Field Notes from the Anthropocene
An anthropologist's dispatches from the edges of ecology, grief, and the sacred.
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A Rhizomatic Exploration of Interconnectedness
“We are sculpted by the microbial companions that inhabit us, contributing to our symphonic cacophony with their unseen innovations and intelligent actions and adaptations. We, individual thinking, in-charge humans, just might choose whom we love, not because we love them, but because the microbes within us do. And in the tasting of another, in the strange mouth-to-mouth, we humans engage in when testing the waters of compatibility and attraction, we take in these unseen beings, and they move, silently, into the diversity of our organism. Becoming.”
A Story in Two Parts:
Glacier National Park (2)
Paying attention to the forest floor opens Everything here is interconnected. The reality is that everything everywhere is interconnected, but it becomes visible and alive when you kneel down and observe the undergrowth. What can we learn from this interconnection, these more-than-human dramas that take place out of our awareness and out of our notice? Life. Moving, shifting, becoming, breathing, living, and dying together for millennia. Most of the stories are untold.
Meaning-making through ordinary magic
My mother told me stories about this cycle, and I told them to my daughter, and together we tell them to Roma and Dahlia. As we pick berries together, babies strapped on milky chests and toddlers between our feet, we are weaving the fabric that saves us from the things that haunt us in the night. And as I navigate the many hauntings, I realize that this is what my mother did, too; we weave the fabric that holds us together when it seems all will come apart.