Anchorage was one of several sites last week that participated in the annual Bioneers conference. I attended last Saturday; Rozz attended all three. Fine plenary speakers in the morning through the satellite feed from the main Bioneers site in California, Bay area I think, and afternoon workshops with local people. The “democracy school” was the most challenging for me, because it hit a lot of my despair buttons. And in the evening, some great movies, one on the long-lived a capella group Sweet Honey in the Rock and the other, called “Oil on Ice,” on the wrongheaded efforts to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration.
Having gone to it is having some appreciable effects on us, and is feeding into some stuff Rozz is already doing in school. And steering me back, I believe, to some things that really sustain me about knowing, really knowing, where I am, the land where I live here in Anchorage, which is now, literally, the Ground of my Being.
The pic here, BTW, isn’t how Anchorage looks now. We’re still in fall, not winter. It’s just the one “natural world” kinda pic I have handy to me right now. I took it in the woods of Ft. Richardson Military Reservation two or three winters ago.
