Tristan Casey / JOURNAL

“   Once I twisted my ankle and had to rest with my foot up for a day or two. Eleanor brought me stacks of books and lots of tea. I started at the top of the pile and simply read. That evening she came into the cabin to chat with me, wondering what subject matter was filling my head. We talked and talked. At the end of our time together, she hugged me and said, “See, you need intellectual time. You’re so interesting, given a chance.“ I knew what she was getting at, though we never talked about it explicitly. I had brought to the commune a real anxiety around responsibility. How could it be otherwise given my years of life as a single mother? And look at all the jobs there were to do . . .   “   - Judith Plant, Culture Gap

“ ... most New World settlers arrived from pastoral places long since cleared for agriculture and grazing land, and a boundless treescape thriving with unfamiliar people and animals was a shock. It wasn’t just the continents scale they found so overwhelming, but its dense and endless secrecy: the forest is an introverted wilderness, and it offers risk and refuge in equal measure. Robin Hood found sanctuary there, but so did Red Riding Hood’s Wolf (who in the end, was killed by a woodcutter). While armies of empires dominate the open plain, rebels and patriots gain advantage in the shelter of trees—right beside outcasts, outlaws, and mystics. The woods provide food and building materials, and yet they also disorient and impede progress. Until relatively recently, North American staple-food species like deer, elk, bison, and caribou inhabited the forest from coast to coast, but so did wolves, bears, and mountain lions, creatures that continue to fascinate, terrify—and kill us—to this day.  “    - John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce

Long reads that have greatly impacted me: 1491 - Before Columbus arrived and those who followed, North America's population was greater than Europe's. While the hemisphere appeared raw and untouched, there's a good chance that it was being terraformed; from the Great Plains being cleared with fire to create a Buffalo Game Reserve to the infertile Amazon being densely grown to become the worlds largest orchard. A developing perspective that the 'New World' could have been succeeding at an alternate journey with the planet, up until 1492. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/302445/ The Uninhabitable Earth - David Wallace-Wells article on how the planet; it’s resources, temperature and people are all a ticking time bomb due to our vast industrial and technological expansion gives Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ a run for it’s money as the most terrifying post apocalyptic story that I’ve ever read. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html

“   I left Jan trying to sketch the thunderbird, and the other two picking up old blue trading beads; and worked my way through the nettles to a burial tree that I had spotted right back of the village. It was an immense fir, seven or eight hundred years old—so old that nothing could amaze it any more. Streamers of lichen dripped grey from bark and branches. Century after century it had stood there watching the fortunes of the little village at its feet. Had it rejoiced with them in the good times—times of plenty? Wept with them in the bad times—times of battle and famine? Or had it merely held their dead more lightly or more tightly as required? There were nine or ten boxes still up there, clasped in it’s gnarled branches. Perhaps the old tree’s clutch was growing feeble, or perhaps it was too old to care—for when I stepped round its base to the other side, three blood-stained skulls lay there on the ground. I shrank back in horror... but making myself look again, saw that it was only dye off the burial blankets. After lunch we rowed across to the burial islands. When tree burial was forbidden by the government the natives took to putting their dead on special burial islands, piling up the boxes in small log shelters through which the wind could blow. Each family or crest had its own island. The first one we landed on belonged to the wolf crest - a great running wolf thirty feet long, made of boards and painted white, with red and blue extra eyes and signs, stood guard over the dead of his family. On the other island, a killer whale proclaimed that the dead of his family lay there.   “     - M. Wylie Blanchet, The Curve of Time

“   Any culture that takes Genesis as its founding story can only have developed as ours has. The Bible is a thought experiment that shows us what becomes of the species that defines itself apart from nature, imagining a future for itself that is separate from the world’s. Revelation is therefore the natural and inevitable end of Eden - the place that story was headed all along. At the end of the Bible, human beings must imagine “a new heaven and a new earth.: What has become of the heaven and earth they had before? They have destroyed them.   “     - Clark Strand , Waking Up to the Dark