In Western culture, artistically-prepared, purified products are medicine. They are designed to correct a deficiency or combat an invasion to the body’s temple. The natural state of this temple is one of […]
What is Medicine? What Isn’t?
The Harvest Begins, With Desert Parsley (and a very fine rock)
The desert parsley is up in the Similkameen. This is on the south-facing side of a gulley. The north side was still covered in snow, so perhaps three days before this slope […]
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 […]
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 […]
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” […]
The Sun is Not a Focussing Aparatus
Every moment of the sun is as focus as any other moment. This is hard for a human eye. It’s used to burrowing through light, to throw it into dimensions, which it […]
The Paradise Apple, Modern Farming and the Apple of the Celts
All apple trees are grafted on a root. The tree is chosen for its apples and the root for its growth characteristics. These days, an apple called M9, for Malling 9, after […]
We Are All Dressing in Our Finery Now and Waiting for the Feast
We are all just waiting now … … waiting… waiting…waiting… …turning around and waiting some more …… OK, sure, maybe getting a little impatient … … and thin … … maybe a […]
Outliers in a Web of Interwoven Worlds
The arrow-leafed balsam root is a great world for crab spiders, wasps, flies and bees, and blooms across the hills in the spring, one of the few native plants that can resist […]
Okanagan Okanogan 