I’ve logged more experience than most with simplicity and the complexity you discover inside simplicity, minimalism and asocial behavior, endurance and landscape.
Here is the truth: I think some deep wisdom inside me (a) sensed the stress, (b) was terrified for me, and (c) gave me something new and hard to focus on in order to prevent me from lapsing into a despair coma — and also to keep me from having a jelly jar of wine in my hand.
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In a clearing in the woods alongside a country lane outside the town of Tutwiler in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, stands Sonny Boy Williamson’s granite grave marker. As we approach, we notice more of the glints beneath us, and notice the same silver glints piled atop the old monument.
Even though we all breathed the smoke from the destruction of the town of Paradise in 2018 — breathed in their burning cars, homes, animals, and bodies — it was still happening “over there” to “other people.”
A trip to the Antarctic, a 500-mile pilgrimage, a two-hour bus ride
When I first moved to New York City, I told myself that I could always leave if things didn’t work out. I’d be all in, until I wasn’t. I found a similar all-or-nothing quality to life there: the sad history of people’s failed dreams alongside all the obvious success stories and diehards who wondered what your problem was.
Featuring Bill McKibben, Rebecca McClanahan, Derrick Jensen, and more.
Wolves are an odd species. We have persecuted them more than any other wild animal, and yet they will stop to look at you, and occasionally take a step toward you. To me those moments are spiritual. That’s what we’re losing today.
It is often said of laying hens, veal calves, and dogs kept in cages for experimental purposes that this does not cause them to suffer, since they have never known other conditions. . . . This is a fallacy.
The deckhand helps where he can. He flips a few lobsters right side up. He tucks a stray antenna away from the pinch of the crate’s hinges. The lobsters, when he holds them, emit a faint buzzing noise — sort of like a scream, if you think about it, and the deckhand does.