This is a very broad generalization about sports but I’ll say it anyway. Sports where there are hats involved are more explicitly about control of your opponent than the free flow of play. This is not to say that there aren’t amazing and improbable and improvisational and miraculous things that happen in football or baseball…

In this episode of The Oxbow the suggestion from a postcard was “rocks.” After a joking chastisement of the submitter for giving too specific a suggestion (The Lessons that rocks can teach us) some considerations of how rocks inspire the phrase “rock ‘n roll” which brings in a discussion of oral and literate culture. Other…

This isn’t a story about the American Chestnut. In the world over but very broadly in the Northern hemisphere there is a persistent mythical understanding of a World Tree. An Axis Mundi. A Tree of Life. The Spine of The Great Mother. The Source of All Wands. This tree might be holding up the heavens,…

So often I write about indigenous people or a traditional cultural pathway. But the other day I saw a few minutes of a baseball game and I haven’t watched baseball in years. I used to be a fan and then it fell away for me. Then the same day I saw some kids and a…

The Schoodic Peninsula in Maine comes from the Passamaquoddy Indian word  ‘skut-auke’ meaning ‘place of the fire’ or ‘land that has been burned’. Whether this was a place that was the origin of their fire story or a place that they burned at some interval to spur new growth or a spot that was prone…

In the fall of 1797 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the famed English poet, fell ill in some unspecified way while out walking and when he returned to the farmhouse he was staying in he took some opium to quell the pain. While opium conjures a particularly exotic and hazy kind of stumbling degeneration to the modern…

I would venture to guess that anyone reading this will have, even occasionally, gone for a walk. Even a short one down the street after you park your car counts. The vast majority of the places and paths that are walked are sanctioned, determined, marked and mapped. Whether it is Broadway or 9th street or…

Recently a rare picture of a crow in a strange spread out and prone position was snapped in the Swan Lake Nature Sanctuary in Victoria, British Columbia by nature photographer Tony Austin. Austin described the moment as “a very odd and violent dirt bath.” But only later when looking at the photo did he notice…

I don’t know about you but I don’t keep my ear to the ground much on high end denim lines or so called “fashion drops” where very limited runs of particular pieces are put online to a waiting list and then snatched up and resold at much higher prices than they were bought at. But…

Silently, I move towards destiny. Quietly, you Iñupiat, await my destiny. I can hear you as I move, I can see you as I surface. Together we wait, both know what the other thinks. Although we live in different worlds, we exist for each other. I move towards you Inupiat, because it is my destiny.…