Rocks lie scattered about. But a rock sitting on top of another rock? That catches the eye. And if a third rock rests on top of the second, that stack of rocks leaps from the background, draws our eye, yells “Over Here.”
Rock cairns are a quick way to mark a route through country too little traveled or too rugged for a trail. They are a gesture from past experience suggesting a route worth following, a gift of mindfulness from the past to help the future explore good places with less effort so that more can become possible.
In 1995, I tried to accomplish a life goal: snowshoeing all the way around Mount Lassen. On the morning of the third day, I lost my canteen in a stream and had to turn back. I followed the park road (buried under many feet of snow) on its mostly gentle descent through a glistening white world beneath blue sky. Six years earlier, I had accomplished another life goal. I had written and self-published a book, Shifting, which was now in its third printing. As I strode along, I realized I had stopped writing since then. I was no longer recording experiences and new thoughts.
I decided I would write a newsletter to the people who had written in response to Shifting. A quarterly newsletter’s deadline would help me reflect on my ongoing thoughts and experiences. Four times a year – that would be forty issues over ten years. That would be one hundred issues in twenty five years. In twenty-five years, I would reach my biblical lifespan of seventy years. Twenty-five years, one hundred issues, seventy years old, those three numbers nestled nicely together into a new life goal. By the end of that snowshoe walk back, the title, Cairns of HOPE, had emerged. I created this logo.
Now it is the summer of 2020. Cairns #100 was sent out a month ago. I’ve winnowed my twenty-five years of newsletters down to the pieces that best mark the territory I’ve been exploring. May they aid you in your roaming.
The cairns are listed chronologically below by issue number. The color of the number indicates the general subject of that cairn though some fit into more than one. Teaching Stories, Understanding and Changing Systems, My Gaia Work with Runoff, and Nature Experiences.
I’ve also indicated cairns that are short (a minute or two read) or long with the rest somewhere in between.
01 Watershed Awareness long
03 Prisoner’s Dilemma long
05 Emergent Behavior long
10 Does Evolution Have a Direction? long
11 Reflections on “Give more than you take”
13 Practicing Mindfulness with a Rock short
15 Pond short
16 The Gift of Constraints long
19 Finding Oneself on the Lost Coast
21 In Context Quote on Experiments
22 Drowning in Nature short
22 “Just animals” short
22 Patience short
22 Swearing short
23 Teaching Feedback Loops to Kids short
23 The Particulars of Place short
26 Biomimicry short
26 Cantaloupe and Seeing Through the Eyes of Animals short
27 Catching Cottonwood Leaves short
27 Peeps short
27 Corporate Globalization as Feedback Loop
28 Redwoods and Looping long
28 Zoo Kids vs Wild Kids short
29 Achieving a Life Goal short
30 Legislation
30 The Purpose of Debate short
32 A Land of Fountains and Chimes short
32 Sean Discovers Drifting Silt short
32 Shooting Stars and Economic Ecology long
33 Remembering My Dad short
34 Catching One’s Breath – Getting a Feel for the Land short
34 Preventative Maintenance short
34 Reflections on Alaska short
35 Systems Thinking and Education short
36 Conversation with the World short
36 Resisting the Trance short
37 Complexity and Fascination short
37 “with advantages” short
38 Wilderness Poem short
38 Closing the Loop short
40 Flying Back from Texas short
40 Spirited Teaching long
40 Using a Trowel short
41 Chrysalis’s Future short
43 Katrina short
43 The Realness of the Upward Spiral
45 Bonemeal long
47 The Flow of Water and Money
49 Cat Story short
49 The River
50 Three Stories with the Same Point
51 The Gradient of Wealth and the Invisible Hand long
52 Changing a Habit short
52 Changing Chrysalis’s Money Flow
52 Science article short
53 Becoming Elves short
53 Swirling Swallows short
54 Money as Flow short
54 Roaming Nail
55 Standards, Frameworks, Textbooks, and Tests long
56 Last Week short
56 Sharpening the Saw – for Art and Miccki
57 For Mom
57 The Analogy between Water Flow and Money Flow
58 Maturity
58 Moving Rocks short
58 Wrong Goals short
59 Returning to My Beach long
60 Global Flattening short
60 Hitchhiking
61 Ahjumawi
62 Back from Japan long
63 Ahjumawi – A Sense of Place long
63 Dancing short
63 Optimism
63 Seeing Space long
64 Fallen Leaves and Three Approaches long
65 An Altar for Gaia long
65 Cat Twist – Lead Onto a Longer Path short
66 A Phenomenal Place long
67 Bottom-up long
67 “How did you find this place?” short
69 Backpacking Class short
69 “Just sayin’ “ short
69 Spiraling Mudholes short
70 Getting Help long
73 Taking Students Backpacking
75 A Story from What is Possible
75 Afraid of Children Walking in the Redwoods long
75 Reflections on the Man Lying in the Street
79 Moment of Glory short
85 Big Bend and Trump’s Wall long
85 Which way is our Earth rotating?
89 Warner Wetlands Revisited long 66
90 The Rant of a Rural Progressive long
90 Teacup Handles short
91 Anne’s Stick Story short
91 Living in Geological Time 59
91 Thoughts on Education short
95 My First Three Experiences with Negroes
97 The Shape of Shadows short
98 Pace, Not Speed short
99 The Pulse
99 Wisdom short
100 Concerning Death long
100 The End short