technology – Antonia Malchik

Art harder

August 1, 2025by Antonia Malchik2 Comments

My mother sent me a birthday card years ago that I have put above my desk everywhere I’ve lived since. On the front is a reproduction of a painting by Deborah DeWit Marchant, dated 1994: a woman, brown-haired and pale-skinned like me, is sitting in a booth at a diner, next to a window. On the table in front of her are an empty plate with what looks like the remains of pie, a glass of water, a cup of coffee, and an open book. Her left hand rests against her face and she is reading. The street looks wet with recent rain. The woman’s hair is even braided back, as mine almost always is.

The painting is titled “The Artisans Cafe.” There’s a sense of peace in it I’ve always loved, a sense of allowance—this woman can sit there getting lost in a book, no other demands on her attention for at least a little while.

Reproduction of “The Artisans Cafe,” Deborah DeWit Marchant

For years I’ve looked at that picture with both longing and an internal struggle. It speaks to me of the kind of permission to rest that too few people in this life, including me, feel they can allow themselves. I’ve been caring for others since I was four years old, when my younger sister was born, and when I look at that picture I see a moment for myself when everyone is fed and occupied, all the dishes are done, and the floor swept, the laundry folded and put away, the endless tasks of housekeeping and people-caring soothed and calmed and, for the moment, finished. Complete. It’s a moment that never comes.

Maybe it’s the pie plate that gets me. This woman has eaten, and has time to enjoy her book, and her coffee while it’s hot, and doesn’t even have to wash the plate. What a luxury.

I long for the moment in that picture nearly every day. It takes a lot of mental effort to give it to myself once in a while, breathe into the moment, any moment, even while the laundry remains overflowing and last night’s frying pan is waiting to be scrubbed and the peas need picking and the strawberries weeded and forms filled out and the bank account stressed over . . .

In the original draft of this, I followed that line with a list of all the things I’m behind on, everything that keeps piling up, but those details aren’t important. Each of you has your own list, your own burdens and worries and piles of laundry.

None of it will ever be caught up on permanently, much as I long for that moment, and in the midst of it all is my own work, which has been intensive for a while and will be for a few months more. An essay for this newsletter about the conflation of wealth and power that I keep needing to cut down (really, there’s no need to quote every book on this subject I’ve ever read but it’s hard, and do you really want to know exactly how Aristotle advised overthrowing oligarchy? yes, probably), essays for non-Substack outlets, and a lot of editing. A lot of editing.

Over the past six months I’ve been helping my friend Kathleen McLaughlin, longtime journalist and author of the fantastic book Blood Money, with a new anthology of essays by Montana writers she’s putting together for University of Oklahoma Press. It’s been a project she’s been shepherding for over two years and it’s finally taking “holy crap this is real” shape. I have an essay in it, but far more interesting to me is that I’ve been working with over twenty writers copy editing and helping develop their essays about Montana. In over twenty years of copy editing, which I mostly do for K-12 textbook publishers, it’s one of the most satisfying and challenging projects I’ve ever worked on.

It’s interesting being immersed in this editing just at the moment when what is marketed as artificial intelligence—but LLMs, or large language models, are not in fact anything of the sort, not yet—is being pushed as capable of taking over work like mine and I wonder, between rounds of essay edits, if I should take up the manager of the local tire shop on his persistent job offers. That job comes with health insurance and in America that’s far more precious than gold.

There are many levels to the speed of this technology’s adoption that are worrisome but out of my control, from people’s willingness to believe it truly is revolutionary simply because they’re told it is, to a complete bypassing of the reality that most of these systems are built entirely on stolen labor and stolen work—my book is among thousands used to train the LLMs with neither compensation nor my permission—and deployed not to improve people’s lives but to further bloat tech companies’ profits, to the deep, disturbing willingness to withdraw the possibility of creative work (much less income for it) from human beings who sorely need it.

A subscriber here once recommended this post to me, by science fiction and fantasy author Catherynne M. Valente, about artificial intelligence and creativity, that I’ve hung onto, while watching people who, for various reasons, justify the use of a product built on stolen labor and being used to replace the creative work not just of writing, but of editing:

“It can and will get ugly. But oh my god, people won’t stop writing or creating or performing, and they won’t stop coding, either, not the ones who love it and are passionate about it, certainly not because AOL Instant Essayist can, too. That shit is compulsive. From hands on a cave wall to these words on this screen, we cannot stop trying to express ourselves, and if one thing about our dumbfuck monkey dance on this call of salt will never change, it’s that. The unending plaintive scream of people trying to connect, to be heard, to be seen, to be known, to take what is inside us and make it manifest on the outside. . . .

Take away art and we’re going to art harder just to spite you.”

It’s also a really funny essay (while managing to be both slightly depressing in its realism and also empowering in its “fuck you we’re going to be human anyway” manifesto), so I’m going to quote another paragraph just because:

“This is not the optimistic part of the essay. Sorry. This the god dammit we spent literally all of science fiction telling you not to do this can you actually not for once part of the essay. Oh you’re definitely doing it anyway? And shoving me in my locker afterward? Perfect.”

For those who’ve never done it, this might be hard to believe, but editing is at least as creative as writing is. It is art. There is something almost indescribable about helping a writer tell their story or find how to say what they want to say in the best way possible, and in the way that is truest to who they are. It’s psychology and architecture, sociology and tailoring. It’s working with live wires of human storytelling all the damn time.

A writer I used to be friends with once told me that he thought my work as a copy editor simply involved “fixing commas and stuff.” I laughed, but was surprised at his assumption, since I figured he had to have worked with copy editors on his own writing once in a while. I do fix commas, true, but it’s a very small part of my job, which is far more about communication and storyweaving than it is about grammatical rules—which I know well enough to, frankly, not care. At least, not unless I’m being paid to. I’ll never correct your typos, unless you want to pay my hourly rate.

Copy editing is, for me and the copy editors I’m friends with, the people I respect, something far more in-depth. Something vibrant. It’s working with language at the level where it lives, before it gets pinned down in a dictionary like a butterfly specimen on a corkboard.

This really came home to me working on this recent project. So many writers, each with their own voice, style, strengths, and stories to tell. Editing is never just working with words or narrative; it’s approaching that narrative as an animal whom you have to get to know before touching. That animal could be affectionate, happy, traumatized, wild. Anything. The animal is alive and individual, their own self. That’s the point.

It’s working with who the writer of that narrative is, and the readers they want to reach. Sometimes, sadly to me, that means accepting when a writer is allergic to revision and balks at editorial feedback, meaning I only do the bare minimum. Frustrating, especially when there’s talent and potential, but I can’t force people to do their own stories credit. I just accept that they don’t want to know their work any more deeply than they want to know themselves and move on.

Other times, it’s the delight of working with someone who’s never published before and is eager to learn how to bring the best out of their own story in their own voice; or the delight of working with longtime, professional writers who feel the same. There are copy editors who will dictate to writers how to shape their story, but it makes me happy not to be one of them. It’s more fun.

This anthology project has eaten up an enormous amount of my time and energy over the past six or so months. It’s reminded me why I almost never teach or lead workshops: giving feedback in the way I do comes from the same creative place my writing does. I give of myself to other people’s work the same as I give of myself to my own writing, or to my kids, and I have to be careful with that. A couple of times I told Kathleen I had to take a break because my creative well was empty, and since she was of course doing even more work on the project than I was, she understood.

But it’s been far more of a gift to me. In the midst of a lot of personal and global turmoil, it has been a sheer pleasure to challenge myself, to be part of something I think is valuable and important, and to work intensively with such a large and varied group of writers, to be reminded that each one of them is an absolutely unique human being. As we all are.

It’s been both creatively fulfilling and soothing to my humanity—with each exchange and round of edits with each writer, with email conversations that veered into moments of shared experience and running jokes in their essays’ comments, I was reminded that there are no seething, personality-free masses of humanity, only people each with their immediate and intergenerational traumas, their struggles, hopes, memories, and battle-scarred heart.

Yesterday morning I woke up to the sound of a sandhill crane passing by, making me think of a few weeks ago when I heard my first of the spring as I waited in line at the tire shop before dawn to get my winter tires switched over and wondered if my ten-year-old car with 200,000 miles on it can handle another decade.

And earlier this week I came back from a self-guided Montana history trip with my younger kid (who’s been homeschooling this academic year) to meet the lilacs at home just beginning to open, and the two resident hummingbirds back in the caragana bushes. The tobacco plants and tomato starts thriving under the grow light my brother-in-law gave me, and the onion sets accusing me silently of neglect while the sweetgrass is thriving.

That night I stayed up to watch the full Moon rise in the southeast, an eerie green-blue glow through the night’s slight fog, the western sky still darkening from Sun who sets far too late this time of year for my taste, lover as I am of the cold and dark of winter.

It was, I’ve heard, a full Moon in Scorpio, a Moon for letting go, a release of what no longer works in our lives. I’ve got plenty of that, I thought, and hoped the murky moonlight would help some of it dissipate.

I have a new editing project starting just as this other one is finishing. It’s a book by someone I’ve worked with before on her audiobook, which I’ve often recommended, about algorithms and bias. She’s a roboticist who worked for NASA on the Mars Rover and is one of the smartest people I’ve ever had the good fortune to know in this life. My creative editor self is excited to immerse in that work.

Her book? It’s about the promises, pitfalls, and prejudices of artificial intelligence, by someone who knows these technologies better than almost anyone else—and, unlike many of us who criticize them, loves them while being clear-eyed about their flaws and risks.

Talking about this project with her brought me back to Ursula Franklin’s book The Real World of Technology, based on her talk in the 1980s that was recommended to me ages ago by a subscriber here and has become one of my touchstones since then.

“While we should not forget that these prescriptive technologies are often exceedingly effective and efficient, they come with an enormous social mortgage. The mortgage means that we live in a culture of compliance, that we are ever more conditioned to accept orthodoxy as normal, and to accept that there is only one way of doing ‘it.’”

Enormous social mortgage. What of our future freedoms and choices do we give up with every unquestioned technology adoption? Who else’s choices and freedoms do we strip in the process without their consent?

In times of darkness as well as times of rapid change, having clarity can feel almost impossible. It’s one of the reasons that I wrote before last year’s U.S. presidential election that one factor many people were missing was keeping the right to protest at all, to fight back, something that is currently—and unsurprisingly—quickly being criminalized. What kinds of choices can you make when the rights you thought were foundational, at least in theory, are being broken up and carted away?

There are at least as many answers to this question as there are human beings alive at any given moment. My own is to look at my Russian-Jewish grandparents and the kinds of choices they made living under the authoritarian dictator Joseph Stalin.

But it’s valid to look also, I think, to that unique human gift of creativity. The messy, tangled, most often unproductive and unprofitable, process that has been somehow fundamental to the history of our entire species, across the planet and over hundreds of thousands of years. One of the answers to how one remains free is—thank you, Catherynne M. Valente—to art harder.

Until all the children in the world live without fear of hunger, violence, oppression, or abuse and every border is marked only by a tree, a greeting, and a bit of cultural orientation, claims of technological progress are, for the most part, mirages obscuring accumulation of wealth and profit. (I’m not talking about developments like vaccines. Vaccines are great, as are many other technologies. But technological “progress” is not the unmitigated good it’s assumed to be—see the entire century of building a car-centric world and the attendant pollution, severed communities, and human health consequences.) They might be developments most of us have no control over, but we can choose to keep our humanity as intact as possible.

I see no reason to give up writing or editing, even when so many believe the marketing hype that says LLMs can do those tasks just as well. I don’t, frankly, care whether they can or not. I care that people believing it’s true will probably eviscerate my ability to make a living doing something I love, but that won’t stop me from doing it. Storytelling, as I’ve written before, is for me paired with walking—a fundamental human experience, core to who we are as a species. I don’t intend on giving that up, even if I need to get a job at the tire shop to pay the rent and feed my kids. It’s not a bad job and the people there are nice.

Editing and writing are, for me, represented by that old birthday card above my desk. Every word considered or line scratched out in my notebook, every minute sitting with a writer’s essay and trying to sink into what it is they’re truly trying to say, and to whom, is a moment of rest, clarity, and the ineffable spark of insight. It’s life, interwoven with the hummingbird outside my window and the river that runs through town and the heartaches and losses and beauty of human experience. It’s connection to whatever it is that holds it all together—holds us, all, together.

It is my chance to live in the Artisans Cafe whenever and however I can.

My kid and I stopped in Missoula on our way home from the history trip, took a wander along the big-shouldered ponderosa pines of Maclay Flats and were rewarded with fresh beaver chew. Every moment of our lives is a struggle between contributing to technology’s social mortgage, which we can’t always escape, and . . . this.

The deep ethics of optimism

November 17, 2024by Antonia MalchikLeave a Comment

Swan Lake, Montana, nearing sunset, through the smoky haze of a nearby prescribed burn.

In 2016, a month or two before that year’s U.S. presidential election, I was at a two-week interdisciplinary artist’s residency at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity in Banff, Canada. We had dancers, writers, visual artists, actors, composers, and musicians in our group, with writer Pico Iyer, musician Richard Reed Perry (of Arcade Fire), and choreographer Christopher House leading workshops.

The residency was formed around the theme of the Art of Stillness, taken after Iyer’s recently-published book The Art of Stillness, with a series of weekend workshops on stillness open to the public—like forest bathing, a Japanese tea ceremony, concerts, and a series of talks on Deep Listening that might have contained one of the most powerful experiences I’ve ever had.

With Iyer, we discussed writing of stillness, and stillness practices. Perry had us listen to our own heartbeats and breathing through stethoscopes, and composed music based on the rhythms we tapped out.

It was a beautiful two weeks, easily the best residency I’ve ever been to. I attended another three-week writing residency in Banff two years later, and decided that interdisciplinary ones are far more inspiring. There’s a cross-seeding of creativity, of playing in unfamiliar forms like (for me) dance and composition. All of us who attended the Art of Stillness have stayed in touch over the years (one of our group, writer and physicist Wendy Brandts, passed away in 2022) and followed one another’s work. Stories shared in that group made their way into A Walking Life, and the book itself was largely shaped by the lessons I got to soak in for those two weeks.

Every morning, Christopher House offered a movement session before we each went off alone to studios to do our day’s work. I can’t remember what kind of music he played or if he gave us much direction in the dancing, but there was one line he repeated day after day, in those movement sessions and in his own presentations and workshops: “We are exploring the deep ethics of optimism.”

I wrote about that line off and on at the time, and remember posting something on Instagram the day of the presidential election with simply that line and a photo of the bitterly cold, snowy morning, Sun’s rise refracting off ice-glazed caragana branches.

That was in 2016.

I wrote about the deep ethics of optimism leading up to that election because I couldn’t figure out what it meant. I’ve thought about it frequently ever since and still don’t understand what it means. The deep ethics of optimism. What does it mean, what does it mean?

I have a feeling it’s the kind of idea I might have an epiphany about just moments before I die. I hope that moment is a long way off, but I look forward to it.

And it’s a thought I find myself wanting to share now and again. Maybe I’m hoping one of you will have an answer. Maybe I hope that for one of you it will be an answer—in the way that I say walking is, not something that gives an answer, but whose action, whose exploration, is an answer in itself.

We are exploring the deep ethics of optimism. Maybe it’s what brought me to writing more seriously about the commons—I’d published my first essay about the commons and land ownership in Aeon earlier that year. Freya Rohn, who writes the Ariadne Archive, recently sent me photos of “a list of women who were named as defying enclosure laws and were imprisoned and executed” in rebellions against enclosure—theft of commonly shared land in England—in 1589.

The optimism of the commons does not require building something new, but it does require an understanding of what has gone before. It needs us to see not only what has been lost, but that things haven’t always been this way. It’s why it was so important to me to write about centuries of violent rebellions against land enclosure in High Country News recently. The harsh restrictiveness of private property in land is very recent—while the same of ownership of people, especially women, and of food and seeds, is very old.

It is deeply ethical to ground yourself in the knowledge that humans have always, everywhere, shaped their worlds—our worlds—differently, have shaped them to treat animals with respect, revere trees, nurture kinship with rivers and springs, and at the same time care for people’s physical, emotional, and spiritual needs. To have, as my friend Sherri Spelic has written about with regards to education, Care at the Core, the kind of ethos that shaped economist Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics model, meeting human needs without straining ecological limits.

Maybe optimism is misunderstood. Maybe this is about the deep ethics of knowing, not just believing, that there are better ways to live. That it is possible because it has happened, over and over.

Maybe the deep ethics of optimism is more about what we think of human nature. It can be, and obviously is, dire, cruel, selfish, abusive. But it is also reflective of what a society rewards, what culture cultivates. Humans evolved in community, in interdependence. We wouldn’t be the species we are if we hadn’t cared for one another for hundreds of thousands of years. The paleoanthropological records are clear on this. Hominins evolved within the necessity and ethos of care.

Which means we can, with intentional effort, reward and cultivate behavior that brings care back to the core of human life. Given where we are, that’s not easy. Given where we are, it might be hopeless.

But given where we are, I can’t accept giving up on humans’ capacity to do better. People have burned down their worlds, and others’, countless times throughout history. In such times, those who suffer most tend to be those who have always suffered most.

A friend recently sent me some photos of her visit to Kara E-Walker’s exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I misread text on the wall that read “A Respite for the Weary Time-Traveler” as “A Respite for the Weary Time-Tender.” It felt a perfect word-shape to hold the increasing everyday stresses of lives even without considering war, genocide, climate change, and the power of billionaires.

A respite from tending to time, because we are weary.

We are weary. We need respite.

We are exploring the deep ethics of optimism. Maybe all it is is being alive, and loving this world with our whole hearts, despite everything that seeks to break us.

First snows! Looking out toward the peaks of Glacier National Park recently in Montana’s North Fork Valley. ☃️❄️🏔️

Dis/connection

September 28, 2024by Antonia MalchikLeave a Comment

The bacon was frying slowly and the water wouldn’t boil. I was poking at both over the camp stove, rain beating the tarp overhead, when my sister asked me something. “I was just thinking,” I answered her, “about how this stove is getting old, and how cold it was the other night, and how I’m stiff from the hike yesterday. I can’t get warm by the fire unless I stand in the rain, and we’re going to have to suck it up and pack all our gear away wet.”

It had dipped below freezing the previous night as we lay huddled in our tents, and I’d been up since 3, tired but still soaking in the full double rainbow that had spanned the narrow valley a little after 5 that morning. I rambled on in that vein to my sister for a minute and then said, “And how much I love all this.”

I’ve always enjoyed camping, ever since childhood. It’s something else to be standing wet and tired and cold over a semi-functional camp stove, and realize you’re happy. I do. I love it.

The more I do these things, the less I want anything the digital world provides—other conveniences, too, like central heating and electric lights, which bring comfort and ease but also are frustratingly disconnected from whatever rhythms and routines my 48-year-old descendant of millions of years of hominin evolution craves. I want less of that and more waking up stiff and sore, a rock digging into my hip, to hear the birds start up and wait for Sun to soak the mountains while Moon is still shining in the south and a rainbow forms and a cold river welcomes my feet, all of it so beautiful it feels like a miracle. It is a miracle; is there anything more natural than worship of stars and Moon, trees and animals?

I recently gave up my smartphone. It was a long process that started in my head over a year ago, and in action sometime last February, when I spent too much time in Reddit forums trying to find a mobile phone that didn’t support apps and wouldn’t allow me to go online.

There used to be a podcast called Note to Self that was one of my favorites until it abruptly disappeared, and with its guidance I had all notifications except for calls and texts turned off, and my phone in grayscale, by the end of 2016. I’d deleted all social media and email apps, the internet browser app, and anything else unnecessary, and corralled all the other apps into tightly controlled categories, where they remained until sometime in June, when I factory reset the phone, removed its number from Apple ID and iMessages, and handed the device over for someone else to make use of.

I was a late smartphone adopter, but quickly became addicted and spent far more time trying to manage my phone use than I ever thought would be necessary. I’d gotten a better grip on time spent staring at that screen over the years, but none of the usage tweaks had been enough and I still needed some kind of phone. I’m fortunate to have work that doesn’t require me to have a smartphone, but I have young kids. Being unavailable in emergencies isn’t usually an option.

The first draft of this was written sitting by a creek listening to a mountain chickadee, waiting for my hair to dry in the sun and being distracted by a small blue butterfly—two blue butterflies, who seemed to enjoy hanging out around the mud at the edge of the creek, buttercups nodding overhead. A month ago I would have had my phone with me and tried to catch their fluttering, but the camera I replaced it with is heavy enough to make me think twice about carrying it around, and so there I was, idly noting the butterflies’ presence in a notebook with a pencil that was growing dull.

Over the last few months, preparing to let the device go, I thought carefully about what sociologist Zeynep Tüfekçi in her book Twitter and Tear Gas called “affordances”: In what ways is a technology useful or enabling of personal freedom and societal democracy? In what ways is it at best a distraction or, worse, a tool for oppression?

I was in a meeting recently where I had to listen to a presentation on the use of what’s called artificial intelligence in the classroom. I’m not going to go into AI. I don’t find it an interesting subject or even an interesting technology. What I find interesting is its use case for lessons on ethics, along with labor and wage theft. I’ve written before about the theft of my first book for the profit of ChatGPT’s owners.

As I told the group in this meeting, a technology isn’t a thing. It’s a philosophy, a structure used to change the way humans live and work together and with the rest of life. A fence isn’t some abstract, objective material, or even a noun. It’s a form of relationship, one used to either work with life in balance, or subject it to domination and control, usually in the form of ownership.

So I spent a lot of time thinking about what my smartphone afforded me that was useful (voice memos), what was nice but unnecessary (Merlin Bird ID, iNaturalist), and what was an annoyance that degraded my life (Apple News). I made a list, worked out what was replaceable and what I could live without, bought a camera and a dumb phone, and, once I’d ported my number to said phone, tried to remember if texting had always been so maddeningly slow.

I have only 24 emojis. I miss the rest of them. But so far, it’s been worth it.

The whole process reminded me of when I first started dedicating my life, and my kids’, to walkability. Walking them to and from school every day, biking in the rain and snowstorms, teaching them to do the same themselves, building in extra time to get to meetings, trying to find myself a yoga class that didn’t require a drive to get to.

It all took work and time. As with all technologies, there come points when some people have that luxury and most don’t. Without our agreement or desire, we’re forced into dependence on technologies that are expensive and have disastrous consequences for both the living planet and for human social connections. Over time, societies are taught to forget those harms. The forgetting is intentional. That’s what happened with cars, their pollution and theft of public spaces and greediness for our income buried under the narrative that people chose to create their lives around car culture. With digital technology it’s simply happening on a faster timeline. A percentage of people benefit, a tinier portion profit hugely, and the vasty majority either suffer or are given no choice or both, and life continues to be subject to extraction for something that is mostly unnecessary.

No technology is without cost. The energy use of data centers for cloud storage is monumental and rarely reported on. We cannot say that we have true choice in its adoption unless that cost is weighed into its manufacture and use—the cost to everyone, not just in the balance of our own personal comfort or convenience.

There are no absolute right answers. There never have been at any time in human history. But there are better directions, led by the health of waterways, the diversity of bugs and plants, the visibility of the stars, the nurturing of empathy and compassion and relationships, and the restoration of our own fractured attention.

I’m glad to have some of mine back. When I first sat down to start writing this, it was in a cabin that my mother’s husband built in the 1970s. A creek runs past banks of willow bushes. There is no electricity, and water comes from a spring piped through a hose.

Making coffee can take an hour, building a fire in the old cast iron cookstove and waiting for the fire and then the water to heat up. But even waiting for the coffee is its own pleasure, sitting in a chair by the stove, reading a book and enjoying the fire’s heat while rain and hail hammer the roof.

Cooking by wood stove, dishes by candlelight

It is something in this world, to be able to spend as much time offline as I’m able to, watching yellow warblers in the willow outside the door and hearing Swainson’s thrushes start up after the last of the night’s snipes have finished calling, to not see the sight of a digital screen for days, or hear the sound of digital music or voices. To go to bed with Sun and embrace boredom and reach occasionally for the field guides on the bookshelf while two marsh hawks soar and cry above a meadow. To linger in memory of the clearly visible Milky Way and confetti of stars covering the sky in the middle of the night.

To face ourselves without distraction, temptation, numbing, even other humans’ company, is one of humanity’s most consistent terrors, as well as one of its most consistent needs. Who are you, who am I, without the demands of a routine, schedule, the pressing obligations of work or caregiving, and the ability to check out? The allure of distraction is constant because to face ourselves is so terrifying. It’s also, in a time when our minds are offered or force-fed distraction at almost every turn, an odd kind of privilege.

If we know ourselves, we might have to be ourselves, and the dominant culture has spent thousands of years ensuring we can’t do, and even learn to avoid doing, either.

My last morning at the cabin, I was walking through a meadow after a final dip in the creek, feeling sun-warmed and a little lazy, and almost walked smack into a pair of sandhill cranes. I stopped twenty feet from them as they called and wandered down-field. The marsh hawks were soaring and screeching as I passed through, and two whitetail deer bounded off into the woods, pausing, tails raised, to watch me.

In that moment, I had nothing with me to record the calls or take any photos. But all of that life was present, vivid and vibrant, along with the wind in the lodgepole and songbirds calling from the willows, and so was I, present. As I was a minute later writing this paragraph in a notebook leaned against a wooden fence rail, under two friendly pines. In the hope that if I stay in these moments then you, too, can find yourselves present within them.