Back up and Running!

A pause clears the head and clarifies purpose.

First, thanks for accepting my break from the week-to-week Substack deadline grind (“OMG, it’s nearly Thursday!”). The head and soul space opened by time without hard stops helped me realize again what moves me as a writer and where I want to follow that deep-down urge.

Photo by Brett Jordan via Unsplash.

Over the past weeks I have been digging into material that is slowly taking shape as the foundation for my next book. Once again, it is a story that connects the human and the wild. And that direction, in turn, helps shape the Substack posts I see lying ahead.

My goal is to share stories uncovered in my current research and to probe further the wild dilemmas that we all-too-human Americans face these days. Doing that means digging into where we have been in order to understand where we are. “The past is never dead,” William Faulkner famously wrote. “It isn’t even past.” His insight, originally about the Civil War’s dominance of Southern consciousness long after Appomattox, underscores the need to illuminate the now with the light of the past.

So I’ll be writing soon about the Sierra Club’s self-destruction, capitalist delusions of infinite natural supply, stripping the wild for parts and profits, the Babylonian myth of Gilgamesh as the key to Trump’s drive to lay waste, turning forests and whales into commodities, and the role of hope and awe in saving the planet.

The first installment of CAST OUT OF EDEN’s new iteration will be up a week from today. Again, much appreciated.