I woke up the morning of July 4th feeling cynical about “Independence Day” after the recent slew of Supreme Court decisions that essentially eviscerated long-standing constitutional rights and protections considered core to our democracy. With Dobbs v. Jackson, the Supreme Court’s newly anointed conservative supermajority stripped women of the constitutional…

Anyone who’s read George Orwell’s “1984,” the dystopian novel about life under an authoritarian regime, knows that to survive, one had to accept whatever Big Brother said no matter how big the lie. Proof you’d come to fully embrace the all-controlling Party was to believe without question that two plus…

In Hiding IN HIDING Altitude 2134 feet. Sky clear. Vine maple leaves, red and gold, scatter in the breeze. Moss-covered ground is as soft and wet as a kitchen sponge, and I know this because I am lying on that ground. Flattened to it. There is a rutted, gravel road…

Seasonal Gifts In winter I find myself thinking about how much I love winter. It is its quiet, its long nights, its holiday traditions, one after another, trees and candles and music and light. It is its storms shaking boughs and filling rivers and covering mountains in white. …

-Naseem Rakha After riding a bus for nine hours from his college, Elijah came home for a brief 26 hour visit, just enough time for Chuck and him to go out for breakfast then spend the day with our dying cat, Itty Bitty. …

I am re-reading John Hersey’s book Hiroshima — the devastating look at life at the moments before, during, and after the city was obliterated by the world’s first atomic bomb. …

In an all out effort to keep the world in a buying frenzy we have the ubiquitous shopping cart. While shopping at Ikea the other day is was struck by this image — shopping carts packed together like nesting dolls, or rather, nesting dollars. I wondered, if we took all…

Grace is the name given to a steel sculpture of a woman balanced in the Natarajansa pose on a piece of rusted and barnacle encrusted cannery slag in Bellingham Bay. No one seems to know who created her, or put her in the middle of the lagoon, about 70 feet…

Standing in the waiting room at the car wash on inauguration day I overheard a large man swearing at the shop’s TV. “Look at that dumb SOB,” he said pointing at our newly inaugurated President. “Fucker. Nothing but a parrot.” The man was sitting in a chair next to a…