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 […]
[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 […]
Let’s talk about violence. Violence is. It manifests in countless forms, beyond shootings and knifings and fist fights. I sometimes call motor vehicles “motor weapons” because of the swath of death they leave in their wake (30,000-40,000 humans, and uncounted non-humans, die each year on the road, in the United States alone). And then there’s […]
For years, in my late teens and early twenties, I carried the following lines by Annie Dillard with me, invoking them in hopes of absorbing the ache of my most wrenching choices: “There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is […]