Sometimes I question my life because of a comic book. These pages are from Daisuke Igarashi's Little Forest. (Read from right to left.)

My great-grandmother and namesake Julia Morehead - painter, frame maker, tree saver, early adopter of pants, and wearer of one earring. Sometimes you hope genes win out :-)

And another Oksana.

Here's Oksana!

Oksana sent evidence that my little tree has survived two Siberian winters!

At the Channels, which feels like a holy place to me.

I wrote a little article about Sullivan Swamp (and how you can see it) for work.

Some more of the beach.

Found a ton of old photos that I was too lazy to put on here.

"Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it – a vast pulsing harmony – its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries."

Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac.

"In traditional indigenous communities, learning takes a form very different from that in the American public education system. Children learn by watching, by listening, and by experience. They are expected to learn from all members of the community, human and non. To ask a direct question is often considered rude. Knowledge cannot be taken; it must instead be given. Knowledge is bestowed by a teacher only when the student is ready to receive it. Much learning takes place by patient observation, discerning pattern and its meaning by experience. It is understood that there are many versions of truth, and that each reality may be true for each teller. It's important to understand the perspective of each source of knowledge. The scientific method I was taught in school is like asking a direct question, disrespectfully demanding knowledge rather than waiting for it to be revealed. From Tetraphis, I began to understand how to learn differently, to let the mosses tell their story, rather than wring it from them."

"Mosses don't speak our language, they don't experience the world the way we do. So in order to learn from them I chose to adopt a different pace, an experiment that would take years, not months. To me, a good experiment is like a good conversation. Each listening creates an opening for the other's story to be told."

Pages 76-77

"In traditional ways of knowing, one way of learning a plant's particular gift is to be sensitive to its comings and goings. Consistent with the indigenous worldview that recognizes each plant as a being with its own will, it is understood that plants come when and where they are needed. They find their way to the place where they can fulfill their roles. One spring Jeannie told me about a new plant that had appeared along the old stone wall in her hedgerow. Among the buttercups and mallows was a big clump of blue vervain. She'd never seen it there before. I offered up some explanation about how the wet spring had changed the soil conditions and made way for it. I remember how she raised a skeptical eyebrow, but respectfully did not correct me. That summer, her daughter-in-law was diagnosed with liver disease. She came to Jeannie for help. Vervain is an excellent tonic for the liver and it was waiting in the hedgerow. Over and over again, plants come when they are needed."

Page 103

From Gathering Moss; A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which has a lot more scientific method than I just made it sound.