Jaime Mathis and The Words

I was raised vegetarian as part of my early upbringing in the cult. That is an entire blog post in and of itself but suffice it to say, I was more aware of turkeys as something I could draw by tracing my hand than I was of it as a relative and source of nourishment. True, my aunties would sneak me pieces of turkey under the table at Thanksgiving when we celebrated with my father's family who was decidedly carnivorous and not in the cult. Also true was the delicious feeling of transgression and taste delight that co-mingled in my mind and mouth as I savored the juicy morsels. But it was an unimaginable leap between this low key rebellion and actually connecting with a living, breathing being that gave its life so I could feel a little naughty and then scrape any evidence into the trash. Skip ahead 30 years and I'm deeply interested in knowing where my food comes from, how it is raised and treated, and how it is killed. Food justice is not only about access to healthy food,...

People know things are changing on the Home Planet, Earth. Even if they like to temper the shifts in climate with comments like, "We could use more sunshine here", the facts speak for themselves. And just because many of us in the Northern Hemisphere can still get food easily enough, doesn't mean that there aren't starting to be inconveniences, like the voluntary power shut offs in some Bay Area communities due to extremely dry conditions. PGE, the power company acknowledged that they were unprepared for the increase in fire danger last summer when a huge area of California burned down due to faulty power infrastructure. Now, Science, which has occupied a similar level of credibility as the Almighty for the last 175 years, is falling in value. "Post-Fact Era" is now a phrase on many tongues and Instagram sites, whether you identify as Red or Blue or Purple. When we no longer want to hear what an authority figure has to say, the power of the masses can ...

Science is not modern Ask any Indigenous person. They will tell you the names Places, uses, and most relevantly, Numbers and Functions of the Life they live within. Pick your subject Biology, Botany, Agriculture Physics, Engineering. Thousands of years Using bodies as laboratories Memory as notebooks Story as peer-reviewed journal lit. Land was an eternal field study Annotated with bridges To span gaps Between Seen and Unseen God in forms of animal and sky Quanta dancing in Coyote's mischief They spoke our holy language Before we did. Now that we have grown Fluent enough to understand We find ourselves Straining To count the remaining whispers Of particle and wave Plant and sea. We pray they will teach us The missing pieces Before our failed experiment Implodes.