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Magpies know their own faces. Put a mirror in front of them, and they know it’s them, and not another bird. During one particular study, scientists placed a white mark on the chest of a captive magpie named Gerti. The mark, situated just below Gerti’s beak, was only visible in the mirror. Gerti, the…
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You do not sleep, fern tree. You stand awake, with moonlight on your shoulders. Behind you, Venus descends, slows, and dissipates, like a stone into water, but you do not move. At dawn the steller’s jays sway on your branches. Their feet clasp, and together you and the birds rustle, touched by the shallow…
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When I see fog, I think of sunlight. I think of the string of clear days at the beginning of each December where the sky blushes blue and cold. I think of a stream I once saw, tucked into a shore-pine forest by the ocean, how I wandered there at dawn in a sea of…
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How can we ever belong to this place? Here, lands were stolen and degraded, peoples were killed and sent away. Here, the future is threatened by rising waters, beetle-withered pine forests, dry winters; by emptiness, and loss. What’s already happened, and what is to come–they are two stone walls on either side of us.…
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Down low, in the golden grass, I sit and watch the scrub oak, bled of sun, and the cottonwood, who stands below us in the canyon, his leaves immovable in the warm silence, the bright walls, the dying sun, the painted light, the circular, dry plumes of wind, the crickets and the stream, the…
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Behind their voices I hear the sky. It moves patiently but briskly, the way a deep river flows but is glass. I feel the depth of the soil; I feel its color waiting in the darkness. I follow it to the hill, weaving between the gray-night grasses, the rabbitbrush, the sage. At the top,…
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I wait at the bus stop, in the grass, as the cars scuff by. There is a hint of sunset behind the road, behind the skyscrapers, and the houses feel empty as dawn. In this moment I look up. Three turkey vultures circle each other; they dance like kites, smooth, their shadows lengthening, their…
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I wander away from the lights. I look for the darkened air, where the bats are felt but not seen. Wildfire smoke smudges the horizon. I crunch over the grass and the gravel until, finally, I am far from the cabin. I look up. Past the smoke, in the clear zenith, vega hangs emptily,…
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This month I decided to participate in Plastic Free July, a worldwide initiative to encourage the reduction of everyday plastic usage. Aside from being made from fossil-fuels, plastic takes millennia to biodegrade, polluting our rivers and oceans–and their animal inhabitants–in the meantime. Many plastic products are designed to only be used once, which makes…
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We walk in the time before sunset. “River,” we ask. “River,” we call. The air smells of sagebrush, that fresh after-rain perfume. We don’t see the rain but the wind speaks of it– the warmth it holds, the velvet-soil fragrance, the red paintbrush and wild peas. “River,” we sing above the wind-flow and the…