Krista > Books: nonfiction‎ (394)

Having never heard the song, I followed along as best I could but had to wonder why the hell he was going to all the trouble of teaching me somethi

Having never heard the song, I followed along as best I could but had to wonder why the hell he was going to all the trouble of teaching me something that no one would ever hear. Maybe he was just lonely and wanted to jam? Maybe he was graciously making some no-name kid’s dream come true by inviting me to play along with him, knowing that it was a story I would get to tell for the rest of my life? As strange as it seemed, I kept focused on his strumming hand and locked into the arrangement, banging it out like we WERE in a sold-out stadium. We ended in unison on a triumphant final crash.

I noticed Paul McCartney out of the corner of my eye, chatting away with friends, and I couldn’t help but stare. There. He. Was. I don’t know what it feels like to see a UFO. I don’t know what it feels like to see a ghost. I don’t know what it feels like to see Bigfoot. But I know what it feels like to see Paul McCartney, and if that’s not a supernatural event, then I don’t know what is. I tried to avert my eyes, but it was no use. I was mesmerized.

I firmly believe that your understanding or “version” of love is learned by example from day one, and it becomes your divining rod in life, for better or worse. A foundation for all meaningful relationships to stand upon. I surely have my mother to thank for mine. I LOVE MY CHILDREN AS I WAS LOVED AS A CHILD. AND I PRAY THAT THEY WILL DO THE SAME WHEN THEIR TIME COMES. SOME CYCLES ARE MEANT TO BE BROKEN. SOME ARE MEANT TO BE REINFORCED.

This is the genius of Judy Blume. It’s the single most important aspect of her legacy. Her work as a children’s writer did something nobody else co

This is the genius of Judy Blume. It’s the single most important aspect of her legacy. Her work as a children’s writer did something nobody else could manage: it helped ensure feminism’s longevity…A movement requires a multigenerational buy-in to maintain its momentum. And over in suburban New Jersey, a soft-spoken stay-at-home mom was listening. Writing cutting-edge books for kids, Judy Blume became the Second Wave’s secret weapon.

Are You There God?, Deenie, and Forever form a triptych, with eleven-year-old Margaret, thirteen-year-old Deenie, and seventeen-year-old Katherine creating a progressive portrait of the new American girl. All three are smart, spunky, and in touch with their bodies. They’re all white, middle class, and from the suburbs — Judy wrote what she knew — but together, they embody an ideal for Blume that transcended race or class. The trio offers a vision of how the up-and-coming generation could digest the feminist and sexual revolutions. They’re good girls with a twist; they’re all in touch with sexuality, but they have futures.

What’s still missing from a lot of contemporary sex ed is an exploration of the way sex intersects with relationships, experts say. Even today, very few parents and educators are prepared to discuss the way dynamics of care and safety and vulnerability all contribute to true intimacy, which is crucial for a satisfying love life. That’s what Judy innately understood how to do. She taught us about our bodies and our hearts through her stories. Periods are something that happens to a whole friend group. First teenage love affects the entire family. Boys experience heartbreak, too! Truly safe intercourse requires talking and planning. You can’t go back to holding hands.

The knowledge base of natural history is under threat as research funding is increasingly focussed on fast-paced, short-term experimental work over

The knowledge base of natural history is under threat as research funding is increasingly focussed on fast-paced, short-term experimental work over the slower-paced, longer-term observational work necessary to build and maintain it. I felt compelled to write this book because it seems to be a problem that everyone in biological research and almost no one outside of it is aware of. Like many of the extinctions quietly proceeding around the world, it just isn’t something we hear about. We as citizens and stewards of this planet owe it to ourselves and our children to be aware not only of the issue but of the opportunities we have to contribute to its solution.

Sitting down to my stack of herbarium specimens and alcohol-preserved flowers every day felt like losing myself in a good book. Scientific research topics can seem narrow to the point of absurdity, like an entire career spent on a single species, but ask any scientist, and they’ll tell you that there really is a lifetime’s worth of discovery there. It speaks to the complexity of our universe that even the thinnest slices can be so expansive. To me, sustained, close attention to a little-regarded slice of that universe felt spiritual, like time spent in quiet worship before a vast and intricate cosmos, trying to know it just a little bit better.

There was no one dramatic incident that extinguished my desire to be in research. What I’d faced was an environment in which I was under strong pressure to never need accommodation, to never let anyone see that I had other loyalties in my life. It was a death by a thousand tiny cuts. And that’s what makes this story important, because I suspect that’s how it is for many of the nearly half of all women in science who leave after becoming mothers. Each time you’re made to feel unprofessional for having caregiving responsibilities, each time you’re made to feel like a burden for requesting minor accommodation . . . it wears you down a little more. You believe that you are the problem. And when the reward at the end of those years of hard work and low pay are far from assured, it doesn’t take a PhD to figure out you might be happier and better off elsewhere, no matter how much you loved the actual science and the questions you were trying to answer.

The whaling captain’s wife gave me a beer, which came in a small can and a piece of whale heart to eat. The meat was chewy, did not easily shred or

The whaling captain’s wife gave me a beer, which came in a small can and a piece of whale heart to eat. The meat was chewy, did not easily shred or disintegrate into fibres. It was clearly part of a whole, carried a message about entirety. After I swallowed it, I sat still and quiet. It took me down into the ocean, sounding, down below the light where benign goliaths swam by.

From there everything happened quickly. A string was pulling me, out of the window, into the sky, across the sea. The next day I left the hostel and moved into a friend’s attic room. I got a loan, organised visas. We would follow the mothers and babies from Mexico to the top of the world, I told Max. They would swim, and we would take the bus, the train, and the boat alongside them. I told myself I would relearn from the whales how to mother, how to endure, how to live. Beneath the surface, secretly, I longed to get back to northernmost Alaska, to the community who kept me safe in the harsh beauty of the Arctic and to Billy, the whale hunter who’d loved me.

Here comes the grey whale from the beginning of time, say the fossils. They pose a question too: All this you know, now what? Human thought and intention are part of the global ecosystem, the most powerful driver of change, the most powerful obstacle that both we and the whales have encountered through millennia. We are writing the next chapter of the story of all life on earth.

I am woman, human, animal. I bore my child in water. We sang to the whales. We listened to them breathing. We listened to the sea. This book is what I heard.

Most of the world’s wetlands came into being as the last ice age melted, gurgled and gushed. In ancient days fens, bogs, swamps and marine estuarie

Most of the world’s wetlands came into being as the last ice age melted, gurgled and gushed. In ancient days fens, bogs, swamps and marine estuaries were the earth’s most desirable and dependable resource places, attracting and supporting myriad species. The diversity and numbers of living creatures in springtime wetlands and overhead must have made a stupefying roar audible from afar. We wouldn’t know. As humans have multiplied to a scary point of concern about the carrying capacity of the earth, wetlands were drained and dried for agriculture and housing. Today 7.8 billion people jostle for living space in a time of political ferment, a global pandemic and now a war, trying to ignore increasingly violent weather events as the climate crisis intensifies.

Early northern Europeans lived and prospered among glacial meltwater wetlands for thousands of years. And what if those old people who venerated springs, pools and wetlands as holy places could look into the future and see us? Surely they would be unable to comprehend humans who dirtied, drained and destroyed water sources, who dammed and polluted rivers, who choked the great oceans with debris and plastic.

Painters, sculptors, photographers, poets, archeologists, storytellers, ecologists, botanist succumb to the allure of the bog world, where moss makes its own ecological habitat, trees dare not put down roots, predatory sundews and pitcher plants eat living swamp meat, where bog cotton “breathes” through its air-channeled stems. Everything seems to lurch slightly, to sink and rise fractions of an inch. Decomposing plant material underwater sends up stinking gas that produces the mysterious light that wobbles through evening mists — the famous will-o’-the-wisp or ignus fatuus (fool’s light). In sunlight there is the swamp sparrow’s rapid iteration like a gear in your brain spinning loose. The profoundly unfamiliar setting is not so much a place as the sudden shock of perception of threatened existence, a realization streaked with anxiety.

It is easy to think of the vast wetland losses as a tragedy and to believe with hopeless conviction that the past cannot be retrieved — tragic and part of our climate crisis anguish. But as we see how valuable wetlands can soften the shocks of change, and how eagerly nature responds to concerned care, the public is beginning to regard the natural world in a different way.

So long and sorry, darling
I was counting to forever
And never even got to ten
So long and sorry, darling
When we found a rip in heaven
We should have just

So long and sorry, darling
I was counting to forever
And never even got to ten
So long and sorry, darling
When we found a rip in heaven
We should have just ascended then

~ ‘Til Tuesday

They came into the clearing suddenly and the moon opened up above them, lighting the cracked and broken concrete that stretched like the decaying bones of giants between them and the abandoned Old Chain of Rocks Bridge. Tom stopped dead in his tracks, causing Robin to stumble into his back. He willed himself to move forward but he felt stuck, mesmerized by the menacing old bridge that loomed up before him. The massive steel structure was wild with leaves, and the undergrowth near the base was dense and uninviting. A few enormous hanging vines dangled from the top of the bridge’s skeleton, and they shifted and swayed eerily in the darkness.

We forget our victims. As a society we have a certain fascination with murder and violence. It’s not necessarily unhealthy — we are a curious people. We want to know why atrocities happen; we want to understand the causes of wickedness. We go looking for answers in books, in therapy, in our media. Unfortunately for the answer-seekers, corpses can’t talk. The dead can’t tell their own stories.

We’ve got excellent reasons to engage in the wisecracking life, but we may also have serious moral qualms about doing so. My title points to a kind

We’ve got excellent reasons to engage in the wisecracking life, but we may also have serious moral qualms about doing so. My title points to a kind of pun: Wisecracks may both bridge cracks and crack bridges, bond people and divide them. Which one occurs depends crucially on what role, if any, empathy plays in the exchange.

Wisecracks are ways of interacting with other people, but they are distinctive because what makes wisecracks aesthetically good — amusing — is often the very same thing that can make them morally bad. They tweak or ignore some of the norms that sustain our interpersonal lives, such as our expectations of trust and honesty, our desires for respect and equal worth, our concern to be viewed as the particular people we are (rather than as members of some group). These features make them very different, and far more interesting, than jokes.

What crucially matters in responding correctly to both the funniness and the moral status of a wisecrack are the wisecrackers intentions and motives, which amount to what the wisecracker means by it and what his or her attitudes are toward others affected or targeted by the wisecrack.

Obituaries of the scathing variety are really what inspired our ventures into the world of the macabre. I mean hello . . . it’s why we put the bitc

Obituaries of the scathing variety are really what inspired our ventures into the world of the macabre. I mean hello . . . it’s why we put the bitch in OBITCHUARY! Yes they’re hilarious, in an absurd morbid way, but really it’s the shock factor. Who would have thought that such a thing existed, and what would prompt somebody to write one? Well, as it turns out, there’s a variety of reasons. The truth of the matter is, some people just plain suck. We can all probably name at least one person in our lives worthy of some petty last words.

• Philip Clover of Columbus, Ohio, developed a device he called the “coffin torpedo” in 1878. In his words, it was a device created to “prevent the unauthorized resurrection of dead bodies.” It involved a system of triggers and springs that detonates an explosion of lead balls if the casket lid is opened after burial. Judge Thomas N. Howell invented his revision of the coffin-torpedo with the catchy slogan, “Sleep well, sweet angel, let no fears of ghouls disturb thy rest, for above thy shrouded form lies a torpedo, ready to make mincemeat of anyone who attempts to convey you to the pickling vat.” Hot damn. Imagine you’re just trying to get some cash for gold to get a bump on a Saturday night and — WHAMMY— your meat is minced, babe.

• Also known as lachrymatories, or tear vials, these were small containers that were believed to collect the tears shed by mourners during times of grief. These delicate glass or ceramic vessels were usually ornately designed and came in various shapes and sizes. It became a tangible expression of grief one could hold on to, to demonstrate the depth of their emotions, as it was believed that capturing tears symbolized the depth of one’s sorrow and love for the departed. Some even thought that evaporating tears were a way to send messages to the afterlife. We think these catchers are especially sweet because once the tears dried up, some would say it symbolized the end of mourning.

• Funeral strippers are just that, exotic dancers who sing and dance while removing their clothes at a funeral or in a procession to a funeral as a way to celebrate the life of the deceased and attract mourners. See! Everyone is afraid nobody will show up to their last party! If strippers can’t bring ’em in — what will, really? The tradition originated in Taiwan and has since spread throughout parts of China. Some say it brings good luck. We’re not experts here, but we’re willing to bet those people are straight men…It seems China has significantly cracked down on this controversial performance, since this little strip tease act is often considered obscene. In fact, they started giving rewards to people back in 2018 to snitch on others for hiring funeral strippers.

• In March 2013, four men in northern China were sentenced to prison for exhuming the corpses of ten women and selling them as ghost brides to the families of deceased, unmarried men. The women’s bodies were to be buried alongside the dead men, ensuring eternal companionship. Guess the saying is true: romance . . . is dead.

• In Sardinia’s past they would allegedly throw their sick elders off certain cliffs. Sometimes senicide would be done by a select group of women named accabbadoras, a.k.a. the terminator or ender. They would bless them and then proceed to either suffocate them, or kill them with blunt-force trauma by hitting them on the back of the head with a wooden mallet.

• In 1888, Alfred Nobel’s brother Ludvig Nobel passed away, but the French newspaper accidentally published an obituary for Alfred — oopsy daisy. The obit referred to Alfred as the “merchant of death” due to his invention of dynamite, which was then being used in warfare. Imagine not only was your obituary mistakenly printed but also . . . they dogged you in it? This incident reportedly had a profound impact on Alfred Nobel, leading him to establish the Nobel Prizes in order to leave a more positive legacy. Mission accomplished. We didn’t even know about the dynamite.

We hope you enjoyed our little romp through death. Our aim was to make you laugh and teach you something new while maybe changing how you see death. It’s a scary topic, one that is hard to comprehend, but learning about it gives us power. We wanted to show that it’s okay to talk about it and that knowledge can help us understand it better.

The expression “tits up” is American showbiz slang for an upbeat attitude, often used as a positive send-off from one woman to another. “Tits up” r

The expression “tits up” is American showbiz slang for an upbeat attitude, often used as a positive send-off from one woman to another. “Tits up” reminds a woman to stand up, pull her shoulders back, and flourish. It’s a cheer that reassures a sister that she will succeed.

Tits Up explores beauty, health, respect, self-esteem, self-determination, humanness, and equality. I hope to shed light on breasts in ways that elevate their value, not just because I believe in some happy, shiny body positivity, but because these organs are emblematic of womanhood. Put another way, I have no doubt that the status of breasts — not to mention tits, titties, jugs, racks, and apexes — is integral to women’s social position. For as long as breasts are disparaged as silly boobs, we will remain the “second sex.”

Strippers, as professional manipulators of male desire, are acutely aware of the dynamics of patriarchy. Sitting here, I’ve come to respect their position on the frontline, observing their shrewd navigation of the global gender war. In the past, I might have assumed that they pandered to patriarchy, but I’ve come to see this perspective as prudish and thoughtlessly classist.

Most of the “breast is best” conversation has focused on the benefits of breastfeeding for infants, as if the health of mothers were irrelevant — a phenomenon that a militant might dub medical misogyny but which I prefer to call patriarchal obliviousness.

While most feminists have seen beauty as a form of submission, others have argued that it is a means of resistance. I think the binary logic of this “structure versus agency” debate is a dead end because the problem is not an either-or. The pursuit of beauty can be both a form of obedience and an effort to subvert and surmount. I read a compelling article by critic Rita Felski, arguing that feminists need to craft thicker descriptions of aesthetic experience so we can balance the political costs of being beautiful with the emotional benefits. Only then can we do justice to the reasons why humans pursue and take solace in beauty.

Through being here and researching the place of breasts in spirituality, I have come to understand that there is no necessary opposition between feminism and religion. Women’s emancipation is not exclusively secular. In fact, our liberation may be enhanced by flights of fancy and leaps of faith.

When I observe women who relish their cleavage, I am delighted by their good fortune. Breasts and chests are the literal front and center of body positivity.

“Hope is the pillar that holds up the world,” Pliny the Elder is supposed to have observed. “Hope is the dream of a waking man.” Go looking for hop

“Hope is the pillar that holds up the world,” Pliny the Elder is supposed to have observed. “Hope is the dream of a waking man.” Go looking for hopeful climate stories and they turn up everywhere.

It’s easy now to poke fun at Arrhenius for his sunniness. The doubling threshold could be reached within decades, and the results of this are apt to be disastrous. But who among us is really any different? Here we all are, watching things fall apart. And yet, deep down, we don’t believe it.

From the observation deck, the drought’s effects were scarily apparent. An abandoned dock lay, in pieces, high above the lake’s edge. Instead of being submerged, the power plant’s four intake towers stuck up in the air, like lighthouses. The steep walls of the reservoir, which in pre-dam days formed Black Canyon, were lined in an enormous black stripe — a geological oddity known as the bathtub ring. The ring, composed of minerals deposited by the retreating waters, runs as straight as a ruler, mile after mile. At the start of the drought, the stripe was as high as a giraffe. By 2015, it had grown as tall as the Statue of Liberty. In 2022, it reached the height of the Tower of Pisa. The water level was so low that the dam's generators could operate only sporadically.

Recently, a Princeton-based team issued a report detailing how the United States could reduce its net emissions to zero by 2050. The researchers considered several possible decarbonization “pathways”. The one labelled “high electrification” would, they projected, eliminate sixty-two thousand jobs in the coal industry and four hundred thousand in the natural-gas sector. But it was expected to produce nearly eight hundred thousand jobs in construction, more than seven hundred thousand in the solar industry, and more than a million in upgrading the grid.

Alone, we had become the lies he had told us. Together, we were learning to unravel it. We were building the chain. We were learning to replace him

Alone, we had become the lies he had told us. Together, we were learning to unravel it. We were building the chain. We were learning to replace him with ourselves.

I reached for my keys, but put them away. I turned the handle on my apartment door and expected, rightly, that it would open. The shirts he left in my closet were no longer there. His T-shirts that had filled the bottom drawer, gone. His sneakers that had formed a neat line against my shoes, and some of my belongings too, gone with him. No one should love me. And I believed him. Because I had been taught to.

Comedy is an invisibility cloak for the men who hate women. It’s not objectification, it’s social commentary! It’s not chauvinism, I’m in character! It’s not a rape joke, it’s intellectual critique! It’s not bullying, it’s risqué! It’s not harassment, it’s banter! It’s not a slur, it’s a play on words! “Good” comedy is meant to push boundaries, meant to shock, meant to provoke. If you don’t like it, maybe you’re too sensitive, too literal, maybe you’re just not smart enough to get it.

There is no singular experience of womanhood and we create the chain to remind ourselves of this. We stand beside each other in such a way that we may say, Tell me your story as a woman, and yours, and yours, and yours. I do not know what it is to be a Jewish woman, a Black woman, or trans, or gay, or disabled, or a sex worker, or a prisoner, or a pilot, or a seamstress, or four husbands deep (yet). Where I fall in our flawed verses of womanhood is that I am unlucky in some ways and fortunate in others. What we share is history. What we share is the need to talk, to say we made it or we didn’t. Survival isn’t enough and it musn’t be.

Nearly everything I know about love, I’ve learned in my long-term friendships with women. Particularly the ones I’ve lived with at one point or ano

Nearly everything I know about love, I’ve learned in my long-term friendships with women. Particularly the ones I’ve lived with at one point or another. I know what it is to know every tiny detail about a person and revel in that knowledge as if it were an academic subject.

Some of the memories I have are joyful, some of them are sad, and that was the reality. Sometimes I danced with a grin on my face until dawn in a circle of my closest friends, sometimes I fell over in the street running for the night bus in the rain and lay on the wet pavement for far longer than I should have. Sometimes I knocked myself out walking into a lamppost, left with a purple chin for days. But sometimes I woke up in a loving tangle of hungover girls, filled with nothing but comfort and joy.

I am enough. My heart is enough. The stories and the sentences twisting around my mind are enough. I am fizzing and frothing and buzzing and exploding. I’m bubbling over and burning up. My early-morning walks and my late-night baths are enough. My loud laugh at the pub is enough. My piercing whistle, my singing in the shower, my double-jointed toes are enough. I am a just-pulled pint with a good, frothy head on it. I am my own universe; a galaxy; a solar system. I am the warm-up act, the main event, and the backing singers. And if this is it, if this is all there is — just me and the trees and the sky and the seas — I know now that that’s enough.

As we finished making fieldwork plans, I thought of something else to ask. “Umbu, have you heard of the mili mongga?” I saw sensible Ibu Jen smile

As we finished making fieldwork plans, I thought of something else to ask. “Umbu, have you heard of the mili mongga?” I saw sensible Ibu Jen smile and roll her eyes. But Umbu didn’t laugh. “Yes, Pak Sam!” he frowned in thought. “I have heard people talk about it.” I had to ask more. “Do you know anyone who might be able to tell us about it?” Umbu promised that he’d ask around and see what he could find out. I was definitely not prepared for where that question would take us.

This book is about my explorations of an island on the other side of the world, to try to understand what kinds of unique species used to inhabit its remote landscapes, and what happened to these now-vanished animals. But it isn’t just a story about biology or biologists, even though I thought it would be when I started out on my adventure. There’s plenty of science and natural history in the pages that follow, which can hopefully also serve to illustrate the steps through which knowledge accumulates and science progresses; how sources of inspiration might be unexpected, requiring new leads to be followed in unplanned directions when confronted with things that we can’t easily rationalise.

We may see the universe as fundamentally rational and following immutable natural laws, but to others it remains an enchanted place. As Christopher Hadley wrote in his fascinating investigation of the mythical English dragon-slayer Piers Shonks, “Searching for a kernel of truth by trying to remove the legendary elements misses something, it gets rid of the best bits.” Even amongst researchers, there is increasing recognition that “anthropology should always be open to the possibility of wonder.” It is imperative to consider the mystery of the mili mongga not just from our perspective as outside observers (the so-called etic perspective in anthropology), but also from the perspective of the culture that holds this differing worldview (the emic perspective). This can be extremely difficult — we are all brought up within our own specific cultures, with their own explicit and implicit conventions, assumptions and prejudices about structuring experience and making sense of the world. But if we can gain a different perspective, we might receive some truly surprising insights into how other cultures think about reality.

Everything alive has some kind of flux and ebb, and when that stops, life stops. When people say life is precious, they are saying that the rhythmi

Everything alive has some kind of flux and ebb, and when that stops, life stops. When people say life is precious, they are saying that the rhythmic force that runs through all things — your wrist, your children’s wrists, God’s entire green earth — is precious. For my whole life, my pulse ran through me with such quiet power that I never had to think about it. And now they were having trouble finding it.

Wilson was still working on my neck, and I was feeling myself getting pulled more and more sternly into the darkness. And just when it seemed unavoidable, I became aware of something else: My father. He’d been dead eight years, but there he was, not so much floating as simply existing above me and slightly to my left. Everything that had to do with life was on the right side of my body and everything that had to do with this scary new place was on my left. My father exuded reassurance and seemed to be inviting me to go with him. “It’s okay, there’s nothing to be scared of,” he seemed to be saying. “Don’t fight it. I’ll take care of you.”

• “It doesn’t surprise me that you saw the dead. Not because I have strong beliefs about it, but because I have zero disbelief.”

• My worst fear — other than dying — was that because I’d come so close to death, it would now accompany me everywhere like some ghastly pet. Or, more accurately, that I was now the pet, and my new master was standing mutely with the lead watching me run out the clock.

• Finding yourself alive after almost dying is not, as it turns out, the kind of party one might expect. You realize that you weren’t returned to life, you were just introduced to death.

• Scientists are so far from explaining consciousness that they can’t even agree on a definition, yet it is the crowning achievement of the physical world and seems to be the reason that anything exists in the form that it does. The circularity is audacious: a mix of minerals organized as a human brain summon the world into existence by collapsing its wave function, giving physical reality to the very minerals the brain is made of.

• Our universe was created by unknowable forces, has no implicit reason to exist, and seems to violate its own basic laws. In such a world, what couldn’t happen? My dead father appearing above me in a trauma bay is the least of it. When I tried to find the ICU nurse who had suggested I try thinking of my experience as something sacred rather than something scary, no one at the hospital knew who she was; no one even knew what I was talking about. It crossed my mind that she did not exist. My experience was sacred, I finally decided, because I couldn’t really know life until I knew death, and I couldn’t really know death until it came for me.

I met her in a bar, my mother -in-law, though she wasn’t my mother-in-law yet. I was twenty-seven and waiting tables in the lounge section of a fan

I met her in a bar, my mother -in-law, though she wasn’t my mother-in-law yet. I was twenty-seven and waiting tables in the lounge section of a fancy French restaurant, where she happened to be going for a drink with her girlfriends before they went to a Neil Diamond show. My boyfriend, Brian, had told me to expect her, so I spent the first hour of my shift feeling terribly expectant, my heart lurching with anxiety and anticipation every time another customer walked in.

Over the previous two decades, we’d come to love each other, but it was a particular, conditional sort of love, one based on circumstance and courtesy rather than connection and compatibility. Brian was the fulcrum on which our relationship rested, uncomfortable and unsteady as a playground seesaw. We both loved him, and so we were determined to love each other, a resolve that deepened when Brian and I had children — a girl and a boy who were ten and twelve by the time Joan was dying.

It had been more than twenty years since she’d walked into that bar and I’d picked her last. She’d been alive in my life for nearly as long as my mother had. She was my family, my ancestor, no matter our distance or difficulties or disappointments, the truth of that finally crackling between us.

Challenge to Civilization: Indigenous Wisdom and the Future is the third book in my series on Indigenous spirituality. The Knowledge Seeker addressed

Challenge to Civilization: Indigenous Wisdom and the Future is the third book in my series on Indigenous spirituality. The Knowledge Seeker addressed the nature and viability of Indigenous beliefs, and Loss of Indigenous Eden examined how Indigenous sacred knowledge became oppressed, suppressed, and discounted. This book will demonstrate that Indigenous spirituality is not only still relevant but will be critical to human survival in terms of restoring balance with both natural and supernatural worlds.

Civilization has waged a relentless and often violent campaign to colonize Indigenous Peoples emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. Part of this campaign has been to portray Indigenous societies as proto-civilizations that would have eventually trodden the path of human self-centredness, greed, and destructiveness. As an alternative, I create the word “ecolization” — a state in which humans recognize that they are not the central purpose of creation, remain grateful for the opportunity to experience physical life, and continue to obey the Creator’s “original instructions”.

In mainstream education we are taught that archeologists, geneticists, and other scientists are convinced that life originated from some sort of biological soup. It is contended that we, as humans, are simply advanced apes — a sort of evolutionary accident. But such an account never existed among Indigenous Peoples. The theory of evolution has been around for less than 200 years, compared to Indigenous stories, such as humanity’s coming from the stars, that have existed for tens of thousands of years. So why are Indigenous stories not given more credence, or at least equal exposure to scientific accounts?

The wetiko (greed-driven) cultures that are now in control of world affairs pretend to solve problems through a combination of rationalism, economic development, and military threat. Unfortunately, they lack spiritual authority and will never possess it until they reconcile with Indigenous Peoples and their ancient wisdom. Only a moral revolution can bring humanity back to its original path. What if we could redirect our intellectual, economic, and technological energies into healing Earth? This would lead us closer to a future that recognizes, celebrates, and honours the higher nature of our species.

How many times, over the years, would my father remind me — quoting Martin Heidegger — that “Language is the house of being”? It would be decades b

How many times, over the years, would my father remind me — quoting Martin Heidegger — that “Language is the house of being”? It would be decades before I’d read those words myself in a book by the German philosopher — who was also a member of the Nazi Party — and feel again that sharp pang of recognition: the difficult knowledge that some of the most enduring ideas had been written by complicated figures, like Thomas Jefferson, who believed in racial hierarchies, inherent superiority and inferiority. More and more I would come to understand that it was not simply ignorance that I’d need to push back against, but also the stores of received knowledge — philosophy, history, science — that I would encounter in the most learned places.

My need to make meaning from the geography of my past is not unlike the ancients looking to the sky at the assortment of stars and drawing connections between them: the constellations they named inscribing a network of stories that gave order and meaning to their lives. That’s one of the reasons I write. I’ve needed to create the narrative of my life — its abiding metaphors — so that my story would not be determined for me.

Singing to me as we passed the state flag of Mississippi was a way to counteract the symbolic, psychic violence of it. Through the triumphant, stirring rhythms of the song, my mother was showing me how to signify, how to use received forms to challenge the dominant cultural narrative of our native geography, and to transcend it by imagining a reality in which justice was possible. Her voice was a counterweight.

The act of writing is a way to create another world in language, a dwelling place for the psyche wherein the chaos of the external world is transformed, shaped into a made thing, and ordered. It is an act of reclamation. And resistance: the soul sings for justice and the song is poetry.

The purpose of our life is sometimes known to us, and sometimes it isn’t. We may have changed someone’s time here by setting them on a different pa

The purpose of our life is sometimes known to us, and sometimes it isn’t. We may have changed someone’s time here by setting them on a different path. Or we may have made them feel just a little bit better with our smile. We may not know what our purpose is, but knowing it is less important than living it. I don’t know if mine has a name, but I believe I have found it in my moments. I hope my stories help you share yours.

What if we were to view death as part of the certain, albeit unknown, lived experience? What if we spent our lives not running with our feet pounding on the pavement but instead we floated through it like a river, secure in knowing that death is our final harbour?

One thing I have learned so far from parents, children, friends, and patients is this: the big moments are important, but so much more happens during the spaces in between. I speak of those times that aren’t planned in our calendars: strolling in meadows; falling in love; finding hope in times of adversity; watching the sun as it sets in a clear evening sky; accepting an ending; growing old; conquering a fear; giving birth; smiling at a stranger; failing at something; watching a flock of birds take flight; making mistakes; feeling an animal's care; meeting new people while away; seeing an ocean wave approach and recede and knowing it’s been doing this forever. These moments are the stories that make our lives, and the ones that truly matter in the end.

What the records tell us is this: human desire is a powerful thing. It is also ephemeral, lost in the moment it is felt, though its traces remain i

What the records tell us is this: human desire is a powerful thing. It is also ephemeral, lost in the moment it is felt, though its traces remain in the world long after. From a swelled root to a crinkled leaf: in the plants we eat, there are remnants of our search for the medicinal and the palatable, and in their genetic makeup, a record of our movements between places.

I am fascinated by the way words can be bound tight to past places, by the way a simple question can unfold an entire scene, long thought forgotten. The way a fruit — even just its mention — can carry more than its weight in flesh.

Simply through repetition — in storybooks and novels deemed classics, curricula — British landscapes come to signify romance, an ideal in nature. I pay no attention to flora outside my window — in a flat land of canola and corn, where forests are built of sugar maple and pines. I read so little of these plants, and in truth, they hold little interest for me. It will take me years before I realise that I’ve built my notions of beauty from the stories of a distant land.

I’m absolutely certain that I’m now the most boring and ordinary that I’ve ever been. I’m very relaxed and surprisingly well mannered. I go to bed

I’m absolutely certain that I’m now the most boring and ordinary that I’ve ever been. I’m very relaxed and surprisingly well mannered. I go to bed early, I avoid red meat and gluten, I get excited about trips to Costco. My slide to all this mundanity started in January 2019, when I tried to have a one-night stand with my high school boyfriend and accidentally married him instead.

After my daughter, Violet, was born and her arrival didn’t miraculously transform a grown man, I joked that we’d wanted a “save the relationship” baby, but we’d ended up with a regular one instead. No one in my family or friendship group had ever been a massive fan of TB, but I stand by his good qualities now like I did then. He’s not a terrible person, just a bit of a dreamer, and we were wrong for each other. My daughter, I believe, just really wanted to be born. Souls can do that, you know. They — from, I dunno, space or wherever — can match you up with a random person, drag you from Canada to the UK, strike you down with lupus, and keep you in an unsuitable relationship just so that they can exist on Earth. It’s all part of their journey, and I would never resent Violet for what she had to do to get here. If anything, I respect the hustle.

The days are long, but the years are short, and it’s on our minds that every minute we spend caring for our family is an investment in the beautiful future we are hopeful for, when all the kids are old enough to be our friends. Having a family with my high school boyfriend, just as my hormonal teenage brain predicted, is the type of basic shit that I’ve come to live for.