“I write because I have not yet found how to say what I long to say. Words can’t contain the fullness of what I see and feel and know. There is a spruce tree outside my window; that the spruce tree exhales what I breath in, and inhales what I breathe out. Our necessary exchange is a silken thread in the invisible, infinite web of breath, nutrients, ideas, feelings, and love that continually pours into and out of all beings. How can I say this so someone else can feel it? That’s why I write.”
~Therese DesCamp
Still Points are deep dives into the nature of the human and more-than-human world.
Wide Spots are the 500-word monthly columns which I write for the Valley Voice newspaper.
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Wide Spot: Some Assembly Required
I have been reassembling our freezers, moving turkey and frozen wontons and homemade soup from the inside freezer to the newly empty outside freezer. It’s empty because friends have been able to go home: their frozen chickens, applesauce and tomato paste have gone home, too. I am also re-assembling my office. Strewn across desk and …
Wide Spot: Fireweed
I have been thinking that we may have reached the chronic, as opposed to acute, stage of our forest fire saga. For many of us, evacuation orders and alerts are rescinded, at least for now. For others, there’s at least a system to check on livestock and land. People are making plans to sustain a …
Wide Spot: Aim High
One predictable result of a good retreat is the scramble at the end when people start asking, “How can we keep this great community going?” Then follows a frenzied exchange of emails and phone numbers. Equally predictable is that any community formed simply for its own continuance inevitably falls apart. I find this depressing. I …
Wide Spot: Cellular Life
Wide Spot: Cellular Life In 1837, the botanist Matthias Schleiden and the zoologist Theodor Schwann had dinner together. Comparing their research while they ate, they realized that there was a deep uniformity between Schleiden’s plant structures and Schwann’s animal structures. Both plant and animal tissues were built of cells: autonomous, independent cells, living their own …
Wide Spot: Look for the Helpers
When my little brother died, I found myself utterly alone. I felt like I was trapped in a transparent box, invisible to everyone but me. No matter what I said or did, I couldn’t get out. I couldn’t touch anyone. And no matter what anyone else said or did, it didn’t touch me. The senseless …
Wide Spot: Fog Blind
I am blind. This is legally true—without glasses, my eyes are so bad that I should only be behind the wheel if I have a guide dog on my lap who has a driving license. Fog exacerbates my vision problems. Driving Highway 6 in the dark and the fog is hard enough; when another car …
WideSpot: Beautiful
“Our fingers imbibe like roots,” begins a prayer by Francis of Assisi, “So I place them on what is beautiful in this world.” Beauty may feel like a shaky reed these days, nothing much to hang our hat on. Most of us are more inclined to attend to what’s ugly: environmental degradation, wars, famines, loss …
Wide Spot: Get Ready
I remember looking up at Goat Mountain from the Kohan Garden that evening. We’d had a lightning storm about an hour earlier and now the trees were candling, just up the mountainside from our house. Close enough that if the wind kept up, we’d be evacuated before the night was out. I sprinted home and …
Wide Spot: Set the Table
If I had five bucks for every time I’ve heard someone grieve over feeling like they don’t belong, I could spend a month in Costa Rica with money left over. I don’t want to denigrate the sincere yearning for community. Many of us lack friends who are willing to hear the longing of our hearts. …
Wide Spot: Temper, temper
First you heat carbon and iron to 1450 C, then cool it rapidly. This makes the steel hard, but it shatters easily. Next you heat it to a lower temperature, say, 650 C, and cool it slowly. The end result is hard but not brittle, with springy strength. This is tempering. I thought about tempering …