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The following is a collection of feature stories from our latest issue:
Brigid
Vol. 33, No. 1
Winter 2013Want this issue in print? Purchase it here.
Overcast Minnesota morning, light snow cover. I open the door to my camper in the north woods and walk down the spruce covered path into the house where our banners and signs have been drying from the night before. Jeff has made French toast for breakfast and hands it to us on paper plates so we can eat in the car as we head to the freeway.
When I was a youngster I once heard a wildcat in the deep timber of the Allegheny ridges scream like a devil. Bouncing from hemlock to pine to walnut, the sound filled me with a strange physical fear and longing.
Teetering on the dire precipice between existence and annihilation, time is running out for the Earth’s creatures, in a cataclysmic period of mass extinction. The breakdown in biodiversity is a ripple effect, causing species to topple off the planet in a chain reaction. We are caught in the last dying gasp of a crumbling empire, desperately digging for the last drops of fossil fuel that it can dredge up and burn, leaving a wake of destruction in its path unrivaled in the history of the world.
Shortly before the Silver River joins with the Ocklawaha River, the current on the Ocklawaha slows to a trickle. It might not even trickle, really, but I was not willing to stop paddling to see how slow it flowed.
I want to talk with you. I want to you to listen, actively, wholly, attentively. I want you to feel what I’m saying, the spirit that lives inside my words, the heart that is screaming beneath them, and the soul that breathes when you share them with another.