Even ladybird shows us the true nature of big sagebrush: it is fire, standing. Look at her flames and coals! Traditionally, big sage was used to start fires, even of wet wood, […]
Harvesting Fire
Paradise Apple Comes Home
A year ago I wrote about the Paradise Apple, the apple of the Celts, and the apple of legend. I’ll let you read it again, and then I’ll show you the happy […]
Tiger Lilies: a Bridge Between Worlds
The tiger lily is native to china. In China, the roots are eaten like potatoes. The Columbia lily is native to Cascadia. Source. So, that makes an interesting confluence of cultures possible. […]
An American Town in Canada
In Okanagan Falls, water is life, but doodads help. And a failed real estate development that hit a hundred feet of post-glacial sand and went back to Calgary, that’s fun. This is […]
Life On Turtle Island
Swim in the molten snow. Come up into the sky. Spend your day in the sun. Gardom Lake We are turtle!
Becoming the Garden
There’s music, mathematics, and this: Three things that are one, yet are culturally separate. It is left for poets, I suppose, to bring them together in temporary assemblages, but that seems to […]
Let’s Set the Delicious Apocalyptic Dream of Settler Culture to Rest
“Settler Colonialism” is a serious thing. In fact, in North America it is one of the most serious things of all. It should be handled carefully, like the toxic nuclear waste it […]
Images of a Dramatic Science at Work and Play in Cascadia
On the principle that a science that creates linkages based on the replicable observation of an individual observer (a fine principle)… Spillyay at Work, Columbia Gorge … leads to individual observers and […]
Getting Grounded in the Okanagan
Huckleberries are nature. The old benches at Bridgeport, their sage, orchards, cheatgrass and windbreaks, are all nature, as is the controlled Columbia River. The abandoned orchard in Grand Coulee below, and its […]
Fighting a Losing Battle with the Wind in Cascadia
Here’s a cherry orchard just south of The Dalles, at the western terminus of the Oregon Trail, looking west to the Mount Hood Volcano. The rounded crests of these glacial flood hills […]
Okanagan Okanogan 