This week I join the Bishop Paiute and thousands of others who mourn the loss of Harry Williams: an elder, a Water Protector, and the world’s foremost expert on the ancient irrigation systems of his ancestors, who managed the Owens Valley when its waters flowed freely. Harry was my close friend and colleague for over […]

Tomorrow is Juneteenth, “the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States,” one of the more complex observational “holidays” in the USA, because the date of June Nineteenth is related to a number of other key dates, including: September 22, 1862 when President Lincoln issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation January […]

For ten months we have been steeped in isolation as families, communities, and governments struggle with the ebbs and flows of this generation’s pandemic. Each of us has coped in whatever way we can, wrestling with a demonic assortment of challenges: loneliness (or its opposite, if we’re crammed into an overpopulated or antagonistic household), cabin […]

Minx & Jinx are the hot new “beings” in my artistic palette: a series of witty vignettes featuring two vintage Barbie dolls and inspired by the efforts of Dr. Nalini Nadkarni, a forest ecologist who retrofitted Barbies almost two decades ago to match her academic expertise. She was unable to get any traction for her […]

Recently I’ve been exploring the healing power of meet-us-right-where-we-are, astoundingly powerful music made by female artists, Ordinarily, I have wide-ranging music tastes: R&B, funk, gospel, jazz, classical, country, pop, house, hip-hop, hula, zydeco. Although I maintain several thousand tracks in my iTunes, I haven’t been making good use of my library, because I’ve …[this isn’t […]