My German cockroach infestation, almost too good a pandemic allegory, forced me to confront the question of how much I could bear from New York City.
The grounding I felt in organized religion was substantial: the loss, acutely painful. I found temporary relief in all the ways nature found me wherever I lived.
As a person who spends a lot of her time reading, writing, and teaching about endangered creatures and environments, I craved something hopeful.
Everyone talks about sea levels and temperatures rising, but there’s also the more tangible inevitability of the soil running out.
Dillard stalked a world just beginning its freefall into an unprecedented amount of change, and her response was to look, and to look hard.
We are already living in a changed world. Giving yourself time and space to grieve is important. But grief can also be a powerful tool for motivation.
Kate Harris writes in Lands of Lost Borders, “Explorers might be extinct, in the historic sense of the vocation, but exploring still exists, will always exist: in the basic longing to learn what in the universe we are doing here.” This is exactly how I felt working at Hilda Glacier.
Contrary to its reputation as an extreme sport, freediving has meditative aspects.
As a child growing up in a landlocked state, I’d imagined the flock of gulls as a cloud of wings, calls sounding like laughter. Now I was struggling to grasp all that we’d lost.
My partner and I were trying to have a baby despite our climate fears. Then Trump was elected.