Happy New Year!
Ok, so we are 12 days into the New Year (2026) and it hasn’t exactly been a stellar start for our Country – but hopefully you are all finding some sort of peace and joy in your daily lives.
My friends and I decided we would start the new year with art and beauty. Our first stop…Graffiti Alley in Baltimore.
Continue reading Graffiti AlleyIt was a cloudy day when my friend and I agreed to meet up. I had asked her if she would sit and chat with me about her artwork. Unfortunately, just after we grabbed our pastries and coffee, it began to sprinkle and we decided to head back to my house. Although I recorded our conversation, my dogs decided to be a handful – either trying to swipe our pastries, force us to play ball, or bark at imaginary invaders. This, amongst other things, made for a terrible recording, but still…a thoughtful, albeit distracting, conversation.
Continue reading The Art in Death (Part One)
Imagine spending a thousand lifetimes caring for these lands only for billionaires to exploit them in an instant – the same way colonists exploited the people.
When people see me, they see an American. I sound American. I live in America. I have an American partner and son. I was born in America. But what exists on the surface is not always true. I’m also half German.
Continue reading LossThere is a great deal of conversation happening these days surrounding health and medicine, thanks to a new faction of influencers who have rooted themselves in the MAHA movement (a Trumpian health campaign, Make America Healthy Again). Much like the MAGA movement, it is fueled by misinformation and emotions. As someone who believes in the power of blending eastern and western medicine together, I find someone like RFK Jr. to be a danger, as he seems to prefer blending science with pseudoscience to sell his ideas, so…let’s talk about some of these spaces of health and wellness (and since it is a bit longer of a post, I’ll break it out into four sections).
Continue reading Health and Wellness v. Medicine“It’s easier to run down the mountain than to walk it!” my partner shouted to me as we were descending Humpback Rock. Except, he wasn’t the one carrying the backpack with our waters and half-eaten charcuterie box from the day before (precariously wrapped in a cup and some napkins).
Continue reading Silence of the SwallowtailContinue reading After Virtue, After Invasion“Imagine that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe. A series of environmental disasters are blamed by the general public on the scientists. Widespread riots occur, laboratories are burnt down, physicists are lynched, books and instruments are destroyed. Finally a Know-Nothing political movement takes power and successfully abolishes science teaching in schools and universities, imprisoning and executing the remaining scientists.”
In my last post I used a photo of an old (positive) test result for COVID (this is also an old photo of my sweet baby, hence the grainy appearance) and I noticed it included Influenza A and B as possible results as well, which got me thinking about the flu and wondering how much people know what the flu even is. The question also ties into vaccines and how experts decide on which “strain” to use – and do people even know what they mean by strain?!
Ok, that’s a LOT to cover, so I’ll try to keep it all simple. First, let’s define what zoonosis is – this is a hot topic for One Health.
Continue reading Influenza and ZoonosisUPDATED: I was floundering in one of my unfocussed days, typing a million disparate thoughts, unable to make them meld properly. This is, perhaps, partly to do with the inherent abstract nature of art and the subjectivity surrounding it. I want to say something, but I am unable to find the right words in the right order. I’ve not rewritten, but I’ve tweeked a few lines to make them more cohesive.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how we use art in activism lately. We create signs for protests, write songs and stories, make documentaries…. City streets are littered with graffiti – everything from murals depicting a civil rights event to simple written messages.
Continue reading “Artivism”I am going to pivot a bit on this one – bail on the format I was previously using (see my first three in the Regenerating Life and Love series: Intro, the Environment, and Animals and Fungi). When it comes to Mount St Helens, it is true that tourism, the logging industry, and other human activities have resumed in the area, but I am not certain how I feel about some of our resilience in the aftermath of this particular catastrophic event. When we speak about systems in nature regenerating life, we often look at them in terms of returning, recovering, and perhaps even overcoming (a forest fire might open up coniferous seeds to yield new forests or a species returning to spawning areas after an oil spill). We like things we can measure and track over time. Useful as that might be, it tends to also ignore the grey spaces of regeneration and healing. And for the human factor, this might be the most important bit.
Continue reading Regenerating Life and Love: The People
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