Braiding Sweetgrass

ends of the strands. Sure enough, they are different. The plain water forms small, rapid drops that seem in a hurry to let go. B ...

maple reaching from the shore, a low spray of hemlock, and, from the gravel bar, alder stems inclining over the edge. Water fall ...

were one thing, as if we understood it. I think that moss knows rain better than we do, and so do maples. Maybe there is no such ...

BURNING SWEETGRASS A sweetgrass braid is burned to create a ceremonial smudge that washes the recipient in kindness and compassi ...

Windigo Footprints In the winter brilliance, the only sounds are the rub of my jacket against itself, the soft ploompf of my sno ...

darkness for a figure, but the snow is too heavy to see. The trees thrash beneath racing clouds. A howl rises behind me. Maybe i ...

leaves to hunt and never returns. When sucking a bone is not enough, the infants follow. After too many days, desperation is the ...

In terms of systems science, the Windigo is a case study of a positive feedback loop, in which a change in one entity promotes a ...

was a human whose selfishness has overpowered their self-control to the point that satisfaction is no longer possible.” No matte ...

from the shoulders of boys no older than twelve, standing guard outside the houses of the narcotraffickers. We passed the night ...

with no one to share with you and no one for you to care for. I remember walking a street in Manhattan, where the warm light of ...

neoclassical fallacy that human consumption has no consequences. We continue to embrace economic systems that prescribe infinite ...

The Sacred and the Superfund Above the spring behind my house a drop forms at the end of a mossy branch, hangs in a momentary sp ...

surrounding hills, great shoulders of inordinately pure, fine-grained limestone. These old seafloors are almost pure calcium car ...

on. All were suffering. During that sorry time a son was born to a Huron woman far to the west. This handsome youth grew to manh ...

agreed to “bury the hatchet” and live by the Great Law of Peace, which sets out right relations among peoples and with the natur ...

Millions of tons of industrial waste were slurried onto the lake bottom. The growing city followed suit, adding sewage to the su ...

unreclaimed— where the limestone rocks were quarried, the earth gouged out in one place to bury the ground in another. If time c ...

reaches the bottom of the heap, the water has picked up enough chemicals to be as salty as soup and as corrosive as lye. Its bea ...

bottom. Oncolites—tumorous rocks. Pilings stick up through the flat like a backbone, remnants of the old retaining wall. Here an ...