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Almost 50 years ago I extracted myself from a life and livelihood in our nearest metropolis to follow a dream, a soul mandate, to live in Skagit Valley. A decade earlier, when I was 16 years old, I’d seen it for the first time and its beauty kept calling: those flat vistas, miles of mist and farmland. As the greening of this place happens once again and we celebrate this season, let me, please, rain a bit on your parade by mentioning something your sense of beauty, indeed none of your senses, will be good at detecting: Glyphosate. While Mons...
Just beyond the deer fencing, lying between this old rotting house with fruit trees just as old, between these and a dense development, lies what used to be called a “vacant lot.” It might have been called a “swamp,” also, rather than a vestige of an estuary. It did take on some water in the 2022 flood. One engineer called it a “natural catch basin.” But all that belies an amazing feature: it’s ability to grow food. Eons of decomposing salmon bodies makes this soil, like much of the Skagit Valley where I live, among the top 1% of agricultural...
I first met Guy Anderson in the La Conner post office, back when you could rent a box for peanuts. There, in the seventies, you had an equal chance of running into a local luminary, your neighbor (might be one in the same) or the person who shouted at you the night before in the bar when you spilled your drink down their back. I can’t imagine Guy spilling a drink on anyone. Or shouting. He was ever so soft-spoken. And there he was, in the post office, asking me, a complete stranger, “How are you?,” and pausing for an answer. I have no memor...
William Slater, known variously as Bill, Billy or Weeyum, lived among us here in the lower Skagit River area some forty years. He hailed from the other coast, an estuary that had been famously spoiled. Bill taught art for a while in New York City at Hunter College and said he hated it. He had befriended some abstract expressionists of that time and place and was scheduled to debut at one of the city's most illustrious galleries. And just as his star was rising, he bailed. After a good long...
Computers are useless. They only give you answers. — Pablo Picasso Mysticism seems to focus on the questions, on wonderment and awe. In world religions, mysticism stands in contrast to fundamentalism. Not its opposite, for I don’t believe mysticism opposes anything. It would be inclusive in its wonder, but there is a contrast between asserting dogma and a receptive state of attentiveness. (I am composing this on a computer, Pablo.) Mysticism takes a lot of a person’s time. All of it, actually! And dang, it can look like you’re doing...
