Earth Explorations

Chances are pretty good you are reading this because you clicked through a link, perhaps my pronouns in my email signature, and were curious about this word ki, pronounced kee. I'm assuming you want to know what is ki and why is it in my pronoun list. To start, ki is a pronoun that refers to something animate and natural, an addition to he, she, and it. I came across this idea of ki while listening to Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer's interview with Krista Tippet on On Being. Rather than me summarizing, I'll let Dr Kimmerer—botanist, State University of New York at Syracuse professor, and member of the Citizen Pottawatomie tribe—speak for herself. (T)he language of “it,” which distances, disrespects, and objectifies, I can’t help but think is at the root of a worldview that allows us to exploit nature. And by exploit, I mean in a way that really seriously degrades the land and the waters, because, in fact, we have to consume. We have to take. We are animals, right? But that, t...

On the last day of 2019 I saw one too many political posts on Facebook that pushed my outrage button and realized that I needed a break. It was time see what I'd been missing for 10 plus years while I was in the scroll hole. I needed to go exploring. January in South Dakota is not an auspicious time to do much outdoor exploring unless you are hardy and have warm boots. Since I'm the equivalent of a Zone 6 on the human hardiness level and my boots aren't that warm my exploration would have to be of the indoor or maybe even internal kind. This is an inventory of what I have done on my month off of FB. In December prior to the Big Leave I set a goal of reading a book a month because that is what I could manage when I fed my evenings to Facebook. I ordered 8 books to get me through to summer. I read three of them in three weeks. I practiced French with an app. I am looking at going to Paris in the spring of 2021.  I applied to attend a field school in Mongolia this Aug...