Of the 75+ articles I wrote during my time with Outside/Trail Runner, here are my favorites.
Top 5 Books in 2019 (via The Mandorla 200)
Since starting The Mandorla 200—micro-distillations of 200 necessary books on ecology, justice, and place-belonging for our times. 200 words or less—in February 2018, I’ve completed nearly 25% of the 200 book goal.
In 2018, I read and wrote about 25 books. This year, 23.
Here are the five most-memorable reads from the 2019. Every book I select for the Mandorla 200 is highly considered, so it’s always difficult to put this list together. These, however, were the five that stuck with me the most, their micro-distillations republished here…
(37/200) White boy, progressive boy, fragile boy. Wait, me? You must be mistaken. I’ve got nothing but love and light. I’m color-blind. Well-traveled. Have several acquaintances of color. I support Black Lives Matter. Surely I’m not the problem; those bigoted backroadsy white folks spit-spatting hate – now that’s racism. I’m of the educated, liberal sort, therefore absolving me of any contribution to structural supremacy, right? Wrong. So wrong. To confront this highly problematic and binary frame is to see whiteness as drifting like a gas, fluid, adaptive to any environment in order to stay on top, and to also understand that anything challenging such legacies of privilege will erupt in immediate defensiveness, withdrawal, anger, and deflection. Welcome to the “cocoon,” that insulated lack of racial stress permitting me to view racism as someplace, or someone, else. This is a) dishonest and b) disrespectful, and it perpetuates a cycle of white superiority if I cannot truly face my own role in oppression, no matter my politics. What to do? Build racial stamina, break that shallow script of progressive (but conditional) human liberation, own my personal contributions to structural exclusion through increased curiosity, listening and learning and scrutinizing speech and thoughts and actions, and prioritize absorbing another’s embodied experience over kneejerk reactions for self-protection. Now, that’s the real work.
(38/200) Worlds whisper beneath your feet, a place to which your body will return one day. Such mortal suggestion is perhaps why we favor aboveground drama, even as underworlds tug us ever downward to the places we spoon-dig for liberation, where we bury our recent-dead while siphoning the long-dead back to life, fossils-extraction-combustion-boom. Subsurface playfields, covert operations, dank truths, trees passing mycelia love notes, punk rock subversion, urban inversion. By avoiding these places—these dark, breathless chambers—we prime them for shallow burial. Stuff away detritus too wretched to face in containers upon containers, sarcophagus down the esophagus, poisoned lozenges corked and buried so that they never hurt or haunt us again. But repression? Concealment? Waste entombed? Ghosts feed on such nutrients. This much we know: it is the inverse of light that helps us see best, so we call upon you, underworld, to reveal your dark matter truths, honest and full vision for what lives and dies on this rock already engraved in a trillion disowned secrets. I vow to plunge into my underworlds, to squeeze through inky shafts and break bread with whatever resides in that psychic bedrock. Want to see far and long? Look down.
(27/200) The gauntlet of modernity is something we are asked to rise and shine for every day. But what about all its glaring insincerities, its artifice and cages and social posturing? What about these shards of separate selves scattered about in boxes, loping in the dark? See, what I crave is the whole; I want everything. Communion. And yet too often I’m offered only keyhole vistas, bits and pieces and broken mirrors. Nostalgia for what’s been lost swerves me into the side-rail and I course-correct trying to return home, trying to locate a life truer than what I’ve found out here, something baby-bottom soft, green-spring renewal held by mature masculine and feminine forces co-conspiring toward liberated union. Sure, inauthenticity is everywhere, a shared madness that weighs heavy on the psyche. But the way out ought not to be lobotomized forfeiture of feeling. Passing through today’s gauntlet requires we first call out the jar-glass hindering intimacy with the whole, because the arithmetic of happiness is subtraction, erasure not of our selves but of all the bullshit causing swerve and separation to begin with. Identify the delusion, shatter the glass, avoid cutting your feet on its fragmented mess, and step forward into the pyrotechnical lightshow of mortality, anew.
(29/200) Extinction event spins a world of color and animacy into grayscale decay, a place vacated by the gods. Nearly. Nearly everything burned and poisoned and left for rot and those who remain stumble through hell-realm desperation cursing subscriptions to a faith unmet, for living so trivially while the world burned. Man becomes easily enslaved by such dark, cannibalizing or being cannibalized, table-scrapping for breath. Tree stump human stump blue sky bright star long gone. No birdsong no visible horizon. Except. Except the disparate few firefly pilgrims stumbling to locate each other through such “cauterized” psychoscapes. Coral bleaching, warming climates, emptying forests and seas—we must continue to carry the flickering light of possibility, of will. Apprentice with geologic endurance because no matter the odds, no matter the battering defeat or horror or silencing of the more-than-human community, our dreams and memories and love for all that is life-perpetuating keeps us doing the Work that Reconnects. Even after gray doubles down to spiked graphite, even after flesh-hungry oil-thirsty monsters prowl the streets, the rows of Congress and Church and Corporate meetings intent to consume whatever and whoever is left, we still carry the fire because this much we know: bonfires are best when shared.
(43/200) Hate responded to with more hate stacks red upon red with the obvious result: more red. More violence, more racism, more bigotry. Excavate hate and the deepest known fear gushes forth—a fear of death—fear projecting itself onto other races to protect from the unknown, to control what illusions of power and permanence and order we think we have. Disowning fear in this way does little to reconcile what lives in us, expressed through structural exclusion and erasure. To speak, then, of God’s role in all this is to suggest that God exists only to provide a larger and more liberating mirror of love and possibility for all. If God does not offer this then God must be removed, for freedom is not possible until it is possible for all, liberty nourished only by shared intimacy, by coming closer, not thick-skinned, coarse-ground spittle. Seek justice but arc always towards softening. Apprentice more with oatmeal than thorn bush. Stand with melting things to expose my own gooey interior of fear and hate and privilege, legacies of violence. Place them out in the open to dry and walk towards, not away, owning such fear in hopes of transforming it into something of enduring care. Soften.
Top 5 Best Books in 2018 (via The Mandorla 200)
On February 16, 2018, I started a personal reading/writing Instagram project called the Mandorla 200.
The mission statement was simple: Micro-distillations of 200 necessary books on ecology, justice, and place-belonging for our times. 200 words or less.
The Mandorla 200 emerged from a need to keep up with reading all the wonderful books I had accumulated over the years. I also understood that, as a writer, reading is as much a part of the practice of writing as writing itself.
So I made 3 goals:
Goal #1: Read 200 books of high cultural and ecological importance (goal: read more; read better).
Goal #2: Write a 200-word or less "distillation” for each book’s deepest message (goal: more concision).
Goal #3: Express gratitude for the author, the publisher, and the person whose recommendation made me read the book (goal: more gratitude).
So far I’ve featured 25 books, doing my best to balance genre, gender, ethnicity, modern/classic, etc.
I am 13% completed with the project at the end of 2018, and it’s been a wildly satisfying and generative project for me. Thank you for following along.
Reading is, in practice, such a solitary thing, so the feedback, community, and conversation sparked has been perhaps the most beautiful part of the process.
Below are my five favorite reads so far. I’ve reposted the 200-word micro-distillations here, but you can follow along on Instagram, too. Thank you.
There There, by Tommy Orange. Shots fired, holes everywhere, draining and bleeding, wounds old and new, past and present, staring through your own reflection, everywhere. How does one move forward, stay visible, while also dancing and drumming into tradition, into heritage? Spiders carry webs, miles of filament, both home and trap, and all lives they braid together, all of it, all the joy and pain, victory and violation, they all converge at the powwow for celebration and ceremony and robbery, white guns and white violence manifest. There is no longer a “there” to locate with any certainty, when home’s been paved over, homogenized, settled, and surveilled by mall cops and modern palates. Colonialism fires its white-hot bullets, so hard, so breakneck. In this flurry, where’s Home, where’s Mother, where’s firm ground after Earth and the cultures that most respect Her are being turned into spectacle and artifact? Earth is everywhere: Earth is bullet. Earth is urban. Earth is imperial coliseum holding native ceremony. Earth is drone. Earth is feather. Shots fired, holes everywhere. Do you stay or flee? Perhaps you dance through the onslaught of bullet-rain, old moves and new ones, transformed ones. You dance any way and anyways, for sustenance, for survival, for grieving, for healing, for homecoming.
Rising by Elizabeth Rush. The brine is here. Sea level rise means temperature rise means species rise means we must rise from the stupor of our ego-systems to meet the challenge of responsible retreat, unspooling the red and blue from our flag to wave bone-white in surrender from all we’ve wrought. But our colonial, frontier-eating patriarch buries narratives like these as if they were bundled in cowardice and defeat. Instead, we bury ourselves in saltwater graves, paying no heed to nonhuman life on the move, en masse, all forced from known thermal niches. We too must make coastal resettlement fair and honest, a retreat to firm ground, a place of observation and reflection, not investing in the same sinking developments atop marshland and mangrove, these selfless edge zones that gulp our carbon and ask for nothing in return. Exploit the edges and we lose, for edge zones are where the great conversations happen: between Earth and us, between us and us. The brine is here and it laps at our doors, fists knocking harder and louder, megastorms dervishing off-shore and on-deck to bowl their strikes of ecological indifference. Retreat or rebuild, rise or raze. Ask these questions now because the brine is here, the seas they rise, and we must rise with them.
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. Invite curiosity for the dark, investigations of the underworld, for what’s been sealed over, frozen shut. Otherwise, this moonless lake might orphan us from tributaries of loss and abandonment that need our attention most. But we’re often told to keep scrubbing. Keep brushing that hair, that toilet. Wear twice-ironed button-ups and bleach everything. Purell your life clean. Upkeep, housekeep, keep the veneer of civility polished while scars and skeletons roil beneath to encrust the unaddressed with overcivilized worship of the prim and proper. Such posturing sweeps “waste” into unseen corners and under bridges, thumbing corks into bottles to trap the ferment. This slow violence of concealment scrapes the psyche like glacial creep, ice-floods inching us ever closer to reset. Tend not to the dark night of the soul and we remain in dollhouses of perpetual adolescence. Instead this: pull up the anchor, pop the cork, and drift our vessels into waters below the fast-moving train tracks of modern life, into ink-fog night, fingerbones paddling into more honest directions, even when, in the distance, our house rips apart in fantastic blaze, set by us, crude purchase from the night but an offering, too, signal fires suggesting where we go, and what we do, next.
The Overstory by Richard Powers. Stand still. Listen, because right now trees are whispering stories they wish you would hear. Tune ears and downshift gears from that hyperrational buzz so that you actually hear their song, for trees are much older and smarter than us, offering moral lessons daily on generosity. That is, if we listen, if we set aside our hunger, intestinal slurries pining for more resources, more prestige, more safety. Cup your ears to canopy moan and leaf twizzle, sounds of ancient neural pathways, governance systems, trade routes. These intelligent bodies teach us to give and forgive, to offer shade to our enemies, to reach up and up only to send gifts down and down. Humans and forests, we sprout from shared trunk, and our task is to come home, a return to forgotten belongings, an inheritance of care. Treetops whisper as they watch us, patiently, crash. Sit still and we might hear their hymns, that we are but one expression of life branching in millions of directions, arms long and elbow-knotted, appearing separate but bound together all the same. It’s time we return here, home, and listen for further instructions, which might go something like this: slow down, grow with intent—as much below ground as above—and give, give, give.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Ecology is home and home is a ballerina on a seesaw dancing the world into being while listening to the eeks and creaks of bird beaks and full creeks, a world alive despite our violations. Humans, we’re the new kids on the evolutionary block, and what we seek is the long view: to learn the dance of the give-and-take, that we don’t own her or control her but are of her, a planet that feeds us daily. So we feed her back, slowing and listening and celebrating a world that sees us, sniffs us, hears us, and lest we forget this reciprocity, well that’s where ceremony helps: dance and poetry and science and music teaching us to live into cultures of gratitude, reminders that we’re in this swirl of belonging together and that the world calls upon our gifts right now to sustain life, as squirrels carry seed and algae nestles lichen and pecans hold council and cedars teach resilience. Go afield and view others not as inert bundled burps but as life that leaps and flies and swims and burrows into their own niches on behalf of the whole, a balanced exchange from which we all flourish. Go afield. Listen. Bring gifts.
Lodged Out Retreat
Excited to be a guest speaker and trail curator for the Lodged Out Unplugged Retreat in Leavenworth, WA October 26-29, 2018. A weekend of running, chatting creativity and conservation with other like-minded folks. Run by Olympian marathoner and photographer Sarah Attar.
All the Hers
At some point our human expression somehow leaned into an atrophied gender asymmetry where the outer, unguided masculine began to make all the rules, and have now, for thousands of years, subjugated and dehumanized other groups thereof, only to harden their own hegemony.
Today we’ve inherited such white male dominance, a hallmark signature of global market capitalism, too, penetrating penises of fossil extraction, gun shafts erect, fleshy fingers pointing, shouting and shooting and shooing and spouting over the calm, over the collected, verbal and sexual and ecological assaults at every corner firing shots across the world without consent, barreling through town to clench what’s left of our psycho-adolescent control of the sandbox while previously unsung voices continue to shine through with ever-more truth, ever-more vitality, ever-more authenticity, and, therefore, ever-more authority.
It’s all a threat to the Secret, the lie we’re told as young boys, of hyper-masculine dominance, of power acquired through the Take: steal the football, steal the base, capture the flag, go for the jugular, go for the gold, that never-take-no-for-an-answer approach to making deals, making friends, getting paid and getting laid.
This calculus of oppression—colonial, racial, sexual, environmental—are all to be glazed over, set firm to law and textbook, truth eclipsed by a machismo perpetuated through failed generations of broken men just following protocol: to be a man, to nut up, that, to be a feminist is to somehow threaten one’s manhood, to get down and give me twenty, to some militant allegiance to secrecy all the way down to its hollow core, a core stewing in lies, lies that keep us on top, so to speak.
No more. I am a man. I am also a feminist. And I believe her. All the hers.
Podcast Interview: A New Angle
Check out this great interview by dear friend, ultrarunner legend, and UM Professor Justin Angle. We discuss the creative process, public lands, and how to keep balanced in the hustle. Take a listen.
In Photos: Freeflow Institute
June 23-28, 2018 - Co-facilitated a 6-day wilderness writing and conservation trip with the Freeflow Institute down the Main Salmon River. 15 clients, featuring Pulitzer-Prize finalist William deBuys. Amazing trip, the first of many. Some photos...
Tanzania 2017
Here are some images from a full month in Tanzania this past June. Click on the images for more.
Todos Santos Writer's Workshop
Excited to announce that I'll be on for another year in Baja, Mexico, as Associate Director for the 2018 Todos Santos Writer's Workshop! Take a look.
International Resilience Summit
This October, I was invited to sit on a panel to discuss resilience and climate change. Really honored and excited. Check it out!
Peru 2017
Here are some of the highlighted images from a month fastpacking and exploring in Peru. Damn.
