union, though photocopiers were highly controlled and only in government offices and a bureaucrat risked his life to get those stories out into regular people’s hands. The more copies of my book are purchased, in whatever form, the happier (theoretically) my publisher is and the better chance I have of selling them or someone else on another one, but it’s far more important to me that people read it than that those reads show up in the graph provided for me in my publisher’s author portal.
It’s a completely different thing to have a multi-billion or -jillion or whatever-dollar company steal my work and then use it to both make more profit for itself, and to put other writers and artists out of work.
It’s also impossible to disentangle complaints about AI and other digital tech from the long history of technology being used to deliver more profits to a few, steal masses of people’s labor, and provide lower-quality services and products to people paying for them, along with building unjust and destructive structures that humanity and the rest of life simply have to live with going forward as best we can. Roads, highways, and automobiles are the examples I usually bring up but there are plenty of others. In A Walking Life I wrote about the Luddites, who are usually characterized as anti-technology but weren’t that at all. What they objected to was being forced out of their jobs—with no compensation or safety net—by machine adoption that made more money for the factory owner while also producing shoddier products.
It’s not about whether technology exists or not. It’s about how it’s used, its effects on people and ecosystems—the energy and water consumption of AI and data centers is absolutely staggering—and whether its role in the world is to contribute to life’s well-being or make it worse.
“The planning structure always fits well into the needs of the powerful,” said physicist and technology philosopher Ursula Franklin in a series of 80s-era lectures (undying gratitude to Jake for sending them to me; they’re amazing). “It rarely fits well into the needs of the powerless, and that is where the struggle sits.”
She gave that lecture long before talks of artificial intelligence became rampant, but whether we’re talking about AI, highway systems, railways, or the mills and machines that powered the Industrial Revolution, her questions hit home:
“Do people matter, or are people in the way? The technology will come once we make the decision whether indeed people matter or whether they are just in the way, and you design more and more stuff to make more and more people unnecessary, unneeded, and redundant. Don’t ask what benefits. Ask whose benefits, whose costs.”
The theft of my book, which took years of research and writing to produce, hasn’t done anything to improve my life, and I doubt it has anyone else’s, but it’s certainly contributed to someone acquiring just that bit more wealth, which can then be used, as wealth always has been, to tip the scales of injustice a little bit more in their favor. My cost, their benefit. That is what enclosure is, both historically and currently: taking that which was in use by all or already belonging to someone in one form or another, and making it your own for the purposes of private profit.
Neither I nor any other writer or artist has been given a choice in the matter, nor can we disentangle ourselves from the systems we’re being frog-marched into, not unless we give up creating entirely. And I can’t think of a single writer I know who would even consider that. We create because we can’t help it, because it brings us joy, because to not do so would be to flee one of the things that makes us feel most alive.
“There is no reason,” I wrote in A Walking Life,
“why our online lives can’t be used as a tool to enrich our restored communities, no reason why we can’t recover from the flu with some good friends bringing us soup and others bolstering our spirits through Instagram.”
Which, in my feverish and brain-fogged state when I came down with Covid last week—a week after getting a third booster shot!—I was delighted to notice was exactly what happened: A friend came by and left a jar of soup and some leftover huckleberry galette by my door. My brother-in-law offered to drop off more turkey broth. Another friend brought me groceries on her way home from work at the rail yard and included a bar of nice chocolate she knows I like.
And then a friend online, whose newsletter Berkana is one of the most beautiful and thoughtful on Substack, sent me a short video of someone making turmeric chai that was so soothing to listen to and watch I let it loop several times before realizing it was something I could actually do (the brain fog of this virus is very, very real for me). So I made some and drank it and did so again in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep, and you know what? I felt better the next day!
A Walking Life is about a lot of things, but at its core it’s about being fully alive beings on a fully alive planet. Walking leads us into every one of these subjects because walking is how we evolved. From the perspective of evolutionary biology, it’s what makes us human. And it’s what can shine a light most clearly on the barriers that have been placed to prevent our full exploration of that humanity.
The Authors Guild, of which I am a member, has filed a class-action lawsuit against several of the companies who’ve used published books to train AI. I gather some of the basis for the complaint is that the content was scraped from a site of pirated works. I’m curious where the lawsuit will lead, though it’s currently only for fiction and I’m not going to get too hung up on its potential. For nonfiction writers and others not immediately affected by the lawsuit but whose work is in the database, the Guild encourages us to write letters to the companies involved and provides a form for that purpose.
Which honestly made me laugh. I appreciate the thought but have better things to do with my day than beg any one of these enormously wealthy and powerful people to please not steal my work to make themselves richer. I can spend that time making more turmeric chai, for example. Or sewing up the hole in my kid’s blanket. Or writing a letter to my county commissioners about their gutting of the county library system, which I doubt they’ll care about but at least they’ll read (maybe). Or I could go for a walk.
These huge, systemic problems can’t be solved by piecemeal approaches, and in any case my focus is on the deeper structures that make the harms possible. Technology has been used both to improve human and non-human life for millennia, and it has been used to control and destroy it far more often. It depends on who benefits, who pays the costs, and who decides.
Perhaps most damaging of all, it’s been used to determine what we think we can imagine: a way of being in the world and living together that’s not determined by the control, power, and ownership of a very few. A world where food, shelter, health, soul-fulfillment, relationships, and even the joyful gifts of creativity are not dependent on tricking us into thinking we can only succeed in competition with one another.
I want us to unburden ourselves at the very least of restrictions around what we conceive as possible, and to contemplate a world where leaving means to wander freely, rather than being forced to flee—whether on foot or in the worlds of our own imaginations.
Someone’s been updating the No Trespassing signs on the fencing around the rail yard in town.
For several years, before and for a while after I had kids, I worked on a mystery novel set in eastern Montana. I wrote sketches and backgrounds for the major and minor characters; mapped out plot points, detailed motivations, and background for the murderer (he was a paleontologist selling fossils on the black market to pay for his mother’s cancer treatments), rewrote the entire thing start to finish at least eight times, went to a couple of encouraging mystery writers conferences, and generally had a fun time pitting my two main characters—half-sisters full of mutual resentment—against each other.
One day, sitting in a small, dusty library in an old building in upstate New York and struggling with another revision of said novel, I realized that I’d been forcing the writing for at least a couple of weeks. I dreaded sitting down to any of my works-in-progress, and actually started sneezing whenever I picked up the mystery novel, as if I were allergic to it. But I wasn’t allergic (maybe that was the library); the desire to write had left me.
I don’t mean I was blocked—“writer’s block” is very often just fear—or that I was stuck. This was something new. The desire to craft narrative, to feel the glide of a pen across a notebook or a printout of a manuscript, was just gone.
It was the oddest feeling. The urge to write had been with me almost as long as I could remember. I wrote my first stories at an age so young I barely remember them, though I still have the first “book” I wrote when I was maybe seven or eight years old.
Four Georgie Stories, featuring the adventures of a ghost named Georgie and his friend Georgina
Losing writing showed me how much it’s part of whatever “me” is. I imagine visual artists and musicians and dancers and in fact creators of any kind feel the same. Before writing left, I would have been hard-pressed to explain its neverending urgency to someone who didn’t already know what I was talking about. Like most writers, I received piles of rejections before my essays began finding an audience. Anyone who’s been bitten by a creative bug knows what I mean when I say rejection won’t stop you: It’s not an expression of ambition or some vision of success that keeps you going; it’s the writing itself. I could never have published anything in my entire life and that would have made me sad but it wouldn’t have stopped the writing. “Being a writer” is a full-on embodied thing that exists no matter what kind of feedback or public notice you do or do not get.
Which is, really, strange. I didn’t know how strange until it wasn’t part of my daily existence. I woke up and didn’t feel a need to write. I had a kid-free hour or two and didn’t bring out an essay to revise. I opened my copy editing work for the day and never turned off my work timer to dive into an idea that had just come. I read books for pleasure and never felt a twinge of envy or wonder “How did they do that?” It was probably the most free I’ve ever felt because I realized I could do other things with my life. I could become a firefighter, or apply to do a graduate degree in mathematics, or get a job at one of the local farms.
It was only when it wasn’t there that I realized how much space writing took in every moment of every day, every breath, every thought.
An accumulation of finished private journals (care of Ex Libris Anonymous, where I buy these in bulk), which I burn . . .
And the same of notebooks filled with first drafts, which I keep.
The absence only lasted about three months. I don’t know what writing was off doing during that time—maybe it was sick of reading that mystery novel for the fiftieth go-round. But when it came back, it saturated everything all over again; I could still go pursue firefighting or mathematics or picking overpriced organic tomatoes for weekenders from New York City—I could cook a stew or try to grow cucumbers and kill thistles and not be drawn to turn each of those acts into metaphor for human existence!—but wanting to write about that life was going to ride along no matter what I tried go after.
I’ve only talked to one other writer-friend who’s experienced this absence. She told me she thinks of her writer self as a middle-aged white guy who sits at a battered desk in a dirty office scribbling stuff out and throwing it to his assistant out front to type. And sometimes the writer dude disappears for no reason and the assistant bides their time playing Minesweeper (this conversation was before games other than Minesweeper and solitaire were widely available).
It was an interesting lesson to go through. I’m not sure any of us understand what writing is—what creativity is, for that matter; Arthur Koestler wrote a whole book about it (The Act of Creation, with lingering themes in The Ghost in the Machine) and didn’t really come to persuasive conclusions—much less why some are driven to do it no matter what the circumstances. As my father is fond of reminding me, Dostoevsky wrote in a freezing shack with his family all around, in exile in Siberia, which is partly why I’m not picky about the mechanics or location of the writing I do. I’ve written in coffee shops and libraries, at home with babies climbing on me and on campings trips in the early morning with frozen fingers.
My office during a 2016 writing residency in Banff, where I always long to get back to; I don’t need a special writing space, but it is incredibly luxurious and productive to have one
When my last book proposal was rejected, I thought a lot about the time that writing went on vacation. It wasn’t that I was going to write the book no matter what; it was knowing that I could ask my writer self if this was still an idea worth pursuing and could trust the answer (yes). I’m a slow learner—and a slow writer—but I’ve heard enough internal “meh’s” to know when something isn’t going to let go.
I’m always curious about people’s relationship with writing and art. With creativity. There’s a tremendous amount of conflation between writing itself and “getting published,” especially getting a book published. I’m always intrigued when people say they hope to “become a writer”—I remember saying things like that, only realizing later that it was just something I was, not something I could choose to become. Does every one of us have to untangle those two things for ourselves, come to terms with the writer who’s going to be a driving, urgent force in our lives no matter what “success” or recognition we do or do not achieve?
Many of my favorite Russian writers and poets existed in frankly horrific circumstances. Exiled, jailed, living in extreme poverty, loss of children, loss of freedom, loss of country and home. They didn’t write because they hoped for a steady stream of book contracts and speaking engagements for the rest of their lives; they wrote, often at risk of government rebuke, censorship, or worse, because they could not help themselves. This has been true of artists all over the world, and over millennia. The best writers I know right now are writing because the stories want to be told, need to be told, and through them.
It’s not ambition that keeps people going; it’s more like an internal insistence. Not being able to help oneself. It’s why days or weeks without writing time leave me incredibly cranky and difficult to live with. It’s why I’m at this moment sitting at an ironing board set up under the stairs and behind the water heater (it’s the only place I have a chance of not being interrupted for a while, with the added bonus of making me feel more Russian than I actually am by being cold and uncomfortable and smelling strongly of pickles because we have a bucket of them fermenting in the same tiny space).
The glamorous office of someone who can’t help writing
When that last book proposal was rejected and I thought about the time years ago when writing left, I couldn’t help remembering how much easier life was, how many more possiblities there were for how to spend my time. It hasn’t left in over a decade, but its absence is still visceral. It taught me a straightforward lesson: writing has nothing to do with either form or success—it’s either there or it’s not. A book is one form, as is a magazine byline, as is a blog, as is a speech, as is a letter to an old friend; and that all the book contracts in the world, either behind you or ahead of you, mean nothing when you’re exploring that next idea, seeing if it holds firm, asking it what it wants to be.
What matters in the end is your commitment to the story itself. Like any relationship, where you go together will be unexpected. It will have its griefs as well as its joys and there is always the potential of heartbreaking loss. Success and accolades are never guaranteed, and even when they come, they don’t change what writing—what stories—need from you. The writing might abandon you for a time, but what the story needs to know is that you will never leave it.
Working on A Walking Life at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity shortly after signing my book contract—the kind of treatment and space book projects probably deserve (yes, book, I’m working on it; we’re working with a little less wall space here under the stairs)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for being here! It makes a difference. Paid support has recently helped make possible a research trip that covered hundreds of miles and many hours in the genealogy and local history sections of a small-town library, and disconcerting time with a haunted doll. The research is making it into No Trespassing and a separate big essay project on private property; the haunted doll I hope won’t (I did put a picture of her in the Chat).
Earlier this week I was walking my nieces over to my house when it was still dark. We got shoes and coats on and checked to make sure their lunch bags were in their backpacks, even though I’d watched their dad pack everything before he left for work. We locked their house and I paused to breathe in the cool early-morning air that I can never get enough of, and glanced up at the sky. It had been overcast for days but that morning was dark-bright clear, the stars speaking of both distant galaxies and ancient cosmology stories.
“Look!” I said, pointing up, “there’s Venus!” They were so excited as I told them how that bright star-point was actually a planet hovering high in the southeast. Then we found Jupiter, almost as bright and a little lower in the west.
It’s one of the things I’m most grateful for about where I live, that we can still see the stars. The light pollution continues to grow, and it’s nothing like being at a cabin or camping, but when I take my first step outside between four and five in the morning, I can, if it’s not cloudy and there’s no moonlight and I let my eyes adjust for long enough, trace out the path of the Milky Way, and am often rewarded for patience with a shooting star, which never fails to feel magical.
Last night as I went to bed, Moon was out low in the southwest, looking almost like a Harvest Moon, all big and golden and bright even though She’s only in Her waxing crescent phase, not even a quarter full. I wonder what it feels like to Her, when She’s only partially sunlit but all of that side is still washed in a golden glow. Does She feel Her own beauty? Does She ever wonder how many of us are taking the time to let our eyes linger on Her light?
In the evenings, my younger kid and I often go outside if Moon happens to be visible before I go to bed, and we watch Her together. They took immediately to the Anishinaabe teaching of Moon is Grandmother, and together we speak of Her that way. Maybe I’ll ask them, or my nieces, who see the brightness of Venus with such fresh, starstruck eyes, what Moon might be thinking.
It delights me to no end to see how easily children’s attention is directed to the world they instinctively love. We all start out that way, loving the world and attending to it.
This last June, I received a gift from one of my neighbors: a small handful of sweetgrass starts. I’ve been interested in growing sweetgrass ever since moving here and being told by a mutual friend all about this neighbor and his relationship with ceremonial sweetgrass.
He can be a hard person to catch, but last winter I ran into him plowing his driveway while I was walking the dog. After we’d chatted a bit about the winter’s extreme weather fluctuations that saw days of -40°F winds and frozen snow followed by days of rain, I told him that I’d really love to learn how to grow sweetgrass if he’d be willing to teach me.
When I walked down to his place in June and said I was still interested, he introduced me to the sweetgrass bed in his yard. We talked about how to tell the difference between sweetgrass and quack grass—not easy but a necessity because quack grass grows everywhere here—and he showed me how to harvest and dry the grasses. Then he gently pulled a few roots out of the ground so I could start a patch in my garden.
“Sweetgrass is friendly,” he told me, “but likes respect. And it likes to be alone,” as in, not mixed in with a bunch of other plants.
I can relate to all of that, I thought.
I planted her in a bed she could have all on her own. Almost every morning since then, I’ve gone out and talked with her at least briefly, unless I’m away, one of the small stitches of early-morning ritual that includes looking at the stars and Moon and then writing by candlelight before getting people up for school, which I use to connect with the world and also keep myself from unraveling.
Since my neighbor gifted me those plants, I’ve thought a lot about the kind of respect they like, about respect in general, respect and recognition and what we give attention to: people, beings, things. How we attend to this world. It brought me back to why I wrote A Walking Life and why I’ve devoted so much of my time and energy to living it.
Last week I was in Great Falls, Montana, as part of a research trip that also took me through Lewistown and Raynesford, and included a side jaunt to Stanford to see if the Judith Basin County Museum does indeed have over 2000 salt and pepper shaker sets. (It does. People are weird.)
There was a talk being given while I was in Great Falls that I wanted to attend, and I had to make a choice between a 7-minute drive or walking, which would take around an hour and fifteen minutes. As I often do, I grumbled with myself about the walk. It’s not a pretty one. It’s along very busy roads with few trees, and there is no sidewalk or road shoulder for a good chunk of it, which is always a reminder of how much of a risk walking places can be. But I knew that unless I got really caught up in my writing and worked until the last minute, I’d walk.
Every time I do this, I’m reminded of why it’s so important that people get out of our cars and start walking places, when there’s time and opportunity, or maybe especially if you have to make time and opportunity. If it’s not easy, if it takes effort. Because it shouldn’t be that way but it is, and you can’t see where walking is made difficult if you don’t do it yourself, which means that you can remain ignorant of the needs of those who can’t or don’t drive. In the U.S., that’s around a little over 30% of the driving-eligible population. Advocating for walkability and public transportation sounds boring and policy-wonky to most people, and it can take a lot more dedication than higher-profile causes, but if we want a planet livable for humans, much less the rest of life, shifting away from individual cars and toward walking and public transit would make more of a difference than almost any other change we need to make.
A car-centric culture makes it easy to wrap ourselves in a perception of the world as existing for our own comfort and ease, never existing for its own sake. I put 850 miles on my car last week doing research, and I don’t think that’s a thing to be proud of, even if I enjoyed many hours of driving by myself on mostly unpopulated roads through landscapes I love. If you can’t walk or take public transportation places—if there’s no choice—it’s a good starting point to ask why that’s the case and what you can do about it.
And there’s much you don’t notice when you’re in a car, much that will never catch your wandering attention. If I hadn’t taken that hour-plus walk in Great Falls along unpleasantly busy roads with mostly too-narrow sidewalks until there was no sidewalk left, I might never have seen the beautifully colorful mural of buffalos painted along the walls of an underpass* dominated by racing traffic. Or the nonfunctioning payphone (I checked; no dial tone) still sitting against the building of a business that looks closed at first glance but I think might be . . . I have no idea, actually. I spent a while trying to figure out what it was, which made me late for where I was going, but it remained a curiosity.
Or the fact that all along this busy, traffic-choked route were ditches full of broken bottles and plastic bags and cans and other trash, and in all of them grew patches of short perennial sunflowers. I was so delighted seeing their bobbing yellow heads each time that I forgot to take pictures.
There is so much in the world to give our attention to. But because walking has been so effectively built out of our daily lives, doing so requires intention. It requires us to make choices.
This week I finally cut a few strands of sweetgrass, dried them, and got in touch with my neighbor to learn what to do next. He rode his bike over to my yard and we went through the small handful together, pulling out a few more bits of quack grass. He tapped the short blades together, braiding them deftly but not so quickly I couldn’t follow. “Not too tight,” he said, “or it won’t burn well.”
He showed me how to pull-knot the end and handed the braid back to me. There are so many gifts in that one bundle, from his sharing of plants to his sharing of knowledge, that I felt overwhelmed. It felt right, to feel overwhelmed.
If I want to give sweetgrass the respect it should have, I have to go through each blade, one by one, to pull out the quack grass that’s mixed in. It’s not easy. The differences between the two plants are subtle, and even sorting the small handful I harvested took a lot of time.
It feels like worthwhile work. Why not give close, caring attention to that which matters to us? Trying to turn myself into a carer of sweetgrass reminds me of walking itself, of all the reasons I wrote A Walking Life in the first place and why I realized I’d have to live what I preached in it: because all the world needs our attention and care, and an essential element in getting there is re-finding our own places as embodied, living creatures in this life-filled world. Walking, like plants, like life, shouldn’t be relegated to wilderness areas or even parks—all places I love to spend time in but almost all of which require an automobile to get to. The very tools we use to “access nature” are directly complicit in making existence so difficult and tenuous for all of life. Why should any of us assume the world right in front of us, broken as the dominant culture has tried to make it, is less worthy of attention?
The bed I cleaned out for the sweetgrass already has quack grass creeping in. That will never end. Quack grass is ubiquitous here, very friendly, and seems to have no interest in being alone. That doesn’t mean I should give up growing the sweetgrass, or give up hoping I can someday know her well enough to make gifts from her, and to teach my younger kid to do the same. All it means is that my full attention is required to nurture something beautiful and honorable and worthy.
Life asks us, constantly, to take a little more time, make a little more effort, give a little more attention. Not just for the rest of life’s sake, but for humans’ own. Everything we do to reconnect ourselves to the rest of the living world, whether it’s watching moonlight in the early hours, teaching children to look for Venus and read the rest of the night sky, walking places whenever we can and with as much of our present selves as possible, or giving plants the respect and attention they need to thrive, is one step closer to bringing us back to life.
After we talked more about growing, harvesting and braiding methods, my neighbor asked if I wanted some more sweetgrass to braid. He had a bunch ready to harvest and wouldn’t be able to get to it before winter. He came back with an armful, which was so fragrant it made me want to sink into her sweetness (the scent is commonly described as being “vanilla-like” but to me it smells of spring’s first apple blossoms), and I gave him a jar of chokecherry jelly, which is my own longstanding gift to people. It turned out it was his favorite.
I laid the grasses out on pans to dry in the sun and thought about how many more hours it would take to go through them one by one before I even got close to the point of making a braid. So much work, so much attention, and so much a gift to be able to do any of it.
Antonia Malchik 