Jaime Mathis and The Words

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.

I stood at the summit of Cascade Head on the Oregon Coast, watching mist roll back from the cliffs and water thousands of feet below me. This place was important to the First People of this land. Huge Sitka spruce held court at my back, cradling ancient stumps and a steady drip of moisture rolling off their branches. Nature’s medicine is potent, and my skin steamed with the effort of climbing. I imagined the entire headland alight with fire, welcoming ancient runs of salmon home like a pyrotechnic lighthouse set ablaze by human hands. To climb, to sweat, to call out to our relatives, “Come home!” requires effort. How many times have I leaned into Life’s challenges? How exhilarating and exhausting is it to put one foot in front of the other with a vision calling me forward? A place I have never visited, a relationship I have yet to build, a world still incubating. Rain drenched the entire first section of the trail. Water cascaded down the path beneath my feet, my body sodden ...

As many of you know, I was raised in a religious cult. Though it masqueraded as a mainstream version of Christianity, it had its own codes and symbols that would be unrecognizable to an outsider. It kept us inside its walls, though to the rest of the world we could come and go freely.  I was educated from first grade through my first college degree in their schools barring one year at Portland State University. I left despite a full ride scholarship because I lost a bet with my mother who was deeply worried that I would leave the cult should I remain. To tell the whole truth, I was a little worried I would too; it was so colorful, so self-confident, so...alive. So I slunk back to cult-land and finished my degree at an outpost university in England. There, I left the cult in my heart and mind but continued to attend school until I had my degree... and promptly had a nervous breakdown in Thailand after graduation because the stress of starting a life outside the boundarie...

Greetings To All Our Relatives, 2017 has been a year of movement and stillness. Much like throwing a stone into a pond and watching the ripples, we have felt ourselves shift and stabilize, cast away from the familiar and seek unknown horizons. In the end, we have come to the the conclusion that relationships are the meaning makers for creating joy and conviviality across moments of chaos that life inevitably presents. Some of these details from our little family may be enjoyable for you to peruse and so we offer a few of the highlights and lowlights from the year just gone.  Tobias and Espen made two father-son trips to Denmark this year, totally sans mom, to great success. We fully acknowledge the opportunity for bi-lingualism and cultural plurality that having parents from different cultures affords Espen and committed to supporting this from the time he was born. This year he is 4 and we felt he was old enough to travel without mom so he could be immersed in a Dani...

Sustainable is the quality of being able to continue indefinitely. It is woven into how we relate to ourselves, our families, our communities, our work,  a nd our world. Being sustainable is a concept that is, at its heart, inclusive because it asks us to consider the web we live in and how we can support and be supported by the threads that connect us to each other. Sustainability is the language of relationships. When I walk on the beach for example, I come into contact with the sand, the water, the rocks, the air, the sun, my thoughts, my feelings, my fellow beach visitors, the birds, the trees, and the plastics. We all occupy a moment in time and space where we are directly aware of each other-- how the wind feels in our hair, how casual conversation creates a sense of belonging and camaraderie-- and yet, there are even more connections beyond this instant that supported us getting to a particular moment at the seaside. And we may start to consider that we exist i...

The internet is a funny place that seems to run on fairly predictable fuel. Survival. Any of you who have fallen into the black hole of Facebook or the rabbit hole of Youtube can attest to this. If a link or site produces some kind of adrenaline rush in your body, positive or scary, chances are, you'll see where it leads. But maybe I should speak for myself alone. Of course we all have different things that get us amped up. Maybe it's the recent antics of 45 or a debate on white supremacy amongst white folks. Maybe it's a pair of really cute overalls or something that just blew your mind on Pinterest. Whatever your bait, the interwebs seem to be built on triggering the fight or flight mechanisms in our brains. Over the last six months, I have been deliberately rewiring the excitement center in my brain, otherwise known as the Limbic System. But, you say, it's FUN to be excited and provoked! Why would I do this? Well, for one, when anyone's brain is being...