Writings

The seedling of this book was planted while teaching ecological restoration to high school and college students. This little seedling grew much larger than expected. The chapters are organized into elements (water, earth, fire, and air), each containing a series of connected stories like cairns on a path.  

As I was writing, it felt like the book was writing me. It felt like an un-natural dam had been breached; like I was eavesdropping on a conversation between landscape and inscape. It’s a verbal walk into the muddy spaces between the earth and human culture, between new but old paradigms. The great writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie once pointed out the danger of a single story; a danger we all know too well. Writing this book is a tasty declaration of the opposite: that immense power emerges when many stories, especially those suppressed, are held and celebrated together. It’s a power and practice that we need now more than ever. The more I wrote, the more I felt humanity opened its arms with colorful revelation, blossoming beyond the monotone portrait constantly peddled, and spoon-fed to us.

And this power of many stories stitched together speaks to how life itself works, and even restores herself. Mother Earth – in all her endless beauty – continues precisely because life is a story of endless connections. Edward Said, the great Palestinian intellectual, once said that: “survival in fact is about the connections between things”. It’s an important lens to see the world with. 

The myriad connections between things, and the healing power they elicit, kept me focused on telling this story. I hope these words and worlds they contain help you travel your own journey between landscape and inscape, and help contribute in some way to humanity’s ongoing struggle for a healthier future.