There is a difference between the subject of a photograph and its body. This butte above Olalla, in the Keremeos River Valley, for instance. This black bird with an attitude. The blackbird […]
Photographing the Unseeable
Sandbar in the Sky
Vernon Creek does a fine job. Look how it builds a sheltering space for waterfowl, out in the sky. Isn’t that great! The creature of the air that makes a home on […]
Reading Balsam Root, Writing Earth, Reading Mind
Here’s a word. Don’t let abstraction fool you. Just be with her for a moment. As you can see, she’s a living creature. Don’t let her dead stalks fool you. Because they’re […]
The Teachings of Rock
The ability of a land to display spires of rock, allows for understanding of height as more than the “top” of the body. It means the ability to read your own height […]
What If We Stopped Reading Books?
What if we read the Earth instead? Not to collect it or sample it or catalogue or analyze it or fit it into a narrative we already know, but to read it. […]
Ancestral Memory and Poetry
People write poetry for many reasons. Any that is written is not poetry, though, but an incantation that allows for poetry, a force within the universe, to appear. People cannot be taught […]
The Spiritual and Technological Roots of Individualism in the Environment, part 2
The American psychologist Abraham Maslow had some thoughts about creativity: It looks as if there were a single ultimate goal for mankind, a far goal toward which all persons strive. This is […]
Book, Man, Woman, Land, God
A long time ago, there was an attempt to speak the language of the world. Ultimately, it came to look like this: Gutenberg Bible of 1455 The idea was that that book […]
Landscape, Colonialism and the Unused Two-Car Garage
A landscape is a stretch of land that has been improved by rational planning, sculpting of the land, and the addition of shrubberies, lanes, paths, buildings and other aesthetic features designed for […]
The Ethics of Living on the Earth
Canada administrates half of my land as a nation state. The United States administrates the other half. Within Canada, the region called British Columbia administrates half of my land in terms of […]
