If you like eating the land, this ever-changing weather gives you a new pleasure these days: a chance to eat the night wind. Here at the northern range of Columbia Hawthorn […]
Eating the Night Wind
Beautiful Starlings
Isn’t it a bitter irony that these beautiful birds, starlings, an invasive species here, are called pests and are electrocuted for it by the hundreds of thousands … … by that other […]
Review of Ken Mather’s “Trail North: The Okanagan Trail of 1858…”
Want to read a great book? Here’s a story of an early cattle trail from Oregon to the gold mines of British Columbia, that helped to define this place long before most […]
Garden’s Up On January 5
Well, gardens, you know. What to do with an unseasonably warm winter? Play, perhaps. Here’s some orach, spinach and cress I planted around November 20, after adding some gravelly soil and some […]
The Role of Poetry in Industrial Development
I showed you some beautiful patterns that poetry was able to read from natural processes. Here are some further patterns, that extend them into useful manipulations. Notice that these, too, are not […]
A New National Park Reserve for the Okanagan Similkameen?
Here’s my grandfather Bruno Leipe, c. 1963, looking down from above Cawston Creek over the middle Similkameen Valley. This area is part of a proposed National Park Reserve, in partnership with the […]
How Caroling Became Line Dancing … and Beyond
Here’s a modern orchard, an enclosed space, a guard or garden, all full of fruit, from the late latin ortus, or, you got it, all together now, an orchard. The beauty of […]
The Beach at Dusk
After the bold statement, the exploration. Canada is a colony and its poetry, science, transportation structures and administration are colonial. OK, that’s the statement. Now for the niggly bits. They concern themselves […]
Magpie’s Thoughts on Land Claims
Middle Class Country: an American pop culture project. Dude Ranch Country: an older American pop culture project. Spiritual Country: a Chinese-European folk cultural project. Artistic Country: an American cultural export installation. […]
How to Make a City Indigenous, Even if You’re Lazy, Eh
Let’s go downtown as if we lived here. Let’s look at Canada through the lens of the story it tells in the Syilx illahie (illahie is Pacific Slope trade jargon for “story” […]
