Writings

The seedling of this book was planted while teaching ecological restoration to high school and college students. What came to fruition was much larger than I originally set out to do.

Each chapter is a small cairn indicating the path forward and where it began. This book travels beyond any one form of travel, beyond any one form of thinking. It is a conversation between new (but old) paradigms, world views and narratives; between the earth and human, history and culture.

As I was writing, it felt like the book was writing me; humanity opened its arms with colorful revelation, blossoming beyond the monotone portrait constantly peddled and spoon-fed to us. 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 was a witness statement to the opposite: the power of many stories, or rather, of how many stories embrace each other.

The power of many stories stitched together speaks to how life itself works on this planet. Mother Earth – in all her magisterial forms and colors – continues precisely because everything is connected; humanity, indeed each us individually, is embraced by, and dependent on, the many. Edward Said, the great Palestinian intellectual, was right when he said: “survival in fact is about the connections between things”.

I hope these words can  help you on your own Journey.