It’s Raining Again….

On By ErinIn Living, Parenthood

The rain is coming down again, but this time only forecasted for a short window tonight and tomorrow morning, before we finally get an opening in this drear. Today was a lovely day, and I welcome this rain as the last kiss on the greenery before the dry. I love dry spells in the rainforest, but I am unsettled by them. Last year’s climate change SOS of a summer still looms in memory and when I see a whole extended forecast without rain I can’t help but get a little worried.

It’s strange how my gut-wrenching grief over climate change gave way, for this window of time, to the immediate fear of the pandemic and the awakening horror around the murder of George Floyd and the uncountable other Black, brown and indigenous men and women. Tonight I happened on a new paper by Jem Bendell, whose Deep Adaptation ripped off my blinders and sent me into a crushing existential crisis. I’ve yet to dip into the 10,000 words of the new paper, but I happened across it in the Positive Deep Adaptation Facebook page, where I spent some time reading a very thoughtful and respectful discussion/exchange between page participants and came away reminded again of this crisis we will all live through.

It’s impossibly difficult for a mortal of human-scale intelligence (read: me) to keep their head wrapped around all of these overlapping griefs. It seems like I can really feel into one, or at best two, of these things, without the overwhelm reducing me to something less-than-useful. I’m also constantly mired in the paradoxical thinking required of any parent or would-be parent who is awakened to any of these frightful truths. I must believe in a good future for my child. I also believe I know something of what is coming. I think often of Mr. Smith in the Matrix, talking about humans as a virus. But even if I knew with certainty we’re all in the Matrix, I wouldn’t and couldn’t give up the beauty of having a child. I read this article by Meehan Crist in the last week, and found much in it that was old, but I love paragraph, and especially the quote from Erdrich.

I can understand why some people might see having a child as a turn towards death – a fatal complicity with the death spiral of global fossil capitalism. But, for me, having a child has been a commitment to life, and a commitment to the possibilities of a human future on this warming planet. It means giving up claims to moral purity, not because nothing matters, but because things do. ‘Staying open and willing is difficult,’ Louise Erdrich writes. ‘Very often in labour one must fight the instinct to resist pain and instead embrace it, move towards it, work with what hurts the most.’

Is it OK to have a child? by Meehan Crist. London Review of Books, Vol. 42 No. 5 · 5 March 2020

This helps put language around my continuing desire to have a second child. Though it’s probably insane in many ways, I also can’t separate myself from the pure, pulsing biological desire of the thing.

Whether biology itself actually permits me a second child is another thing entirely. I’ve dithered in uncertain spaces around my own parenthood for excessive amounts of my adult life, making the question one that is now quite, quite real. But no matter how much I read, how much my imagination can conjure up the hardships and grief of +1 more human, I am unable to sever the animal wanting. Call it stupidity, or outrageous selfishness, or whatever it is. It’s entirely real.

Also real: the real laughter that Auggie conjures up in me when he sits on the potty for the umpteenth consecutive night, after bedtime and reading and tuck-ins and kisses, manifesting (how!?!) yet another last-ditch sleep-postponing poop. How is it possible that the pooping of a three-year-old can make me love him so much. Is it his up-and-down eyebrow wiggling, the pure satisfaction he feels as he demonstrates for me that, in fact, he is right, and there is a poo-poo coming? I can’t help but laugh out loud, dropping my head into my hands as I sit on the edge of the bathtub across from him. Then he reaches out and rubs my newly cropped hair and says, “There Mama, when I rub your hair, does that make you happy?” “Yes,” I tell him. “And you make me happy.” He does. So much. And also, how does he know so well that his mama is oftentimes sad? I don’t want him to feel that he must perform miracles (ha!) to erase my sadness. I don’t want him to feel that my happiness is contingent on him. I don’t want him to feel that… But also, to no small extent, it turns out to be true.

In any case, this hour of dusk and soft rain, with all the myriad trees in our old neighborhood shaking and dancing in this small weather system — this is a gift for me, tonight. I am so grateful to this life-giving rain. I do not take it for granted. I see it, feel it, and am humbled by it every time the sky opens up and lets it come down upon us. May it remain relentless for many, many years into our future.

Little Hummingbird

On By ErinIn Living

It’s 9:32 pm. And though it’s not still entirely light out, darkness is still a long way off this evening. It would be even brighter out, but thick clouds hang on the mountain behind our house. The swallow chicks peep in an unused venting duct on my neighbors’ house. Each year the parents or their progeny make a nest and breed in there. A tiny hummingbird was perched on our feeder as I walked by with my warm cup of nighttime tea in hand.

I had a twinge of guilt seeing him there, remembering that I’ve not changed his water in nearly two weeks. I hope he doesn’t get drunk off the fermented concoction and fail to make it home to his tiny nest tonight. Everything around me is like that. Two dinosaurs rest on the same tabletop where they’ve been since five days ago. The blanket on the couch is unfolded and lumped where Auggie left it on his way to the bath. A receipt sits on the countertop, and will likely stay there for days. So too the cat’s collar, the unwashed dining room table, the backing for the empty notepad.

When Chris is home our house returns, at least once a day, to a nearly immaculate sense of order. He is maniacally tidy, save for the corner of our dining room table where he heaps all his things for weeks on end until I give up waiting and haul them unceremoniously to the basement bedroom. Dirt may accumulate on the rug, or soap scum in the bathtub, but surfaces are clean, things are put away, toys are returned to their storage bins.

I’m not given to this inclination, though I’m enough the child of my mother to feel guilt at the piles of things. Living with Chris has only strengthened this sense of anxiety at domestic disorder. His annual departure gives me an opportunity to practice letting go of that anxiety, by allowing things to come apart a bit at the edges and living with it. But I can’t entirely let go of the distress. Messy bed, messy head.

I remind myself that reading a book for thirty minutes while Auggie sleeps will do better things for the both of us than me washing those dishes and that counter. The dishes will always get washed.

I am so hungry for reading and learning, all the time. I am finding an inverse relationship between everything I absorb and my sense of myself as good at anything at all. When I was younger I had confidence in my work and my direction in life. And I was achieving really material things, like helping to build the new Kodiak library. Now I know more, but I am confident of far less. But I happily accept this uncertainty for the joy of taking on more and more and more ideas.

Books mound up around me. On my bedside table. In the basement bookshelf. On the shelves in the living room. They are oppressive at times, but mostly they tantalize me. They hum to me while I move around in my day.

And with that, I’ll sign off. Time to read.

Security or Sailing?

On By ErinIn Creativity, Living

When I was in my youth, living seasonally on the 56-foot wooden boat that was my family’s livelihood and my platform for coming-of-age, our moorage slip was on the farthest finger of the local harbor. This same finger served as the “transient” float for those vessels just passing through town or staying for a season. Each summer the transient fleet included a good number of sailboats and their crew making passage to North America from Asian waters. Ours was typically the first port of call in North America along the great circle route that came over from the Far East.

These “cruisers” who docked on our finger were among the most elite of blue water travelers. Many sailboats never make it out of the Caribbean. But anyone returning from Asia was a de facto dedicated sailor. Arriving in our town was, in itself, evidence of years’ investment in the sailing life. The winds that push a person to the Eastern hemisphere and back again are seasonal and only circulate in specific directions at certain times of year. Our occasional neighbors had necessarily spent time in Southeastern and East Asia, likely in the South Pacific, sometimes in Russia. Some of them would have made a westward crossing a year or years earlier, perhaps from South America. Some others would have come around Africa from Europe or the East Coast of North America, and through the waters of the Indian Ocean. All had opted out, at least for a time, of the “land based” life.

These people were heroes to my father, and to us, his children. He had pined for the sailing life for most of my own life. As a fisherman who cut his teeth on the old fishing grounds of New England and lived near and worked out of the whaling ports of these Yankee places, he was surrounded by tales of maritime adventure and multi-year voyages around the globe. He identified with it completely. I remember the first time he talked to me about sailing — after he and a fishing friend had somehow secured a contract to deliver a sailboat from New England to the Caribbean, despite having no actual sailing experience. He told me a sailboat was all of the good things about a boat, but without the roar of the engines constantly with you. He said you could hear the water passing by beneath the hull. I was captivated.

My father would immediately befriend any arriving sailors who tied up on our finger in the harbor. We would have dinners with them, tour their boats, give them rides around town in our beaten up truck, hook them up with the right service people, loan them anything they needed to make their stay comfortable. We spent countless evenings absorbing the stories of their journeys. I was certain that all I wanted when I grew up was to cut the ties to land and move out onto the sea, to begin to see the world and to let go of the false narratives of middle class aspiration. My dad said being in a sailboat was like being a turtle. You took your home with you wherever you went, but you never had to wake up to the same thing any two days in a row.

My parents were wanderers. They had uprooted our family from our New England home when my brother and I were tiny children, putting a continent between themselves and our extended family, bringing us to Alaska. This wasn’t a move to get away from them. We always remained close and devoted to our kin. But my parents sought some kind of adventure; something different from what they knew.

We moved constantly throughout my childhood, mostly from home to home, but also from town to town and back and forth across the country several times. Dad was often away at sea. Mom was raising us kids. We were decidedly poor. My parents also rejected many social conventions. My mom scoffed at “Hallmark holidays.” My dad never wore a wedding ring. My parents never bought a house in all of my childhood.

They also didn’t buy other things, including the boat that my father fished for most of my life. This decision proved economically catastrophic when the federal IFQ program was implemented for halibut and sablefish, which my dad had harvested everywhere from the Aleutian Islands to Southeast Alaska for years. The astronomical wealth created through that federal program was “given” to boat owners. In other words, not my parents.

Not having a home of our own conferred certain benefits. Because we had no assets, and therefore no wealth, my brother and I were able to attend an elite private school for our latter school years, for which my parents paid a tiny portion of the tuition while the rest was written off or granted to us as “aid.” Likewise our private college educations were largely gifted to us through aid packages. (Though I have no doubt that the small portion we were expected to pay as a family was a significant lift for my parents.)

Meantime, my parents continued to sing the praises of a life untethered. My mom insisted, repeatedly, that home ownership simply tied you down. It took away your options. We were free! Able to do something new at a moment’s notice.

For all my adulthood, I have felt the pull of the kind of freedom that those cruisers had chosen. I have valued approaches to housing and living that have been low on square footage, high on quality of life. I’ve coveted and planned for housing that defied conventions. I have overflowing Pinterest boards devoted to tiny houses. I spent a decade subscribing to Mother Earth News, learning all I’d need to know for my self-sufficient homestead. I’ve gone through convulsions of desire and have more than once considered derailing my life, if I could only have a sailboat and cut free from it all.

But the seeds of another great need had also been planted in my childhood, and they have created great unsettled conflict within my spirit that has torn at me for all this time. For while my parents coveted the life of freedom, I experienced it as a life without stability or certainty about “home.” By the time I was 20 years old I had lived in 20 different houses. As a 42-year-old woman, I have lived in close to 35 homes. And that reality set up a different set of bone-deep needs within me. Needs for a deeply rooted place. The need to call a home my own. The need for ownership. The need for stability and, yes, for the accumulation of wealth.

But my commitment to the ideals of the free life upon the sea lives equally strongly within me. And the two poles of need set up a terrible push and pull that creates a certain discontent no matter where I am, or how I am living. The result is that I’ve never committed to either — neither the kind of grounded ownership that would soothe the anxieties of an unrooted child, nor the sailboat and the life of unconventional freedom. To do honor to the needs of my child self, who craves stability and certainty, is to disavow the equally beautiful and compelling possibilities of the nomadic life on the sea, or the financially poor but spiritually wealthy life of a self-sufficient piece of land. This tension has sent me ricocheting from one extreme to the other for many long decades.

It’s only now, as I enter my middle age, that I can even describe this polarizing conflict with the clarity it merits. This is no “little thing.” But the understanding is instructive, and I hope to see it play itself out on my life in coming years.

All art harvested from other people’s creations, published in assorted magazines. Collages assembled by me.

Gotta start somewhere

On By ErinIn Creativity, Living1 Comment

I’m 42 years old and I’m going to give art a try. It’s nothing I’ve really done before. No one was withholding that license from me. No one told me I shouldn’t. It just wasn’t part of what I did.

I grew up with a brilliant and devoted artist as a brother. His obvious attraction to and cultivation of his creative ability was there from his very youngest years. It was clear as day. He would lie on the floor with a pad of paper and pencil and scribble complex worlds, completely absorbed for hours on end. It was what he did. I admired and still admire him. I love what he creates. I love the abandon that he shows in creating. I love what is uniquely his.

I think I took a painting class in about third grade. What I recall of it is that it was offered in the gym and we made some stuff. I know nothing I created at that time still remains. I took a ceramics class during the J-term of my freshman year. I LOVED it. But I never did it again.

From time to time over the years I’ve made line drawings. Typically of my dog. They weren’t bad. But they weren’t anything I practiced making. A one-off on an intrigued afternoon perhaps.

About six years ago I was part of a women’s group. We came together to read and study the archetypes and fables presented in Women Who Run with the Wolves, the brilliant and difficult book by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. In that group we were called upon to make collage. We called them soul expression cards, if I recall correctly. I loved making them. I made many, and continued to make more over the years. I know now that this was an art practice, but I didn’t recognize it as such back then. I thought of it as something like homework. It was Therapy with a big T. Something I had to do because there was something that needed fixing, and this was part of the prescription. Maybe I believed that if I was “better” — in whatever that meant — I wouldn’t have to make these kind of soul-baring creations any more. The fact that I absolutely loved making them, and would be lost in the joy of creation when I constructed them, did nothing to teach me that this might be a wonderful thing rather than something shameful.

Some of my soul expression art. First piece made in February 2014. Last piece (see below) made yesterday.

Now I’m participating in a training, a school, that has at its core the critical importance of nurturing creation. Of developing a practice of creativity, as part of my work to become better at what I do professionally, in relationships, and in the world. The teachers view it as necessary to anything else that I and we may hope to do to be part of change in these structures around me.

Interesting that it takes permission — no, instruction — for me to embark on something as personal as a creative practice. So it has always been for me. I need a structure to write with abandon. I need an app to do exercise. A program to eat differently. Accountability, even if only to my phone, to meditate daily.

But those are the parameters I have to work with for the time being, and I accept them! So today I declare that I have embarked. I will cultivate creativity.

Onward!

My most recent collage pieces. All from the past five or so days.

The Cat

On By ErinIn Uncategorized

We got this cat back in April. His name is Phillip. He was our COVID foster. He is now our COVID adoption.

Phillip is a lynx point, which apparently is cat fancy for “Siamese mix.” The lady at the shelter told me this (about his Siamese-ness) when I spoke to her in a hurried fashion prior to bringing him home. What did not compute for me then is that Siamese mix means loud.

Phillip is like a dog. He wants to be where we are. Interestingly, he wants to be where Auggie is. This is despite the fact that Auggie has him trapped in a strangle hold for much of the day. Phillip also wants to be where I am. (And where Chris is, when Chris is home.)

When Phillip is not with us, he lets us know. There is a low “mrrrowwww” that escalates quickly to “rrrreoowwww” and then “yeaaaowwww.”

I have been on edge since he arrived.

As I write this he is sprawled across my lap in a warm, breathing, delicious blanket of cat. But can I revel in that? No. I’m on alert. Waiting for the moment when me might spring to life and go meow outside Auggie’s bedroom door.

This on-edge-ness is spot-lighted by Phillip and his presence in our life. But I’ve also started to see and understand since his arrival that it’s a feature of the basic construction of my own, particular nervous system and patterns of worry. Stressful though it has been, this process has been instructive. I’ve been able to see something that I previously couldn’t — my tendency to lean into the what-if sequence, and get worked up about it when nothing has or necessarily will happen.

This is in contrast to Chris, who is constantly encouraging me to lighten up. Which infuriates me and also inspires me.

Phillip is here to stay. The little guy is going to teach me things about letting go of control. I’m glad for him.

The Boys Rode Bikes

On By ErinIn Parenthood, Society

The boys rode bikes today. Letting this happen takes a tremendous effort in letting go. There are all of the “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” that run in the head. And then there’s the simplicity of three 2- and 3-year olds learning to accelerate and careen. Learning that wind makes their hair blow when they go even faster. Learning what it feels like to be part of a pack. The contrast in experience for them utterly joyful, and so natural, even after all these months–these not-insignificant percentages of their lives–gone by. A delicious two hours of completely normal boyhood.

I could feel my body relaxing.

It’s such a relief to see the normalcy.

Their return, if fleeting, to normal takes place against the backdrop of Juneteenth. I will confess to be one of the white Americans who had no idea that Juneteenth existed. I’m glad to know of it now. In this complicated moment I’m glad for anything I can learn that can guide me to be of better service in the world. My view is so appallingly narrow. But I see and accept the privileged grounds on which I build my life and that of my son, and it’s not acceptable to do nothing, or the near-to-nothing I’ve been doing for all of my life up until now.

This interview between Krista Tippett and Resmaa Menakem laid down some solid guidance for a starting point.

… White people, don’t look for a black guru. Don’t look for an Indigenous guru. Find other white people, and start creating a container by which you can begin to work race specifically; not race in this and race in that and break bread together and do all that — not that; not a book club. You specifically deal with the embodiment of race and the energy that’s stored with that.

Resmaa Menakem, Notice the Rage on OnBeing

I have his book on order, and while I recognize that we can’t just solve this problem intellectually, I also know I have to start somewhere.

All of the overlapping confusions and pains and intensity of this moment conspire to undermine the beauty of today. But I also cannot let that be. My little one deserves the gift of joy in wheeled flight. And I, his mother, can be allowed to love that moment. To adore him unendingly, and weep when I hold him in my arms for the sheer magnificence of his little being. I also must recall in every moment the love that every mother has for every magnificent, perfect child. I must learn to do whatever I can to make sure the losses and griefs we experience are those of Life, and not those of an oppressing heel–or knee–stepping on our children’s necks.

Day Zero?

On By ErinIn Uncategorized

I’m tired, and I should be turning my lights out. Two weeks ago I had incredible “sleep hygiene.” The same wakeup time every day, a very early bedtime, a solid commitment to 8 hours of sleep.

COVID-19 has upended all that. Sure, part of it is the unhealthy media diet. (Binge, binge, binge.) Some of it is trying to figure out how to do my job around the waking hours of my son. Some of it is the need to do more, more, more.

So I ought not be posting. But I feel I should. Because looking back in a few days or a week, it may turn out that this was Day 0 before everything went insane, and I want to memorialize it.

So here’s what happened in my life today, in no particular order:

  • Auggie and I snuggled in bed and hid under the covers together for 45 minutes
  • Chris showered and went to work
  • We made pancakes
  • I worked a bit while Auggie watched some PBS
  • We went to see 2 baby goats, 2 mama goats, 2 horses, a pony, and two donkeys
  • We stopped in work to get my plants and my computer plug before calling the office “closed”
  • We had a walk up by the governor’s mansion and down the staircase to Willoughby
  • We ate quesadillas with greens
  • Chris did more late-night Costco shopping for random things
  • I worked on my laptop
  • Auggie and Chris went for a run
  • I talked to my brother
  • I wrote an email to the borough and the school district asking them to close down school buildings to all people (read: teachers) and to start putting firmer restrictions on other workplaces
  • Auggie and I went for a walk at Lena Beach

I just wanted to write some of those things down because I think it’s possible I’ll look back soon and realize how simple life’s pleasures were today.

Everything is Achingly Hard

On By ErinIn Uncategorized

Ridiculous how hard everything is. No one is immune. Everywhere I look someone is suffering, angry, breaking up, dying. Including me. (Not the dying part… at least not imminently.)

Some people I know fixate all the time on the catastrophe of it all. Others find some sort of off-switch. Hide behind TV or exercise or some sort of activist organization. Me, I think we’re all fucked. And spend each day trying to make magic for my perfect boy while warding off the swooping bats (demons?) of my own despairing, black-and-white nature.

My memory is utter garbage. All the work of maintaining (composure, hope, face, focus, organization, control) wipes out every available space in my mind. So yesterday’s conversation (argument?) is un-recallable. The memory palace of my daily life still holds strong, though. Ask me where that sock is and I’ll know. (Tucked behind the book about bear cubs in spring. Pair in dryer.)

A family member is dying tonight. In this storm. Or maybe it won’t be tonight. Maybe they’ll hold until Tuesday. Or not. It doesn’t matter except it’s all the world. Bright thread of life.

It’s all so achingly hard. The illusion of bright tomorrows has been long annihilated. Maybe by other deaths. Maybe by divorces and car crashes and cancer and that fucking glacier, that shrinks and shrinks every day.

No matter. Life is and has always been suffering. The TV lies to us but our stomachs know the truth. Thank god we’re in good company. Every fellow traveler walks the same path with us.

Amen.

Someone’s cheerful little door.

Vole, deceased. Drowned? Then frozen.

Forgive Me My Love. Or, Forgive Me, My Love.

On By ErinIn Uncategorized

It’s impossibly hard to sit on the edge of my son’s bed, delighting in the trilling word games that are the genius of his growing mind, his language acquisition, his exploding consciousness, and feel the hard stone of the climate crisis sitting in my stomach. We play together with lion’s roar, stinky toes. He mouths rhyming words silently as I repeat them to him again, again, again. He beams with pride. I sniff him, inhale him, brush lips on his temple and hair. I tell him I love him; that he is precious to me. “Precious boy,” he replies.

We all are mortal, each of us. So it has been since the dawn of our days, so it remains for we who stand here on the brink of this great unraveling. My love for my child is no less, no more (though of course infinitely, incomparably, unbearably more) than that of any, every mother who has come before or after me.

Still, the joyful worlds I weave for him, of lush forests and creatures of the jungles and savannas, feel like lies. When my mother read me stories in my youth, did she confront the same sense that they were untenable, unreachable? Did the simple, pastoral landscape of Frog and Toad feel achingly ancient, lost to her? She is gone; I cannot ask her. But I wonder.

The magic of my son is my gift and my burden. His coming hardship, his living in this too-hot world, is an agony for which I have bargained with the devil. “Please, allow me this child.”

I fear that my bargain was too selfish; that he will pay its rising price. Yet we laugh together with such true, pure, mystical glee. Please, God, let that joy be tender for the debt.

I labor determinedly in our garden, seeking to re(dis)cover lost knowledge and skills. Each seedling’s struggle through soil to light is a celebration. I want to save him. I want to save myself. I pray I cultivate in him this wonder, fleeting or hopefully durable. Wonder is the only thing for which I feel honest hoping in these days.

I have traded my life for his. Each parent, all parents, only lucky enough to do so. Have I also traded his life for mine? For this, the love that bursts inside of me? This thing, so sweet, so crippling, so precious, that he has gifted me.

Before my mother died the cancer in her abdomen became like a stone. A heavy rock setting inside her. Each morning in the last weeks of her life she and I would rest beside each other in the pre-dawn birdsong and she would love me, her only daughter. In the fleeting moments before her pain took over she would breathe me in, brush fingers on my temple. I would call her Mama.

We are mortal. We are doomed. But I will take my child out each day and live. I will cultivate. I will seed wonder, tend our garden with him alongside. I will eventually tell him we all will die, or he will discover it himself and, with luck, I will comfort him through its dark revelation. I will be sure he knows the gratitude I feel for his unwitting agreement to pay the debt of my love for him; of my bringing him into this unimaginable world. Forgive me, I will ask. I love you so much.

The Places They Call “Home”

On By ErinIn Society

Salmon is our most bountiful wild food source, and we think of them as coming “home” when they return to the streams where we harvest them. But they are at home throughout their range—in the places where they live their seasons of adulthood as well as they gravel where they emerge or the splashing pools where they finally fall away. The challenge of loving the salmon who come home to the place where we wait for them is that we forget about all the parts of their lives that they spend away. They are at home in all those places and they live in all the places throughout their range. We often connect our desire to act—to protect them—to the place where they come “home.” But the home that they need is everywhere where they live.

Baby coho salmon, while still smaller than the size of a pinky finger, spread out over great ranges, sometimes transiting miles or even tens of miles in this juvenile stage. If we imagine them to need only those streams where they have spawned, we miss the enormous complexity of the watery lands that support them. Any Alaskan child who has walked, eyes down, through a forest or field, will have seen these tiny “minnows” flitting about in the shadow of creekside grass, or moving through the dappled light in the rivulet of a stream passing beneath a cottonwood tree. These are the homes of our salmon. These swampy places are no less important than the shallow streambed where we saw the parent generation spawn and die.

We grow frustrated when we attempt to take steps to safeguard our salmon, only to find that our actions in our backyards or in our boroughs or in our watershed don’t seem to be enough. We learn about and focus our efforts on stream bank restoration, for example, but we find that climate change is taking bites out of our fish faster than we can act to restore them. We temper our own harvest, taking only what we need so nothing remains in our freezer at year’s end; but we know that others downstream from us or out in the marine system are harvesting in numbers that surpass our own impact. The feeling of helplessness can be overwhelming. Our individual actions feels insignificant against the 1,000 cuts that strike at our fish.

The salmon is a microcosmic example of our entire global system. Everything in the world around us is spinning faster and faster; our impacts are spiraling out around us. Our desire to rein things in, or to find something sane in the whirl of the storm, feels more and more unattainable, even as we reach for it. 

Our systems are so large, so all-encompassing. Words printed in books of law are meant to encompass the circumstances in a brackish estuary tucked alongside the highway in the Mat-Su, at the same time they are meant to govern the clear-running waters of a snow-fed Kodiak river, or the wide exhale of the Kuskokwim as it drains marsh and grassland and creek for tens of millions of acres of watery land. 

Where do we start amidst all this confusion?

One possible answer, one tiny piece of the puzzle: must reach out and touch our local elected officials. We must ask them to go to their work with our values in mind. These values of family, of land, of the import of the whole system, not just the too-visible places.