Reading & Writing

The Science Behind Sleep and Ways to Get More of It

In this anxiety provoking time, many readers have expressed problems with sleep disturbances. A book entitled Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker, PhD. (professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley and Director of the Center for Human Sleep Science) offers the reader information on many aspects of […]

Review of Tightrope, by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

Nick Kristof, who as a columnist for the New York Times, reminds us often of what we should be doing, has, together with his wife Sheryl WuDunn, a former business editor and foreign correspondent for the Times who now works in finance and consulting, written a book entitled Tightrope that inspires us to go do […]

Review of Sustainable Homes for the 21st Century by Richard Benner and Michael Royce

As many of us grow older, we dream of ways to make our own lives simpler while conserving resources for future generations. Ideally, we would love to be among friends who share these values. Richard Benner and Michael Royce have managed to achieve these goals and best of all, their recently published book, Sustainable Homes […]

All My Relations

I want to thank all my relations for this chance to be on Earth in her time of flourishing; to thank the First People of this place, to honor their sovereignty in long and continuing relation, still teaching us how we might be here together; to thank my mother and father, moon and sun, for […]

The Replacements

My parents are missing. I think it happened around the time that my daughter was born. I am embarrassed to say that I was so consumed by being a new mommy that I didn’t notice at first that they had disappeared. My daughter is now three years old. Don’t worry. My daughter has wonderful grandparents. […]

A Fertile Meadow Far From Town

I wished to dive into some deep stream of thoughtful and devoted life, which meandered through retired and fertile meadows far from town. I wished…to lurk in crystalline thought like the trout under verdurous banks, where stray mankind should only see my bubble come to the surface. I wished to live, ah! As far away […]

Fire and Water

I had always thought that when I died, my children would scatter my ashes under the pines beside Davis Lake, where we have camped for twenty years. But it’s all ashes there now. Wildfire flared up along the road behind the east campground. Driven by 25-mile-an-hour winds, the firestorm charged across the road and ran […]

The Prankster-in-Chief Moves On

The answer is never the answer. I’ve never seen anybody really find the answer—they think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer. —Ken Kesey […]

Hippocratic Hypocrisy

Several years ago, Congressman Raul Labrador (R- Idaho) proclaimed that “nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care.” * My experience has been different. When I heard his words I thought of a sweet young woman whose body and community both turned against her.  Somehow, I was supposed to be her last hope. […]

“Good Driver!”

Passing through steeply descending terrain amid dramatic peaks in the Hindu Kush Mountains, south of Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan, with treacherous cliffs dropping abruptly only yards to our left, my driver and I saw before us a disturbing scene of near disaster. A public bus had crashed into an enormous rock on the right hand […]