At first, she thought the tools didn’t belong in her writing area (which double, tripled, quadrupled, quintupled as her bathroom, dining table, charging station, ancestor altar, art studio, and so on). After all, she hadn’t put them there—she simply hadn’t bothered to remove them. Once she’d wiped the blackened boards of the ancient workbench a […]
[A few months ago, I published a review of Sanction, Volume I, by Roman McClay. Today, I received this commentary on that same book, along with a request that I post it anonymously. Having consulted my pendulum, and received a reading of harmony with my Sacred Heart, I decided to go ahead and do so. […]
Welcome to my new podcast, Undercurrents! Enjoy! Episode #1 (20 August 2019): Live vs. Dead Power with Trike Impresario Gregg Zuman Gregg Zuman, founder and principal of NYC-based trike-services company Revolution Rickshaws, and a long-time pedicab driver, reveals why trikes have not yet taken over the world—and how they still might!
[In late summer 2004, a couple weeks before I left Zendik Farm, a dog named Apache ripped a chunk out of my left calf, while I was diving into the pond. This scene, in which I reckon with the bodily aftermath of that attack, didn’t make it into Mating in Captivity. But I do so […]
[In this guest essay, Cara Judea Alhadeff, PhD, tells how she came to be living in a converted bus, at Earthaven Ecovillage, with her son Zazu and her partner, Rob Mies. For another angle on the story, please read Rob’s companion piece, “Building Our Home in 30 Days…in the Dead of Michigan Winter!” Scroll all […]
[In this guest essay, Rob Mies tells how he came to be living in a converted bus, at Earthaven Ecovillage, with his partner, Cara Judea Alhadeff, and her son Zazu. For another angle on the story, please read Cara’s companion piece, “Permaculture Love Story, a Dung Beetle’s Perspective.” For more photos of the conversion process, […]
Each morning, I engage in what I call “positive brainwashing”—I listen to a voice memo of myself reading a series of supportive texts (written in response to prompts from kick-ass life and career coach Sarah Mac), with the first few songs of The Complete Scottish Bagpipe Collection playing in the background. Here’s one such text; […]
In the days and weeks and months and years before MOSS, Madgelma had thought, a lot, about the polyculture of stories. She remembered learning, in high school biology, that scientists liked to conduct experiments on Drosophila melanogaster—the fruit fly—because it reproduced so quickly: they could observe, within forty-eight hours or so, the implications of a […]
In late February, I flew to Scotland, with my husband, to learn from my ancestors. I knew that if I went far back enough I’d find humans who’d evolved along with their land, and relied on a tight tribal weave for their thrival. What, I wondered, could these ghosts teach me about tending our Beacon […]
Madgelma didn’t know what had gotten into her, on that particular day; she did know that the sweep of her arm seemed inexorable, as she shoved that first laptop off the table. She was staying at a hostel in Scotland, on the sacred Isle of Iona. There was a sign posted on the door to […]