I went looking for light. In a grey world, it was all in the red osier dogwoods, stəktəkcxʷlɬp, the purifier, the beloved of moose. I spent some time with it as it turned […]
The Lessons of Red Osier Dogwood
The Private Landscapes of the Okanagan Valley
Here’s a healthy stand of bunchgrass, which I showed you a couple days ago. As I mentioned, the Okanagan Valley of the North Eastern Pacific Rim probably looked like this 200 years […]
The People of the Grass
Just look at this Great Basin Giant Wild Rye in the late November sun. It’s growing up the hill from my house, in land set aside for new houses. Actually, it was […]
Bringing the Water Home
I bring home the name of water. It’s not that it reflects the sky, as the picture below from Hvalfjörður shows, so much as it brings the light from the sky inside […]
Learning Balance from the Birds
The earth is a plane of balance. After all, it spins. Whatever humans do to the earth changes the balance it achieves. It’s the same with birds. I suspect they did this. […]
Growing an Old Language New Together
A language is not a string of beads on a wire that you hook around your neck, fiddle with, mumble along with, and presto, you have a smart phone. An indigenous language […]
If This is Not Autumn What Is It?
Spring. Autumn isn’t a season. It’s a mood within a cultural tradition, that views life as a flow out of the earth during certain degrees of tilt of its northern shoulder towards […]
Autumn and the Wind
Thoreau called images like the ones below “autumnal”. He described the ripeness of such leaves at great length. He called them fruits. Keats did much the same. He called them mellow fruitfulness, on the […]
Walking With Bears: a meditation on the place of ecocritical writing today
This is a folded land. Not all lands are made like that, but this one is. We can expect folds from it, and lines of energy, planes tilted up at odd angles, […]
What Would Our Sons and Daughters Want for a World?
I mentioned yesterday that it is the genius of science that it separates the components of a scene in order to be able to say what it does know and what it […]
Okanagan Okanogan 