Blog

Have you heard their pronoun names?
Skeletor can never beat He-Man or She-Ra. If anyone’s genuinely startled that He-Man is he/him, boy howdy, let me double-startle ye and introduce ye to his sister, She-Ra. Not so important, really.

Pull, slowly. Discouraging authoritarians, opening the door
Exiting the long-term Groundhog Day trap. If you tend to move slowly, that might be OK. There is a role for you. A counterintuitive movement may open the door. Breathe. Hold. Pull.

Preparing for the bumpy journey: Bringing my tools into the time trap
It’s the day before Groundhog Day. What if we’re trapped inside a time that has been stolen, but we don’t need to move, because time will change around us? How do we thaw the ice?

Climate change, predicted (three decades ago)
Returning to an environmental classic: ‘The Ages of Gaia’ by James Lovelock. We don’t yet know what it will be like when the forests are gone. But we should live in a way that prevents this outcome. We must support our own survival.

The Industrial Revolution: All of it has to change again
Trains represent where we’ve been & where we‘ll go next. Steel, aluminum, concrete; fossil fuels; electric light; transportation, communication, refrigeration, medicine. Do we know what we have to change?

Tadpoles teach us in Kern’s ‘Real Sugar’
Stories for those who feel ‘fragile about frogs’. We can grieve “all the frogs that aren’t.” Some of our stories going forward, though, have to be about the frogs that are. Which will those be?

How we’re here now: Poems of California
Poems in ‘Rift Zone’ and ‘Last West’. We know in our bones what being is. Because we are. ‘To be’ is to exist in a place, to grow, to break off, to feel how this ties us to past and future.

We know who’s responsible for orange sky
We need to hold them accountable. It’s Exx-smog and Shell-smoke. The big orange cats must be held accountable, and there’s more than one. Each of us has a role to play.

Designing a town people can get around? Repeat this exercise.
Anna Zivarts reminds us how we can take an hour to try harder. Sometimes we lack empathy for each other’s transportation needs and preferences. We have no idea because we haven’t stopped to try.