content warnings: mild self-harm, sexuality

Last week, I stood outside my storage unit and watched the sun go down in the hills as a faint rainbow shimmered in the clouds. Beautiful spot for a storage place but a hundred miles from where I am staying now.

My list of items to retrieve suddenly seemed irrelevant. Things like this — like moving, like packing for trips, like leaving the house for the day, really, entering any unforeseeable future — have always been challenging for me. How can I imagine what I will need in one place while standing in another? I might need anything. I can’t take everything.

I have dealt with this by always carrying as heavy a load as I can bear. In graduate school, some people called me “the bag lady,” the way I always had at least three large bags on my shoulders. For Christmas one year, my parents gave me a bright green luggage scale, since I was always packing my checked bags right up to the fifty-pound maximum.

Four years ago, when I first started experiencing real housing insecurity, I built a platform into my car. In place of back seats, I have stuff: blankets, water, dog food, shoes. For a while I had an excellent miniature pantry of dry goods and spices. But I don’t know what I’m doing now, why I am where I am or where I am going to be next or what I’ll need when I get there.

It’s hard to know what to hold on to, and when to let things go.

As I was finishing graduate school, I found a round-trip ticket to Rio de Janeiro for under $500. It felt like a gift from the universe. I had become obsessed with the Portuguese language and with Brazil’s cultural resistance to dictatorship in the late 1960’s and early 70’s. I was specifically interested in the art and music of the Tropicália movement, which included visual artists but also musicians like Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, and Gilberto Gil, who risked and experienced arrest and even exile for their politics.1 I had never heard music that made me feel so alive.

A professor connected me with scholars in Rio, a friend’s family offered to host me in Belo Horizonte, and I booked a domestic flight from there to Bahia, the epicenter of Tropicália. I wanted to see it all and learn as much as I could.

But I brought my baggage with me. Instead of traveling with a backpack, like others my age, I brought a fifty-pound duffel bag plus a purse and a carry-on that barely fit on the plane.

At the time, I hardly believed I could travel at all, let alone travel light. For one thing, my body felt large and impossible to find appropriate clothes for even at home. For another, I did not at all understand how to use money, or really any other form of exchange. I was worried about what would happen if I didn’t have the right things on me at all times. It took multiple trips to haul my bags up the two flights of stairs at the hostel. I could not carry all the things I brought in one go.

Still, I spent much of the trip acquiring more. I bought several records and dozens of CD’s, and I took photos everywhere I went. My suitcases swelled, and the SD card in my digital camera filled up. When I tried to transfer the files to a computer to make space for more, they got corrupted and everything disappeared. I was inconsolable.

The night before my flight to Bahia, I realized that I would not be able to bring all my luggage with me, as the domestic airline’s limits were lower than my international flight. Later that night, I got inexplicably sick, and passed out on the bathroom floor in my friend’s mom’s apartment. When I came to, she was holding my sweating, shaking body, my eyes open wide and fixed on the ceiling. I did not vomit or have any other symptoms. I simply could not do more than tremble.

It felt like a spiritual experience. It was as if Brazil itself was saying no — you can’t come here just to take. In fact, you can’t go any further until you let a lot of things go.

One of my closest friends walked the Camino de Santiago, a popular pilgrimage across southern France and northern Spain, a few years before I did. She described her Camino as a path of shedding. Every place she went, she unintentionally left something behind, until she reached the final destination with nothing but the most basic essentials on her body.

When I did the Camino, I experienced for the first time what it felt like to carry only what I needed. Still, I accumulated things. At the final stop, I purchased a Galician seashell on a red-and-white string, painted with a Cross of St. James, which I still have somewhere in storage. I also brought back a miniature replica of the Camino’s iconic waymarker, a stone pillar with a yellow scalloped shell on a blue background, underneath it, an arrow pointing right. For many years and across many countries, I kept it at my work desk. Until recently it was in my car, next to the steering wheel. It’s been with me all this time. It’s strange to realize I’m not attached to it anymore.

In the first apartment I lived in after leaving the State Department, I had more books than shelf space. Books covered every available surface: above the kitchen cabinets, where they collected grease; along the windowsills, which caused the pages to rumple with moisture. Some of them, I had kept since high school.

At my next place, I invested in a beautiful, gigantic bookshelf, which a friend assured me I would have for the rest of my life. I arranged the books by category, a well-tended display of the things I’d done in life. Then, I hosted a dinner party where people kept asking me about the books I didn’t want to talk about, instead of the ones that resonated with who I wanted to be.

After that, I found myself suddenly able to sort through the volumes and pare them down. I got rid of Samantha Powers’ biography of Brazilian UN diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello, but kept Caetano Veloso’s memoir, Tropical Truth; shed the cheesy patriotic photography books I’d purchased as diplomatic offerings but never actually given away, kept the bilingual copy of Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva’s Milestones I’d been gifted, even though it came from someone who I no longer considered a friend. It felt very good to say goodbye to George Packer and Jared Diamond, whose work I’d read out of academic necessity and held onto in order to impress the kind of people whose opinions, I realized, did not actually matter to me at all.

I brought that bookshelf with me to my next house. When I had to leave that place at the end of 2020, I loaned the shelf to a friend. When we got into a fight the following year, I took it back, only to put it in storage, then sold it for cash to a couple who wanted to use it for dishes. I wish all the time I had let my friend keep it instead.

Once, at a talk-back after a dance performance, choreographer Kate Wallich described her approach to the show as “playing with accumulation.” In my mind, I played back what I’d just watched and saw that the story of the dance was one of building movements, one on top of the other, before letting them all go. Accumulation without much residue, like a sand castle, or an arrangement of leaves — I liked that idea. Something to be played with, not buried underneath.

A few years ago, I forced myself to get rid of some clothes I hadn’t worn in a long time. One of the items was a pair of knee-high white leather cowboy boots that fit my wide calves perfectly. I told myself that because I was unemployed and homeless, changing my gender expression and gaining weight, it was ridiculous to keep them. I sold them at a Crossroads for $14, blinking through tears the whole time, my feet bleeding because the shoes I had been wearing had broken spontaneously on my way in to the store. The line between what was happening inside me emotionally and on the surface felt very thin. Everything seemed to be screaming at me to stop, but I handed the boots over anyway. When I went back the next day, wailing in regret, they were already gone.

Where is the line between preparation and hoarding, between treasuring and gripping too tightly? How do you know what to keep and what to shed?

I have a small box of photos from my childhood that my mother saved. Moments that mean little to me are well-documented, as is, for some reason, the aftermath of my emergency surgery at age five. My own favorite memories — like smelling the lilacs by the road, inhaling their fragrance into every cell — didn’t make it onto film.

The photos make a strange constellation, incomplete. Everything that really happened, happened in between.

In Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The World, aboriginal author Tyson Yunkaporta shares a conversation he’s had with a friend:

We yarn about the sentience of stones and the ancient Greek mistake of identifying “dead matter” as opposed to living matter, limiting for centuries to come the potential of Western thought when attempting to define things like consciousness and self-organizing systems such as galaxies. Western thinkers viewed spaces as lifeless and empty between stars; our own stories represented those dark areas as living country, based on observed effects of attraction from those places on celestial bodies. Theories of dead matter and empty space meant that Western science came late to discoveries of what they now call “dark matter,” finding that those areas of “dead and empty” space actually contain most of the matter in the universe.

The things we think we know about the world, in other words, can block us from seeing what is really there.

In the novella Too Loud a Solitude, by Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, the main character, Haňťa, is a worker in a police state whose job it is to compact wastepaper and books into giant bales. He comes across many rare and censored books, ranging from radical literature to Nazi propaganda to western European art.

Haňťa takes meticulous note of all the texts that come through his workplace to be destroyed, and makes an effort to take care of the tomes that come his way. At the center of each bale, he stashes a rare book, and he takes a great many of them home, to the point that his house barely has room for his body amongst all of them, and the roof is caving in.

The character says:

When I read, I don’t really read. I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.

At the time of its writing, Hrabal’s country had been under dictatorial control in the name of patriotic Communism for almost three decades. Too Loud a Solitude was published in 1976 by samizdat, or underground self-publishing, exchanged among people much like zines are today. It was not officially published until 1989, the same year that the Velvet Revolution finally ended four decades of censorship and one-party rule.

It took a long time, a lot of literature, and a lot more than literature, to bring down the regime.

Whenever I’ve done a clearing-out project such as Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, I find going through books and old files to be the most challenging parts. In 2020, I finally faced a box of things from my time in the Foreign Service, which at that point I’d been out of for seven years. I found emails I had printed out from my first internship at the State Department, where the program coordinators were making fun of my weight and overall appearance. I felt a burning embarrassment and rage when I saw the words. I had been holding onto these emails for years, in case I ever needed proof that this really happened to me. Suddenly I couldn’t imagine a single scenario where they would be needed. I was simply holding onto the trauma, and to the idea that my survival depended on being able to evidence the harm that had been done to me.

It hurt so good to let that go.

In western astrology, the part of the night sky called Scorpio, anchored by a group of stars perceived to resemble a scorpion, represents sex, death, rebirth, and transformation. I might add revolution to the list, and shedding. It is associated in the body not only with the reproductive organs but with the entire digestive system, mouth to anus, what we consume, what we shed.

Personally, I put all those things under the header of eroticism, which, as Audre Lorde reminded us in her 1978 essay, “Uses of the Erotic,”2 is about much more than sex.

Truthfully, most sex between human bodies isn’t erotic to me at all. I am interested primarily in experiences that scare me, expand me, leave me changed. The holy experience of biting into the first spring kohlrabi as I tear it from the ground, the gasping cold of the river when I finally let it cover the top of my spine, the way consensus reality itself trembles when a mass of people is singing together in the streets — these are the things that turn me on, that make me feel like I am growing and alive.

For me, eroticism is a touching-in to the unknown. Entering this realm demands curiosity and openness. It is inherently dangerous to one’s concept of self, because it puts us in contact with what psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou refers to as opacity — the parts of ourselves, and others, that we have not yet clearly perceived. That kind of sex can explode our consciousness, shattering us, as one of Saketopoulous’s clients puts it, into “thousands of tiny pieces, […] hanging out in space like overheated pieces of dust.”3

Sometimes, for long stretches of time, I am afraid to enter this realm of mutual opacity, to reveal to myself and others the parts of myself that have not yet been seen or sorted.

Last summer I developed a crush on someone so intense that the moment they leaned back into my body on a bar patio, the whole world melted away. My finger tucked into the back of their knee felt more erotic than anything else I’d ever experienced, even than having a whole fist inside another person.

I could feel myself transforming through the connection. The entire universe hummed, vibrating through me, turning chatter into music. For the longest minute of my life, nothing else was as real but the feeling of their cheek against my cheek. I couldn’t even hear the gunshots right behind us.

When I came to, back to a world where fear existed, I thought, you’ll be the death of me, and I don’t even care.

I wish I had held that breath for so much longer.

What if the experiences that feel like dying are actually what keep us alive?

On the night of the full moon I found a time-lapse video of a scorpion molting. At first, the creature trembles on its back. Its arms twitch. It appears to be separating not from some external shell, but from its very self. The labor is intense.

Then something new emerges, a blacker black, velvety. Slowly it unfurls its arms, exposing its new belly.

The old exoskeleton, now fully shed, is a dry, yellowed thing, fragile without the life it once contained. If the scorpion tried to return to it, it wouldn’t even fit.

As a child, my favorite of the books in C.S. Lewis’ beloved Chronicles of Narnia series was book 3 The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. In it, the original four children from The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe are joined by their obnoxious, greedy cousin Eustace Scrubb, who finds a dragon’s hoard, falls asleep on it, and becomes a dragon himself. After some necessary experiences in that form, he is assisted by the great lion Aslan to peel off his skin, layer by painful layer, until he is a boy again. The experience changes him, and he returns from Narnia with a whole new personality.

A Swedish fairytale that has become popular among western meditation teachers tells the same story in a different way. A young woman is to be married off by her parents to a dragon, so she seeks the advice of the village crone. For her wedding, she wears ten dresses, and on the wedding night, she demands that her groom shed a layer for each one she takes off. The first layer of scales is hard enough for him to remove, but he’s done it before, and he’s still a dragon afterwards. But by the fifth dress, he is weeping, crawling out of his own skin. When the final layer comes off, the dragon’s true form is revealed: He was a prince all along.

A long time ago, after a period of conflict between us, a friend gave me a children’s book called The Knight in Rusty Armor. It’s about a knight who so believes that he must be battle-ready at all times that he stops taking off his armor, until finally he can no longer remove it at all4 He loses everything, including his relationships with his family; he has to be fed by a squirrel friend who chews up nuts and pushes them through the visor. It takes a quest with multiple stages and millions of tears to rust through his armor and free him again.

There’s one particular scene where the knight, still encased in his armor, encounters a mirror. He’s terrified of what he’ll see, only to find a vibrant man with compassionate eyes staring back at him — the person he really is. Once he accepts that this version of life is possible, he is struck by an intense grief, convinced that he’s wasted his entire life being any other way.

“No,” another character corrects him. “It hasn’t been wasted. You needed time to learn what you just learned.”

The respiratory organs of scorpions are called “book lungs.” They consist of plates, or lamellae, that look like the pages of a book. They are held within a larger container, called an atrium. Air flows in and out through a vent called a spiracle. When the spiracle opens, air rushes into the atrium, full of oxygen, and blood rushes into the thin pages of lamellae, full of carbon dioxide and other gaseous wastes. For the duration of the held breath, in the pockets between pages, they make their exchange, before the spiracle opens again, and air and blood both rush back to where they came from, no longer carrying what they no longer need.

As a child, I was always getting in trouble for picking my scabs. I guess you’re supposed to let them fall off, but I couldn’t help it. The skin underneath wanted to be free; there was something so exhilaraying about letting it touch the air. I loved seeing the fresh pink flesh, and even when I accidentally peeled off a scab that wasn’t ready, and bright dots of blood appeared underneath, I felt the thrill of that too. The pain was a small price to pay for the feeling of becoming free.

Creatures that are meant to molt, must. A snake that doesn’t shed can go rigid and blind. A crab that can’t discard its shell will grow fragile and fail to mature. Scorpions must molt around six times to reach full adulthood. The process is vulnerable, as all transformations are, and they typically go into hiding for safety until it is complete. Throughout the molt, they are unable to breathe. It all takes place within a single, extended breath, held for up to twelve hours. The entire process is immensely painful and incredibly dangerous. One scientist described it as “like having your lungs ripped out.”5

The night things went upside-down at my last house, I felt as if I was being sucked into a nightmare. I spent that night in what I can only describe as labor. I was unable to breathe steadily for nearly eight hours, hit by wave after wave of panic. To catch any breath, I had to position myself on my elbows and knees, chest toward the bed, gasping. I thought about going to the hospital, but I knew that what was happening required a different kind of medicine. I had taken on a lot of things that were not mine to carry, and I could no longer hold them, and I found myself rejecting not only the things my housemates had done that had put me over the limit, but the whole unholy load, including the parts I had taken on willingly, the way I had been trained to do to survive up until then. I felt like I was dying. I felt like I was giving birth. I will never again be the person I was when all this happened. I don’t yet know how to be whoever I am now, but I know I am never going back.

On my second night back in the city, when I was already raw from the move and struggling with nightmares, my car was vandalized. Nothing was taken, but I had to have a window replaced.

For months I had been wondering whether I was inviting trouble by leaving my stickers on the back window. Free Palestine, one said, surrounded by beautiful red poppies on a black background. Another read, Protect Trans Folks, with a snake through it.

Peeling my stickers off, and replacing my window with trash bags and RealTree-patterned duck tape, I thought about the novel The Skin and Its Girl, by Sarah Cypher. In the beginning of the book, a Palestinian immigrant to the United States buys an American flag welcome mat for the family apartment and puts a patriotic bumper sticker on their car. This performance helps to protect her family.

There are times when we are not safe, when safety requires deception, when the fight goes underground, when stories must be hidden and compressed and traded in secret. It doesn’t mean we forget who we are. It doesn’t mean we stop changing.

I don’t know what happens next. I don’t know what I will have to give up, or get to keep. I don’t know what you’ll have to part with, either. I only know that a big story is ending, with tremors and violence, and a new one is struggling to emerge.

I know that every time someone interrupts a hearing or attempts a de-arrest, it is a sting in the face of the state. I also know that it will take many more stings to bring this system down, and a lot more work on the insides of ourselves than many people have yet been willing to undergo.

If I have any recipe for us this week, it’s simply this:

Let go of things that are dead and dried up. Dust the cobwebs, sweep the floors. Remove the rotten foods from your crisper drawer and expired goods from the pantry. Shred the old emails and tax returns. Burn the Bibles and the flags. Retire the stories that stop you from thriving. Remember that almost everything that’s real is beyond the things you already know.

Learn to discern between what is really you and what is a skin that once protected you, which has now gone brittle and holds back your growth, makes you weak, will kill you if you cannot get it off. There’s so much more underneath.

Don’t be afraid to fuck your way to freedom, whether that’s with people, or food, or rivers, or books, but make sure you are fully present for each exchange, willingly encountering your own opacity, bringing your fears and your beauty back to the light, tenderly caring for your fresh new skin and staying unafraid to remove your armor at night. It’ll hurt. It’ll feel so good.

One day you’ll be beetles and bacteria, one day you’ll be memories and seeds, one day this whole earth may be covered again, in water, in fire.

One day we’re all going to die. We’ll enter a void, a breath held, a quiet infinity, the space between stars, an overwhelming expanse of possibility.

There will be labor. We won’t know whether we’re dying or being born. The pain will become transcendent, taking us somewhere we have never been, filling us with an energy like we’ve never known.

And then we’ll emerge again, in a form not too unlike the one we held before, our skin velvet and tender, the holes in our bodies open and requiring an exchange with the outside world, life flowing between the pages of our blood.

We’ll be awake. We’ll be naked. We’ll be terrified.

And we’ll be free.

note: the audio version of this issue does not include the part about the cake. :)

A couple weekends ago I drove up to the base of the mountain for a class about moss. A few of us sat on blankets on the humusy almost-spring soil and watched as the instructor drew on her 2’x2’ square whiteboard about the lineage of moss: that squishy, textural wonder that surrounds us in the wet woods of the Salish Sea bioregion.

Moss is an ancestor, an ancient being and one of the first to appear on a landscape that is recovering from disturbance. In English, we currently call these “Pioneer plants.”

Mosses need so little to live, growing in the cracks in stone made by the lichens that precede them and then breaking down to make more rich matter for other plants to grow in.

They are both sensitive — a single cell thick, with no wall to shield them from the elements — and resilient, able to stay alive through long periods of drought and dormancy, springing back to life with the addition of a little water.

And they brought about the beginning of the world as we know it.

As our teacher explained in blue expo marker, the current scientific theory goes something like this: Once upon a time, there was no plant life on land, only algaes on the water — red, brown, and green.

It’s possible that some algae were occasionally stranded on shores, lapped out by waves that then receded. It’s possible that these micro-exposures to a new environment, which undoubtedly felt hostile at first, caused them to start experimenting with other ways to survive.

I would add that it’s possible that some got curious and crept up to the edge of the shore of their own free will.

Then, around 400 million or so years ago, Something Happened, and suddenly, a lot of algae were stranded on the shore.

Not all of them survived.

But some of them did.

Those that did were the green kind of algae.

They kept evolving, and from their evolution came most plant life on earth.

They emerged from the ocean, and they turned the world green.

So here we are. It’s March. Crocuses are blooming. There’s baby sheep grazing alongside the main road that leads toward my house.

Spring is coming, but it’s not quite here. I still need to make a fire at night and chances are there will be another frost before we’re really through. It’s dangerous to bloom to soon.

I’m thinking about apricity, the false spring, how it can lure plants and animals into feeling they are safe to leaf out before the conditions are actually right.

I am thinking about whether I have done the same, unwisely bringing my edges into being under conditions that can’t sustain them.

I am speaking of my present personal circumstances, where I got comfortable with a living situation that turned out not to be as stable as it felt, and now have to close my petals up again, gather my things, and, using what resources I have left after this adventure, find somewhere else to go.

I am also speaking about the waves of humanity that have felt safe as of late to grow beyond the previous edges. Trans people came out in larger numbers than ever as we found greater access to health care and social acceptance. None of this has been easy, but still, there’s been a bloom.

Now, that flourishing is being challenged by a political force that wants to push us all back in time. Young people who just came out, hopeful they’d find an accepting world, have had their health care ripped away, their government turn definitively against them. Funding is being pulled back, passports taken or returned with the wrong gender marker. People are newly afraid.

The tides that brought us here are receding.

Not all of us will survive.

But some of us will.

Some of us, June Jordan wrote, did not die.

Her words were about 9/11 but they could be about anything. She’s an ancestor now, timeless.

I hear us echoing her from the future, when we look back on this time from a place where we are no longer mere individuals but a collective ancestral being, like moss.

It was horrible, we will say. But some of us — some of us did not die.

Being trans, more so than any other identity I have held, feels collective. I feel the life in my body and the importance of it. I also feel the “we” of it all.

I had a massive group interview last week for a job that would be excellent for just about any non-binary, neurodivergent queer person, so I was not surprised to see several of us there.

As much as I wanted the job, I found myself feeling, instead, I hope one of us makes it.

A lot of trans people I know are terrified right now, especially the young ones. When we meet each other, there’s a feeling of knowing that not all of us will make it.

But some of us will.

Some of us, we reassure one another, will not die.

It’s our job to make sure that’s as many of us as possible.

So here we are, those who have explored beyond the edges of our being, who found ourselves exiting the great sea of binary gender and wondering how we might live on new territory.

We are not so different from, and we are not better than, those who birthed us. We are simply stretching the edges of what is possible.

It can be difficult to weather moments like this when we think of ourselves as individuals on the time-scale of humanity (as we must, to some extent, because that is what we are and how we survive).

But I am touching moss and remembering that we are part of a much larger and older story, a time scale measured in hundreds of millions of years.

Whatever happens in the future, we have broken the barrier and proven that something more is possible.

A lush, green world, with life on new territory, is within our reach, and it is beautiful.

Some of us will not die.

And because some of us will not die, transness, and the possibilities it opens, will survive.

If you are a person of means, you can help ensure that more of us do not die by contributing to Trans Lifeline, local direct services organizations like Lambert House, and community fundraisers for individuals like Kylie, who needs community help to stay housed (it’s an achievable goal).

If you’re looking for a truly magical edible moss experience, try this moss-inspired spring nettle cake from Miss Wondersmith. I made it with a friend last year, and will offer the following advice:

• You need a lot of nettles to get 2 cups of puree, so don’t be shy with your harvest. They’ll keep growing all season and be all the happier for having been lovingly gathered this time.

• The recipe calls for 1 tablespoon of fresh ground Douglas fir needles, but I think to really get the bright, citrusy flavor to shine through, you will probably need more than that.

Stay resilient, my dears; whatever your own edges are, they matter, too.

Note: This newsletter contains some mild spoilers for the Apple TV series Severance. I’ll insert an alert before any major spoilers appear.

Emotions motivate our psyche. They’re gorgeous. Transcendent and terrifying. Splendid and devastating. Without them, there’s not much to experience in this life. Even if they’re overwhelming, they’re part of what makes us human.

It’s not possible to dull your senses selectively, feeling only the pleasurable parts of life but rejecting the rest.

But what if it were?

That is the premise of the Apple TV original Severance, which explores the world of office workers who’ve undergone a surgical procedure that wipes their memories as they enter or exit the “severed floor” at their company, Lumon.

Iconic scenes show this transition happening in the elevator, as the employee’s “outie,” the self who roams the outside world, splits off from their “innie,” the self who only exists on that severed floor.

Immediately, this concept for how consciousness could be structure brought to mind ideas I’ve encountered in therapy, specifically, a framework called Internal Family Systems (or IFS), also known as “parts work.”1

The main idea of IFS is that we have different “parts” of ourselves that play different roles. Some of these parts are protectors, some are managers, in my case, some are clowns… and some are exiles.

Exiles, dissociated from the whole, are often in deep pain. They hold our most painful memories, including the memory of their own rejection by us.

In a way, they protect us by keeping painful experiences outside our conscious awareness. They stay buried, along with the emotions that were too big for us to feel at the time.

But they have a funny way of breaking through to the surface in other ways: as nightmares, as trauma patterns that affect our relationships, as pain or tightness in our physical bodies.

Or even, sometimes, as desires we are too afraid to acknowledge — the clothes we secretly want to wear, the music that longs to move through us, the ways we find ourselves loving, anything that we have been taught is against the rules.

We are all of our parts, and they are all us. We may dissociate to survive, but those parts of us never go away.

When watching Severance, I cannot help but think of the “innies” as a metaphor for these exiled parts.

While we attempt to go about our lives as usual, they wander the unmarked hallways of our deep unconscious, as mysterious to us as we are to them.

forgotten, but not gone

The work performed at Lumon is, the workers say, “mysterious and important.”

Fan theories as to what the main characters are actually doing in their roles as “Macro-Data Refiners” abound.

My personal theory is that their labor helps Lumon achieve a more targeted version of severance than the blanket shut-off these workers experience in the elevator.

The promise is to remove difficult emotions, like pain and the memory of pain, by deleting the associated memories.

Still, even in the Lumon world, these memories don’t go away. They just become new places that are cut off from the whole.

Places with labels in the rolodex. Projects that can be marked complete. Compartments, compartmentalized.

Maybe I think this because I think that’s how it works for us in real life, too, when we compartmentalize our own feelings, or push away information about what’s going on elsewhere in the world that we find upsetting.

We may not be burdened with the memories of our “innies” on the conscious level, those parts we’ve exiled and stashed away.

But they’re still hurting, maybe hurting all the more from being abandoned by us. They may go to great lengths to communicate with us, even to the point of self-sabotage or self-harm.

It seems Lumon is promising a world where only some people (“innies”) have to suffer, while others can enjoy blissful ignorance of the harder parts of life.

Truthfully, that’s not terribly unlike how global capitalism works right now, separating us not only from ourselves, but from each other.

We are currently sorted into groups where some are forced to experience horrific things — such as workplace exploitation, slavery, imprisonment, childhood labor, dangerous working conditions, and separation from their land — so that others can have convenience, consumer goods, and a feeling of power.

I feel a strong connection between the inner suffering of exiled parts and the external suffering of others in our world. Prentis Hemphill writes about this in their book What It Takes To Heal, noting that oppressors are trained to cut themselves off from empathy and reciprocity for those they harm.

This also cuts people from empathy and reciprocity for their own selves.

And yet, no matter how deeply we sever ourselves, we are always whole. Some part of us always knows.

The pain of the world — the pain inside us, the pain we cause others — is always communicating to us, somehow, whether or not we listen.

black boxes

Some years ago, I made friends with a woman who had developed a mysterious neurological disorder after the sudden death of her sister, which resulted in frequent seizures. After two years of various failed treatments, at the recommendation of the Mayo Clinic, she saw a hypnotherapist.

He explained to her that, for a part of her body, the moment when she learned of her sister’s death was still happening. It had never stopped happening. It just kept happening over and over, in some part of her psyche that was outside her conscious awareness. Through hypnosis, they were able to bring it in and move forward together.2

(spoiler alert for s2 through ep7)

I thought of her story when, in the last episode to air, we finally got a glimpse into Gemma’s underground reality.

Her experience is an even better metaphor for the exiled parts, which live perpetually in the nightmare that created them.

Six weeks may have passed, but that part was just at the dentist. That part never got to leave.

Much like Gemma’s multiple innies are forever stuck inside specific memories. It’s always Christmas in Allentown. She has never left the dentist’s office in Wellington.

Even disconnected, those innies are still in her body.

While Gemma may never consciously know what happens to her in Wellington, her mouth hurts — and she must remember that, because when she opens the wardrobe and sees her going-to-Wellington outfit, she reacts. She knows something is wrong, just as our intuitions do.

As Miss Casey, she knows she wants to see Mark, even though she doesn’t know the backstory of their love on the outside.

(end spoiler)

As the show illustrates, exiled parts and their memories can be as difficult to retrieve as they are to sever, if not more so.

I know I have black boxes in my own psyche, some of which I used to try to break into before I was really ready to reintegrate them. I have learned to be patient and gentle, ensuring I am strong enough to feel now the pain I couldn’t feel then. It is a constant dance of challenge and care.

My approaches to reintegration have been as many and complex as the traumas themselves: talk therapy, EMDR, inner child work, pyschiatric treatment; body work, acupuncture, breathwork, reiki, hypnosis; meditation, ritual, spirituality; drugs, pharmaceuticals, herbal medicines; sex, creativity, screaming; cold plunges, time in nature, growing plants; and yes, even surgery.

They have all worked to some extent or another. But there’s always more to do.

I reached a point a few years ago where continuing to open to life felt dangerous. Going on dates, going to parties, doing creative work all began to seem incredibly risky. I couldn’t open up to other people without exposing my once-exiled parts, who tend to feel in extremes, who never really got the chance to grow up with me.

It’s hard and sometimes embarrassing when they show up.

But I’m no longer able to send them back to the severed floor.

And I no longer want to.

outie work

I believe deeply that healing is our birthright.

And, also, sometimes looking solely into ourselves through therapeutic tools becomes unhelpful. All the technology in the world can’t help.

That’s because our pain isn’t really individual, it’s collective.

Therefore, the opportunities to heal this pain are not only buried deep inside us. They’re all around us, in the form of other people.

Whatever horrors we have experienced in the past, someone is probably experiencing them now, perhaps even with our implied consent, powered by our taxes and shopping, our attention, our political passivity, our complicity in the systems that steal their life.

When we show up for people who are in pain on the outside in ways that we’re not, we’re also giving medicine to those parts of ourselves, because — well, a couple levels up from this particular severed floor, they are us.

When we distribute hot food and harm reduction supplies to our unhoused neighbors,

when we hold our friends’ deepest fears without shaming them,

when we contribute to fundraisers so that those in financial need can have housing, transportation, health care, and educational opportunities,

when we march through the streets to say the names of murdered Black and indigenous kin,

when we barricade campus buildings in the name of a Free Palestine,

when we interrupt the galas of the corporations and politicians who feast on the suffering of other people,

when we listen to those who can only show us their pain through self-harm and the occasional unconscious scream,

we are bringing the world back together,

and reintegrating ourselves, too.

Severance season 2 episode 8 drops tonight at 6 pm Pacific Time.

I found another essay that makes this same parallel between innies/outies and IFS, by therapist Candace Barrett on Medium. It’s a good, short read.

Was this good? I have no idea if this was good. Comments welcome, as always.

Thank you for your continued support for my writing. It means the world.

This week the odometer on my car crossed 222222. I didn’t see it. I had my trip counter on, increasingly irrelevant as I’ve dropped in $20 at a time, slow-dripping fuel to get through the days. By the time I toggled over to the main, it read 222286. Bummer.

That car has been putting in the work the last few months. It started wheezing a while back, possibly a belt issue, or a transmission thing.

I am scared to take it in to be looked at. I tried once, about a month ago. They just said you better just start saving for a new one, and I drove off with my breath in my sternum.

I’ve stopped panicking about the noise. Instead I’ve just adjusted to it, the same way you adjust to an aging body.

Together we’ve been chugging up the mountain a few days a week. I’m grateful we’re both still capable of at least that.

Oh, yeah. The mountain.

A few things have changed.

I’ve struggled to update folks because I don’t know how to talk about everything that’s happened the last few months, let alone write about it. To say these things flippantly or quickly feels wrong. To not say anything feels wrong, too.

And if I just write it all out, it reads like a sob story, an almost impossible string of bad luck.

I have to start here, even though I don’t want to. This year on the farm was different. So much harder than it needed to be, and not because of externalities, but entirely because of how it was run.

A lot of farmers treat their workers like they treat the soil: We are seen as a resource to be depleted and discarded, as opposed to a source of life that offers possible mutual thriving through reciprocity.

This season depleted me so fully I almost didn’t have the energy or financial resources to leave, and the trajectory kept pointing downward. The idea of staying made me feel dead inside.

So. Despite my love of the river, hearing beavers splash in it under the full moon, swimming with the jumping salmon in the autumn. Despite the cherry tree and the hawthorn bushes and the Nootka rose along the edges of the road. Despite the yarrow and the comfrey, the horseradish and the nettle, the friends I made and my proximity to beloveds in the city, and all the places that had become special to me, I knew it was time to go.

Near the end of October, I finally told my boss I was quitting the farm, a decision that gave me only a few weeks to find new housing. Three days later, I got Covid. Just as I started to feel better, my beloved dog Moon Pie collapsed on the floor and screamed as he struggled for breath. I called a friend and asked, Is he dying? even though I already knew.

There would be no returning to work after that.

He sank slowly into death, and I sunk with him.

Maybe someday I’ll write about it, how I held him through seizure after seizure as a rat screamed and flopped around in a trap from the room next door, death surrounding us, how he laid on my chest as his eyes stopped perceiving light, but when I start to write about it now I sink again into a place I don’t easily return from.

I may have to let that part of myself go, too, along with him, in order to be able to keep moving forward in time.

Less than two days after the first seizure, I held him in a cold vet’s office as his heart stopped. I wrapped his body in a beautiful wool blanket and surrounded him with flower petals. The next day, I drove south to a place where there was a place to lay him to rest, on a friend’s family farm, far enough from the river but close enough to hear it running.

I buried him, incorrectly, rushed, then dug him up and buried him again, deeper, in the middle of the night under a bright moon. I inhaled the smell of his already decomposing body. I needed to experience the death and decay on a sensory level. It made it real.

I stayed there to watch the farm and the family’s dog. When I tried to do anything but grieve, things went awry. I drove my car into a pond and had to be fished out with a tractor. I traveled six hours to see the house I was planning to move into, where I dropped my phone and broke it irreparably. Without GPS, I almost didn’t make it back, and the housing fell through anyway. My other dog, Woody, had two accidents I didn’t notice in time, leaving stains on the floor and overwhelming me with guilt. I felt unsteady, like everything was spinning out of control.

When I finally got back to the home I was trying to leave, a massive windstorm hit. We and everyone else in the valley lost power for several days.

I slept on the floor next to the fireplace, Woody and I trying to keep each other warm and alive. I used all of what was left of my wood, but couldn’t get the stove hot enough to boil water or heat food.

In the few hours of the day where there was enough light to do anything, I packed through panic, unsure of where I’d wind up. It was cold. I was already descending into debt. Everything felt impossible and yet I had to keep doing it.

All this loss was terrible.

It was also a portal.

At first, not having a smartphone or computer or power made me feel anxious. Then, I slowly sunk into parts of myself I hadn’t been with in a long time. I looked into the fire, as my ancestors have done since the beginning, and I felt myself enter a place I hadn’t been since childhood.

I lit an oil lamp and tried singing songs from a little book called The Ditty Bag that I’d found at the thrift for a dollar. There were tunes from Italy, Romania, Appalachia. My voice struggled but I could read the music well enough to catch a few songs from across space and time. I clutched a small jar in which I’d put a tiny clipping of Moon Pie’s fur and lit a candle for him every night and wept with my whole heart, wept as a way of keeping my heart whole.

I had a few numbers in my burner phone, enough to connect with somebody who had a lead on a place we might be able to live, up near the border, quiet but less alone. I decided it was worth a try. I drove up to see the place, and felt more at home than I ever have. I didn’t know how I’d make it work, but I knew it was the right next thing, and now I’m here.

I fell through a darkly star-lit pathway between possible lives.

I lost so much, and found a version of me that was more than all of that.

I learned about love in a whole new way, the shape it takes when the beloved is gone, the heft of grief, how it anchors you, how it forces you to let go so you can open to what life has for you next.

Now I live on the edge of a town near the base of a new mountain, in a yurt next to a cabin with a bunch of other queer folks. Collectively, we have three dogs, three cats, and, currently, three goats, one of which is a buck named Rocky whose urine-soaked pheromones you can smell all the way down the drive.

For now, I’ve got a gig cleaning vacation rentals a few days a week. It’s hard work and it doesn’t even cover half my monthly expenses, but it keeps me from spiraling into despair. The bank raised my credit limit, buying me time. I am grateful for this even though I know I’ll pay for it later.

On the mountain, it smells like cedar and mycelium and cold glacier water. Everything is covered in moss and ferns. Most of the houses are vacation rentals for people who ski. I go into these cabins that feel old and stale and like no place I’d want to stay even with the beautiful location, and I feel them transform through the care of my hands.

I still don’t understand how this works except that it feels like magic. When I am done, the rooms feel bigger. Brighter. More inviting. There’s more energy, more connectedness between inside and outside. As I work, music flows through me and I can feel how I’m transmuting whatever energy was left behind and preparing the space for whatever experiences it will hold next. I can always sense what needs to be done and sense when I’ve done enough for the day. I am attuned to the spaces, connected. We are alive together.

Through the magic of tending to place, place tends to me.

This is the hope that’s holding me up: that by tending to this world I’m in now, I will somehow find a way to keep surviving in it.

In an earlier issue of this newsletter, place and memory, I wrote about the way memories move through the land. It still feels true.

There’s a passage I love and quote often from Conner Bouchard-Roberts’ A Field Companion for Wandering, about the spirits of place:

A daemon is an in-between spirit, a demi-god. A long time back they permeated nearly everything: psychology, fate, desires, philosophy, legends, and intimacy. It was common language to refer to ‘a daemon of a place,’ the ‘genius-loci,’ which is sort of our feeling of place-ness. A place carries a history, memories, an understanding, an individual character: its particular daemon.

I keep meeting and befriending these daemons. I keep moving. Wandering. Dreaming. Falling. Believing.

I don’t know what will happen next. But the farm, the chapter that birthed this project, is now firmly in the rear-view mirror.

I think it’s probably time to release this, too, even though I don’t know yet what’s coming next.

I’ve been writing a lot, but nothing quite seems to fit into this format and it’s making me feel crazy to try. I need to take some space, let my voice evolve, figure out what wants to flow through me from this new place.

I am afraid to let this go, because your subscriptions are a significant form of support — almost 8 percent of my income last year came from this project — and it has meant so much to me to have your readership.

But the death-portal of this winter taught me something: to keep moving forward, sometimes you have to stop looking back.

You have to let go of everything you are holding and step into the future with your hands open.

You have to trust that there’s more life out there than the life you’ve known so far.

I choose to believe.

I can’t overstate how much I’ve appreciated your support for this endeavor as it’s evolved. I loved learning about land and food and place and people, and having an opportunity to integrate my past life with the life I’ve been building. Your readership gave me faith in myself and helped me develop as a writer, and your financial support really, truly, has helped me survive.

Through this project, I wrote 43 essays about land, food, labor, earth, and bodies. This one makes 44.

Looking back at them, I can see more clearly the journey I’ve been on and what it’s been about: accepting my transness and neurodivergence, being in my body and connecting to the body of the earth, and working through the wounds of colonization and capitalism, including religious fundamentalism, racism, and genocide. It’s been a heart-wrenching, border-melting journey.

Here are some highlights:

• what’s in a name?, the very first essay I created for this project, starts from the story of the tomato variety called Paul Robeson, and connects labor issues, farm work, Soviet gardens, global labor and race politics, and seed exchanges.

• cucumber season examines themes of excess and scarcity in food, eating disorders, salvage economies, farm worker union rights, and generosity.

• good land explores the difference between colonization’s ever-degrading approach to land and long-term, interdependent, mutual tending.

• pain and the price of embodiment has nothing to do with food or farming, but it is about being in a body, and it’s one of the pieces I’m most proud of from the entirety of this project.

• let us live connects slow food, broccolo fiolaro, and transness; the follow-up everybody dies!, about living while we’re alive, is one of my favorites.

• sardines in a can took the most research of all these essays, and connects early Chinese communities on the California coast to Belarusian students working in Alaska to Vietnamese workers in Japan shucking oysters on TikTok. I learned so much from it (including that I love smoked mackerel!).

• this generous earth is a brief reflection on the gifts offered to us freely by this planet, from stones on Tiger Mountain to natural gas in Azerbaijan.

• self-seeding connects purslane, volunteer plants, and the unstoppability of transness.

• patch work (addendum) articulated succinctly the magic of tending to the land.

• underworlds looks at soil health and mental health and spirituality and how we tend to the things we cannot see.

• heirlooms, the first piece I wrote after the genocide in Gaza began, addresses the gifts of our ancestors — including generations of seeds — as well as the need to confront intergenerational inheritances of trauma and belief.

• going under is a reflection on winter, my decision to have top surgery, and the struggle to communicate one’s inner self in the outside world.

• the things we can only know by heart is about nostalgia and temperature and memory and “false spring” and captures a feeling I feel tender for.

• people loved a row to hoe, one of the shortest pieces in this collection, about tending to what’s right in front of you.

• blackberry blues is, I think, the best piece of the whole project, and it’s about invasive species control and family trauma.

• where the buffalo roam, which came out this past election day, is about holding onto hope and investing in the future even when the fight seems almost futile.

I feel proud of this collection and how much I’ve grown from creating it. I’m so beyond grateful to everyone who’s read, commented, supported, or responded to my work off this platform. Thank you for being with me on this journey so far.

I know I’ll keep writing. I’m not sure yet what form that will take, or where I’ll be, but I’ll keep you posted.

I’m slipping through the portal now.

Hope to see you on the other side.

A small parting gift: I strongly recommend you get a copy of “Beautiful Stories about Dead Animals,” some of the most exquisite writing I’ve ever read about death. Khrysanne does what I could not, and I’m so grateful.

On my way out of Montana this past August, I stopped to learn about the bison.

Sometimes also called buffalo, nearly 30 million of these creatures once roamed the Great Plains. By the end of the 19th century, they had almost gone extinct.

This was on purpose.

“Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone,” a U.S. Army Colonel said during a hunt in 1867, according to the historical records. He said this, apparently, to assuage the conscience of a settler-hunter who was more concerned about the lives of these animals than of the human beings who depended on them.

These actions — combined with the destruction of their habitat, commercial hunting, and introduction of disease — decimated the bison population. By the late 1800’s, they were nearly wiped out from the lands where the buffalo had once roamed.

But before that, there was a man named Atatice.

Atatice was of the Pend O’Reille, one of the tribes that had been promised the lands of the Flathead Reservation by the U.S. government in the Hellgate Treaty of 1855.

Not long after this treaty was signed, while out hunting east of the mountains, Atatice had a dream to bring some bison back to the Flathead Reservation.

He felt strongly about it. Atatice presented this vision to the chiefs, who could not agree amongst themselves. Eventually Atatice withdrew his request, but he carried the dream forward and passed it on to his son, Łatati, also known as Little Falcon Robe.

A generation later, Łatati traveled east and found six orphaned bison. He brought them back to the reservation lands (not an easy journey).

Under his care, these six became twelve. He loved them dearly.

But one day, while Łatati was gone, his stepfather sold the herd — without his consent — to the two men, Michal Pablo and Charles Allen, whose names have since been attached to the herd.

It is important to understand this history.

Łatati was heartbroken, but also, with new resources, care, and better lands, the herd grew.

In 1908, the U.S. government broke its treaty and opened up the Flathead Reservation to non-indigenous settlement, using a strategy called allotment that forced households to accept individual property ownership rather than shared management of lands. This affected the herds as well, who were meant to range openly.

Ironically, the U.S. government, which had by then realized the importance of bison, bought some back from the Pablo-Allen herd and created what was then called the National Bison Range on the newly stolen Flathead lands. They fenced it in and prohibited tribal members from visiting or even working there.

The work to return tribal members to stewardship of the bison herd has been long and contested, a result of changes to federal law and steadfast advocacy by the tribes themselves. Only in 2020 did the land begin its return to tribal management, more than a century after it was taken.

It is now called, simply, the Bison Range.

Some of us live in very narrow timelines in our active consciousness as we go about our lives. The whole world is just whether we win or lose a particular game in a particular moment. Time began when our bodies arrived and will end for us when they depart.

Others know what it means to survive generations of oppression, carrying seeds, buying back what should always have been yours. Saving your history. Living for future generations. Planning for what you will leave behind and how you will show up on the other side, and listening to the ancestors who are already there.

Understanding that time is long even if we are short in it. 

I’m finishing this on election day 2024. It’s wild to me that this is happening now. I’ve been sitting with this essay for months, blocked within it and blocked by it from releasing anything else.

There’s been so much to unpack and so much to react to — saviorism over Kamala Harris, fearmongering over Project 2025, lots of things that brought up my own childhood in a rigorously Christian nationalist household and the ways that shaped my life, including my early career in the U.S. federal government. I’ve been tempted to comment on what’s happening on the real-time, constantly evolving surface of the U.S. elections, because I do have insights.

But somehow it didn’t fit. I touched a buffalo hide and it changed something in me and how I need to write about these things.

The bison hold a deeper history of what happened here, one that explains why so many people are determined to look away from the suffering the U.S. government is wreaking upon the world today — because it’s the same suffering it has wrought, with little consequence, since this country began.

As Ashinaabekwe leader Winona LaDuke put it:

[Euro-Americans] can’t talk about Israel because we can’t talk about Wounded Knee. Because we can’t talk about Sand Creek or Carlisle ‘Boarding School.’ Because we can’t talk about forced sterilization or small pox blankets or Kit Carson and his scorched earth policy in the Southwest. Because we have Andrew Jackson on our twenty dollar bill. Because we are one huge settlement on stolen land. We can’t talk about Israel because we are Israel. (emphasis mine)

If we really want to stop this genocide, we have to be willing to look in the mirror and under our feet. If we want to evolve as a nation into something that actually lives up to our democratic ideals, we have to be willing to address the past and see how it is shaping our lives now.

That’s something that liberals and conservatives alike have avoided in different ways. The right denies or justifies the horrors of the past, while liberals paper it over with superficial efforts at diversity that allow them to look away cheerfully without guilt or doing reparations work.

This country hasn’t reckoned with what actually happened here, to the climate, to the people, some of whom, to quote June Jordan, did not die.

Thanks to the fight of so many people to survive, and to carry forward their ancestry, culture, knowledge, and even physical seeds, we have the opportunity to begin to make it right, in every moment.

By we, I mean us. Me. You. No matter who becomes president, or if we even continue to have a presidency here, all of us have work to do.

One thing I’ve noticed: The powers that be are always trying to convince us that it’s “too late” to make a change.

The Democrats argued this for months, as anti-genocide protestors were stating loud and clear that we would not vote for Biden. We were told by the establishment that it was “too late” to put forward a new candidate, but then, once they decided to, they raised a record-breaking $81 million overnight.

It’s never too late.

But we have to go deeper into time to make any real change.

Focusing on elections, on the choices available to us on a ballot, shrinks our imaginations and allows us to remove ourselves from the deeper work we have to do if we want options that offer any of us a real future.

I’m asking you, begging you, really, to dream a bigger dream, no matter who wins. Do what you have to do to believe that one can exist.

Learn about Land Back, and the bison. See how even this government, mere moments after breaking its promises and seizing the land, had to go back to the people it had attempted to exterminate and beg them for the seeds our collective future needed. Recognize that our survival depends on reversing the course of climate change and endless wars. Join others in dreaming a better way.

Inside each of us, no matter how colonized our bodies and our imaginations, are the seeds of remembrance.

Find them, please. Find the part of you that knows it’s never too late.

One last thing.

Hearts broke over and over, during this story. Almost all hope was lost: A population of 30 million bison reduced to a few survivors.

When I consider the attempted extermination of both bison and the people whose lives were intertwined with them, I cannot help but think of the lands that have been destroyed in Gaza. The trees uprooted and soil scorched. The Wounded Children with No Surviving Family, a new horror on the landscape of the world. The way that Netanyahu and his applauding backers in Congress want to “finish the job” with a fervor that recalls exactly what happened here.

It is worth fighting for every inch, every elder, every child, every sunbird, every olive tree. Every indigenous life, here, in Palestine, anywhere in the world, is a seed of a dream. Even those who wish to destroy this dream will someday understand how precious it is, how much they need it, too.

It will require generations to recover from these horrors, and we will never escape the sorrow. There is much to be done, and the dream has to adapt, continuously, to changing conditions and challenges from those who still wish to destroy it.

We don’t always get to see our dreams manifest, and there’s often a great deal of pain along the way.

Our own people don’t believe us.

The wins are contested and never certain.

We never get to stop fighting for more than a moment.

We often pass on before we see our dreams come to fruition.

But when we do this work, when we do our part, we get somewhere.

It’s not only those who want to steal our lives who can be bold enough to dream the dream they want, and gather around it, and fight for what they believe in.

We, too, can imagine the world we want to live in.

And we can carry it forward, in the spirit of Atatice.

I’m immensely grateful to all the teachers whose work informed this piece — while humbly acknowledging that it has flowed through me and my specific life experience and flaws and is an incomplete reflection of their teachings, which I encourage you to seek out on your own.

These include:

• Atatice, Łatati, and all those who carried their story forward, with specific thanks to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes

• Chippewa-Cree artist Loren Henderson, who let me touch the buffalo hide at his booth during the Sacajawea Park Art Fair in Polson, Montana

• The lands currently known as the Flathead Reservation, which hold the entire story no matter what has been built on top or who currently occupies them

To make a bison burger, you don’t have to do much. Just mix it with salt, pepper, and any spices you want (I used sumac), but don’t be heavy-handed — the meat doesn’t need a lot of doctoring and you may want to taste it. No egg or anything else. I cooked mine in a skillet with butter and ate it on a brioche bun with some spicy salad greens from the farm, ketchup, and mayonnaise, but I think it would be have been plenty delicious on its own.

Some sources:

“Kill Every Buffalo You Can! Every Buffalo Dead Is An Indian Gone,” J. Philip Weston, The Atlantic, May 2016.

“Bisonology,” Ologies podcast, published January 16, 2020.

Bison Range signage and website.

“Project 2025,” Today, Explained podcast, published April 3, 2024.