Process/ing

Pilot Rock at sunrise. From "Wild Transit," not up at Oregon Humanities:

"Buses made my first memories in the mountains possible, and buses would help form new memories and a new life in my mid-thirties. I wonder about what might be possible for so many others as well, if we could only break out of the stranglehold that car culture has on our collective imagination, so that the words transit and buses aren’t automatically equated with urban and cities.

There’s more at stake than any one individual’s ability to go hiking. The culturally reinforced habits of thought that link transit with urban spaces and cars with wild spaces also map onto the false dichotomies we’ve made between human culture and the natural world. These days, more Oregonians are trying to break down these manufactured distinctions, as more of us understand the extent to which the forests in Oregon that settlers claimed were “uninhabited wilderness” were in fact maintained, cared for, and lived on by the land’s Indigenous peoples since time immemorial. We’re getting clearer on how it’s not an absence of people that makes a place wild, but that wildness comes in part from how we as humans show up there, how much we let our presence be felt in the more-than-human world. What if one of the ways we begin to renew our care for the wild, to have a lighter impact while still being present, is to reduce the number of vehicles we cram into such spaces? What if part of rewilding is remembering how to migrate from village to mountaintop, not in isolation, but in community? What if the most wild way to show up in the woods is not in a 4x4 truck, but on a bus?"

"This month, I’ve been reminded of the potential of art and writing that is grounded in community and purpose to hold us together through difficult times, the way it can let us witness one another and let us feel witnessed, the way it can help us experience through all our varied senses the possibility of transformation."

Also this month, I watched the rapid appearance of a surprise sunflower forest around my house. See how the two come together in "With Sighted Eyes and Feeling Heart, Among the Sunflowers," over at Unsettling.

My first piece as an Oregon Humanities Community Storytelling Fellow is out!

"I have no business being in Klamath Falls—and not just during a week in which it has received over a foot of snow. All I'm trying to do is travel from Ashland, where I live, to Corvallis. It just so happens that I'm trying to do so without a car.

“I admit to hoping that if I can make myself hardy enough to be whipped in the face by unexpected spring gusts, I will tap into the strength needed for the braver forms of action necessary in these times. For we are being tossed about by winds and currents harsher than what I will meet outside my door this week.

This is the point of all these seasonal practices, really: to ground us in the places we love, to know them as worth protecting, while also remembering the more-than-human powers upon which we depend, if most days unconsciously so. It is this whole other realm both beyond and encompassing the human one that makes life possible, and that, I believe, sometimes act through us in ways we still do not fully fathom. It is times such as the ones we face now in which it is wise to go and seek their aid.”

Full post at https://open.substack.com/pub/unsettling/p/in-the-season-of-uncertainty

Goodreads is currently blocking new reviews of JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. Giving something a two-star rating is my typical catharsis after reading something truly terrible, and I needed that outlet badly enough that here I am back at Tumblr after a bit of a break.

I pulled the copy I read out of a Little Free Library around the time rumors of Vance as the Republican VP pick began circulating, thinking maybe I should finally read it, despite studiously avoiding it since its initial release.

But while I didn't expect to like HE, I'll admit I didn't anticipate it to be as awful as it really is. The last few decades have been the golden age of memoir and autofiction, and this somehow captured everyone's attention? I don't know that it makes me think poorly of Vance so much as it does every reader who found this revelatory or insightful.

I'd heard it called 'poverty porn,' interesting mostly for the shock value, but if what's in here is shocking then you've managed to keep up some willful ignorance about the lived reality of a good many people. And if you take his surface-level conclusions on any of it as thoughtful analysis, it suggests you also haven't been taking in much else on the topic.

Piece up today at Unsettling with some interesting maps tracing the evolution of the Oregon-California border, and a bit on my own experience hiking to that border earlier this summer.

"State borders are always a little artificial, but the manner in which the 42nd parallel unnecessarily cuts through and divides so many small and unique communities makes it especially so. 

Yet we use artificial lines such as this one to shape many of our own conceptions about what a place is like. Our tiresome Red State/Blue State divide in popular discourse is just one example (and a distinction that happens to be quite unhelpful in these particular parts of these two particular states). The more we let the unexamined categories resulting from borderlines harden, the more we let the powerbrokers of the past with their pens and maps continue to have excessive and arbitrary sway over our future. Do we really want that?"

Published a new short series of photos showing what it's like to experience a recent prescribed burn, taken earlier this spring on the Arizona National Scenic Trail. Also some additional fun photos of the desert. All at unsettling.substack.com.

There’s a new groundswell of critique of the 4th of July this year, and more abstention from routine participation than I’ve really seen before. Just a couple years ago, when I first wrote this post, I still felt pretty lonely on that front, which made dealing with PTSD on the holiday all the more difficult.

I still think we’re a long way from finding appropriate forms by which to mark the founding of the United States, but I’m feeling a little more companionship on that quest this year.

There’s a new groundswell of critique of the 4th of July this year, and more abstention from routine participation than I’ve really seen before. Just a couple years ago, when I wrote the post below, I still felt pretty lonely on that front, which made dealing with PTSD on the holiday all the more difficult.

Today, though, jumping on the socials later in the afternoon, I found this filling my feeds:

Starting a new series over at Unsettling. Excerpts from the first post:

The protests after George Floyd are often characterized as rebellions. While they helped popularize calls for abolitionism and forms of restorative justice—ideas that have restoration, repair, and healing at their center—it hasn’t seemed, at least not to me, that these two concepts are paired together very often. We don’t talk about rebellion as related to repair. Did efforts for reparations get a boost, post-rebellion? Yes. Do we yet talk easily about rebellion as a call for repair or for reparations? Not so much. I’m curious about this, and if there is a greater connection between acts of rebellion, which act as a kind of rupture, and the opening up of possibilities for true repair. This flies in the face of how rebellion and protest are often read; popular narratives often see them as nonsensical, attention-seeking enactments of additional harm. My own experience tells me they’re much more than that.

While protests happened worldwide after Floyd’s death, it was here in Seattle that a very particular kind, the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (or CHOP, and at times also known as either the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest or the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) took place, with calls to defund police—calls that took on a new urgency for many experiencing the impacts of police violence for the first time, as tear gas seeped into local residences. The latter fact is probably why the CHOP holds a more prominent place in popular memory than some other important Seattle occupations—both the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center and El Centro de la Raza are longstanding community hubs that were won using the tactic of occupation. These are direct actions that didn’t simply flash and fizzle, but very clearly won actual physical territory, and they’re worth learning more about. Though it’s possible that the effects of the CHOP are still playing out in ways that aren’t so easy to see, as most of us who were involved in Occupy are likely to argue is true for that movement.

But all these examples raise another set of questions: why is occupation so often the tactic of rebellion these days? What is gained by it? And when is it likely to be actually effective, and when is it more likely to fail? Do occupations—which are inherently place-based, necessitating the physical maintenance of a specific location—offer us any better opportunity for place-based healing? Do they increase or lessen the possibility for rebellion to turn to repair?

Wrote a little bit about how the contrast between SW and NW springs is allowing me to see things more clearly. Also some good links on foraging local weeds out of your yard, recipes, and this great video from the Nito Project: