Articles

Sex, Time and Prophecy

Sex, Time and Prophecy: why women evolved to envision and how that learned ability can lead us toward a livable future. Prophecy is the ability to learn from time. Social scientists and anthropologists Leonard Shlain, Helen Fisher and Marija Gimbutas … Read More

Confession of a Bottle-Sick Novelist

Bottlesickness. “A temporary condition (often caused by shaking a bottle) that interferes with a wine’s fruit flavors,…alleviated with a few days rest.” Wine.com Dateline: Taos, New Mexico. One week from completing my six-week fellowship at Wurlitzer Foundation, I woke assailed … Read More

On Shapeshifting

On Shapeshifting: cost/benefit and peril In 1976, I got divorced, left the Digger community I had lived and worked among, abandoned my life in Aspen Colorado, and took my girls home to southern Ohio where my mother lived. Those condensed … Read More

Matrilineality

When you’ve grown up in a patrilineal tribe—where your family name comes from the father and ancestry is traced back through your father’s fathers, it’s difficult to imagine another way. Before the progenitors of the sky gods of three major … Read More

Humanifesto #3

“Misinterpretation of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar was the basis for a popular belief that a cataclysm would take place on December 21, 2012. December 21, 2012 was simply the day that the calendar went to the next b’ak’tun, at … Read More

Sic Transit Gloria: a eulogy for Peter Berg, the father of bioregionalism

Sic transit gloria: And so passes one of the most intriguing, profoundly influential men I have met in my life. I first met Peter Berg in the spring of 1967 at the Digger’s Free Store in the Haight Ashbury District … Read More

Susquehanna flood, community organizing–underwater in East Sayre

My partner in Reinhabitory Institute, Judith Thomas, was visiting the Penn-York Valley from the San Francisco Bay Area. I had told her my valley was a bioregionalist’s dream: in two states and three counties, between the Susquehanna and the Chemung … Read More

The Big Daddy of all the Book Fairs: Frankfurter Buchmesse

As a spanking new press with one publication–Burning Silk, my first novel in the Textile Trilogy–and another in the pipeline, going to Europe to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair would have been a case of the intent of our grasp … Read More

Nieuwemarkt, Amsterdam

Todd and Barbara’s canal house has a footprint of approximately 16 feet square. Land is at a premium in Amsterdam; houses were taxed on their footprint so thrifty Amsterdammers built up. My room is under the roof beams, up a … Read More

The Metises: designer people engineered by the continent

In fact, I STILL didn’t know what my novel was about, after completing it in Taos NM at the end of 2005, dazzled by the compelling eroticism. The journal I kept named the tribes I passed through, Hopi, Navajo, and … Read More

What makes Burning Silk a Reinhabitory Novel?

In case you wondered… What makes Burning Silk a Reinhabitory Novel? I had been waiting for someone to ask the question. David Simpson did. What makes Burning Silk a reinhabitory novel and further, what makes the book ideal to introduce … Read More

Humanifesto #2

Autumn equinox 2009 My grandson Rowan is weeping. I wonder: Am I too late to this wake? We’re not going to make it, I suddenly realize. My grandson, nine years old and a nature buff, recently spent a half day … Read More

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