Writing
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Finding A Way In The World: The Dark Light of Seal Fat
I don’t have any tattoos. Maybe you do. I have known friends be delighted with them and have them have deep meaning for them. Others have spen good money getting them slowly lasered away. Others...
The Terrorizing Beauty of Shetland Lace Shawls
While sheep have been in Scotland for about 4500 years there isn’t evidence of short tail sheep being there until about 1200AD…and Shetland sheep are short tailed. The oldest Shetland lace we have is about 150...
The Salmon Wisdom of the Ainu
Nowadays you might walk over to Whole Foods or get filets delivered to your door. But there was a time where every running body of water in the northern Pacific Rim that admitted to tides...
Zapotec Warp and Weft: The Web That Has a Weaver
I have never spent much time in front of a peddle loom or sliding a shuttle through the arms to weave much of anything. But there are people and peoples in the world who know that...
Hórreos: In the Presence of the Fruit of the Land
According to an online ancestry site that took a tube of my saliva and sent me back my results of my blood origins I came back 96% Ashkenazi Jew (not a surprise) and 4% Neanderthal (a...
Eaten: A Food History
When a culture has really made its bones and can call itself a culture there is something deeply life affirming about it. Not that new things don’t or can’t arise – of course they do....
In Apulia, There Is No Remedy More Effective and Immediate Than Music
In 1728, in Campo Salentino, Anna Palazzo was bit by a spider while working in the vineyards and promptly collapsed. She was hauled into her bed and the doctor Nicola Caputo wrote that he called the only people...
The Song of Life among the Montana Blackfoot
Constitutions are a kind of creation story. These political documents try to say ‘this is who we are, where we are from, and what we value.’ The United States constitution starts with ‘we the people’...
Follow Your Blisters: weaving the stone wall
Here in the west we largely consider history to be ‘the facts.’ Sure there are the more liberally minded that concede that history is written by the victors and that voices like Howard Zinn (and...
Maremma, Italy to Upstate New York to You
Luisa Sciavolo and Jody Somers have their own love story to be sure but I learned to love them at the Northwest corner of Union Square at the farmers market there years ago. Eating their...
