“Flow” is Really a Cli-Fi Movie: And Your Cat and Dog Will Like it Too!

Watching the movie with my friends and Sammy—who thankfully has never been caught in a flood or even seen a river—I couldn’t help but see the story as a metaphor for the water element out of balance. Disruption of the water cycle is of course a key component of the human-caused climate breakdown that we are already living through...

Of Chosen Family and “Childless Cat Ladies”

Maybe we should all claim the honorific “childless cat lady”—whatever your gender, sexual orientation, or age, whether you have cats, dogs, other companion animals, or just love wildlife and the Earth, and whether or not you have raised children and/or grandchildren.

The Great Forgetting: World War II and the Fight Against Fascism

There is a Great Forgetting [of World War II} that all this storytelling is attempting to jolt us out of. Perhaps the collective unconscious is urging us to wake up before it’s too late and new iterations of fascism have decimated our increasingly fragile democracies, our ideals of human rights, and the very future of our planet due to its obscene coupling with climate denialism.

Be Unpredictable: Smash the Algorithm (and AI Too)!

The "Escape the thought police" game When I was a child of perhaps nine years old, my best friend, also named Debbie, and I used to play an odd game called “Escape the Thought Police.” Bear in mind that this was the mid-60s and though we were both reading at adult level by that age, … Continue reading Be Unpredictable: Smash the Algorithm (and AI Too)!

Healing and Redemption in the Alaskan Wild: A Review of On Heaven’s Hill, a novel by Kim Heacox

Kim Heacox’s latest novel On Heaven’s Hill is a vividly written tale of healing and redemption through connection with nature in the wild rainforest of Southeast Alaska. It is a multi-layered story with complex and sympathetic characters—one of them a wolf, the courageous and clever young male Silver. Magic weaves itself throughout the narrative and several subplots about community and compassion.

Solastalgia: Grieving Many Paradises Lost

I have a home I love in an environment I am deeply grieving.

None of This Had to Happen

Meditation and prayer help, but even after 30+ years of practice I can’t currently seem to sustain the feeling of calm non-attachment the way I used to before times were so relentlessly hard.