Dirt

Singer, songwriter, creator of The Shadow Catchers—a female indie folk and Americana band from the Pacific Northwest—shares a poignant question.

What happened to our wild side? When did we lose that?

There is a great Lakota Sioux Chief who believed that the more distance we put between ourselves and the dirt below our feet, the harder our hearts become. I’m beginning to feel the truth of his words. Maybe it’s more dirt I need. Maybe it’s more dirt we all need. Not because it’s the thing to do, but because it’s the thing we were all meant to do.

Go

We are born wild, but then we lose our senses. In a world where food comes in tidy plastic packages, modern footwear binds us into synthetic soles, we swim in chlorine pools and breathe in small shallow chest-gasps while sitting in front of screens for hours at at time—

A Full Moon in Kyrgyzstan

What is that edge, the one where we leave behind the fearlessness of youth in order to begin the heart’s journey into the wilderness of womanhood? One adventuress stumbles upon it on a rough slope above the Issyk-Kul Valley.

Starling

Where does a woman find freedom in a city life bounded by motherhood, car horns, glaring street lights, and the silent expectation that we succumb to flying in formation?

A Recipe for Okra Soup

Fix in your mind the hands of your father’s mother. How they were the hands of her mother and her mother’s mother and how those hands may have touched indigo and rice on the plantations that lined the sandy hills that were once the ocean floor from which you came.

Dirt

Letters from Readers

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Go

A Full Moon in Kyrgyzstan

Starling

A Recipe for Okra Soup