Travelogue Archives - Macska Moksha Press

Cows, Coal and Peaches: My summer in Paonia, Colorado

November 2, 2025 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

[This is the first of a few recollections from the summer. There’s too much for one essay.]

Shadow, the farm cat, by some Mustard greens I was growing out for seed

Farm or travel? That’s been the choice I’ve made every summer for the last decade or so. The two options are basically mutually exclusive, or as I’ve often said: “Farming is the opposite of traveling.” This year I picked the first one, and I spent the agricultural season in Paonia, a small town on Colorado’s Western Slope.

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2023 Photos: “Artsy” — for Joanna Pocock

December 19, 2023 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

I exited social media early in 2023, and while my quality of life in general improved, I did miss a small number of people who I interacted with there. One of them is Joanna Pocock, a British author who I interviewed on my podcast twice (here and here), and who posted photos to her Instagram that I truly appreciated. She has a great eye for composition and her work is really worth looking at closely. Occasionally I posted my own photos especially for her. Some were call-outs to her subject matter, which often included scenes of urbanity and decay, and others were simply my attempts at creative arrangement I thought she would dig.

Had I still been on Instagram this year, I would have tagged Joanna on most of these. Some were taken specifically for her (many of the black and whites), and others jumped out at me as I reviewed this year’s roll. Someday I hope to take a walk around London with Joanna, taking pictures together, but in the meantime, I have these to share. They are arranged in order by date, from earliest to latest. Enjoy!

Gravel Lot Reverie

September 1, 2019 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

*Gravel parking lot in the Central Valley [photo by author]*

We pulled off at that exit because we saw a grocery store sign from the freeway. Our destination was still hours away and we wanted to have a beer when we arrived, but by that time the stores would be closed. So it was a practical thing.

I’ve been to quite a few, but not nearly all, of the exits on the 5 in the Central Valley but never this one. I had no memory of visiting this particular grocery store chain anywhere between Sacto and the Oregon border.

I’d been driving since leaving Ashland in mid-afternoon and the sun had just sunk behind the coast range here. The sky was lit up with a dusty orange glow. The summer was slowly waning from its peak as September approached and we were thankful there’d been no big fires yet. It felt like it was only a matter of time before everything burned—every last tree from Del Norte to Tahoe and from Klamath to Marin—but perhaps we’d be spared any record breakers this year.

That seems the most to hope for in these days of new highs, lows and days-in-a-row: that this month won’t be the hottest, wettest or deadliest every recorded; that some respite, however temporary, might be felt, if only for one’s nerves.

For, what is it to live in such times? When talk of “the end of the world”—in some sense or other—is no longer just crazy, like it was not so long ago?

“Roadtripping at the End of the World”

August 26, 2019 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

My new book, “Roadtripping at the End of the World,” is now available! For a limited time, you can order an autographed copy direct from me. When these run out, the book will be available only on Amazon.

When you order the hard copy, you will also get the book in all its digital versions (PDF, epub, Kindle). Or you can order just the digital versions.

This book is a collection made up of eight essays inspired my travels around the USA and six interviews with activists I met along the way. A few appeared online previously, but much of the material is brand new.

Check out this excerpt: “Virgin Prairie: Rarer Than Old-Growth Forest”

The book is available at four prices:

Regular Price (includes shipping in USA): $17.50
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Patron Price (extra support for the author): $35.00
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Solidarity Price (low income/student): $10
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Digital downloads only (PDF, epub, mobi & azw3): $5
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If you would like to order multiple copies, please contact me.

“Home” as a Season, Not a Place

May 26, 2019 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Painted Lady butterfly, bg: California Poppies

The other day (May 24, 2019), I saw a Painted Lady butterfly (Vanessa cardui) near the town of Dinsmore, California. That’s in the northeast corner of Humboldt County, near the Trinity County line, just off the 36, on the edge of Six Rivers National Forest. The terrain is hilly, fairly steep and treed with Firs and Oaks of various species. Though this spot was only a little over 50 miles from the 101 to the west, it takes close to an hour and a half to drive there, due to tight curves and steep climbs. It’s out in the boonies for sure.

The butterfly had seen better days. One of their lower wings was over half gone and the others a bit raggedy-edged. Earlier this year, in southern California—specifically in Anza-Borrego State Park—I had seen thousands of them every day for weeks. There had been a bigger-than-usual migration (see here, here and here). For awhile there, I couldn’t drive anywhere without my windshield getting streaked with yellow and my grill filling up with dead bodies. Try as I might, it just wasn’t possible to avoid hitting them, there were so many. I felt a little less bad about it one day when I came out of a store and saw a couple of small birds on my bumper, gorging on the corpses.

Other times, sitting in the desert, a cloud of them would pass through, literally hundreds a minute, alighting on the many, many flowers and passing on. (A “superbloom” was in effect too.) For as many as there were, it was tricky to get good photos. They were shy of close human presence and never landed in one place for long. What I had to do was a pick a good spot and sit still with my camera turned on and pointed, waiting for one to flutter within focusing distance.
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Mass Shootings, Toxic Masculinity and their Roots in Agriculture

November 17, 2017 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Local newspapers

On November 14, a gunman in Rancho Tehama, California, shot 15 people. Five died. It was the 318th mass shooting of 2017 in the US. Of these, it ranked as the fifth deadliest (tied with a June 5 attack in Orlando, Florida). In terms of injuries, it was the sixth worst (tied with May 20 in Philadelphia and January 27 in Brownsville, Tennessee). The assailant was himself killed by law enforcement.

As it so happens, I arrived in the area later that same day, on my way from Portland to Mendocino County. My plan was to harvest olives from an untended orchard near the town of Corning.

I’d been listening exclusively to MP3s on the drive, so didn’t hear anything about the shooting until I stopped in a restaurant for dinner. It was a Thai place, which is always a great choice for meatless and gluten-free food, which are my preferences. Though it was around 7pm, I was the only customer. The owner immediately volunteered why that was.

“Everyone’s nervous to go out tonight after what happened today,” she said, and then detailed the violent event after I expressed my ignorance of it.

“We’re taking it hard,” she added. “This a small place and we all know each other.”
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A Glimpse of the Past and a Taste of the Future in Hell’s Canyon

December 16, 2016 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Hell’s Canyon rimland, July 2016

Since giving up farming a couple years ago, my interest in sustainable diets has only changed focus, not waned. Turning away from the domestic, I have been exploring wildcrafted food and medicine, including plants traditionally used by Native Americans. So this spring, when my former farming partner, Clara, invited me to visit northeast Oregon with her for the early summer harvest season of wild foods there, I was thrilled.

We spent six weeks in and around Hell’s Canyon on the Oregon/Idaho border, an area that’s abundant for foragers and has been for millennia. Fruit trees, berry bushes, wild roots and medicinal herbs can be found in profusion, mostly on public land. Most of this flora is native but some was introduced through European colonization. All of it is threatened to one degree or another by misuse of the land, both contemporary and historic, and by Climate Change. Indeed, every place we explored offered us a glimpse of the past and a taste of the future.

Civilization as Symptom, Not Disease: Digging for the Roots of “Babylon”

March 7, 2016 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

I first began to consciously question the value of Civilization in 1997. I was visiting Northhampton, Massachusetts, with a new lover. We were enjoying that early stage shortly after meeting when the intensity of sensation is so strong that your world is blown apart, making space for the new to enter and blossom, including the mystical. We went a book store I had never been in, and I found myself following my feet as they led me quickly down one of the aisles to a particular shelf. There, my hand reached up and picked out a book without my eyes reading the spine. The book was “My Name Is Chellis and I am Recovery from Civilization” by Chellis Glendenning.

I devoured the book in the days that followed, sating a hunger I hadn’t been aware of. Glendenning’s lucid text explained so much of the depression I had been experiencing in my life. Among many other salient points, she demonstrated how Civilization disconnects us from the natural world and how Capitalism appropriates our instincts in order to peddle us its wares. Glendenning turned on a light in my head that never went off again and has illuminated much for me in the time since as it has grown in brightness.

Four years later, inspired by the protests in Seattle against the WTO in late 1999, I moved to the West Coast and dove head-long into political activism. (The lover had become a partner and then an ex; as is typical, the magic was traded first for the mundane and then for the wretched.) In my new circles, I met forest defenders, anarcho-primitivists and rewilders, all of whom shared Glendenning’s disdain for Civilization, and some of whom took it much further, in both attitude and in action. This is when I first heard the name “Babylon” applied to Civilization in general and to Cities in particular. I’ve never been too fond of the term — Bible stories don’t inspire me much — but I’ve often shared the anti-Civ sentiments of those who use it.

Babylon, after all, has wrought annihilation seemingly everywhere:
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The Mark of Malice in California’s “Emerald Triangle”

December 22, 2015 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Clearcut in Humboldt County, making way for Cannabis cultivation

In November of 2015, I spent three weeks working at a medical Cannabis operation in Humboldt County. My time there was filled with realization and sadness. Though the land in that part of the country is sparsely inhabited and appears wild or even untouched, it has in fact been abused for well over a century and a half, and the mark of malice lies undeniably upon it. Waves of genocide and environmental destruction have swept through it and, unfortunately, the “Green Rush” of recent years is bringing more hurt.

Life and Death on Route 395: Water Wars, Baby Birds and a Crashed Harley

July 1, 2015 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Storm over the White Mountains, 6/6/15

I awoke the morning of my 46th birthday on top of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Not immediately on top of it – it was buried at a depth of at least 25 feet in this spot – but just a few steps from our parked van it was exposed by a service shaft: an open concrete box lidded with a thick grate. Standing over it, I could hear the roar of water being sucked southwards by the thirsty urban monster 100 miles away. Down the hill from my vantage point, the giant metal drinking straw of the aqueduct’s pipe emerged from the soil, spanned the dry creek below, and thrust itself back into the ground of the opposite slope. Another service shaft stuck up out of the hilltop above it, just like the one in front of me.

The Romans made far more elegant structures for the same purpose, but I marveled at the feat of engineering laid before (and underneath and behind) me. I wondered about the degree of angle it employed in order to run slightly downhill over such a long distance. I looked in vain for any sign of the tremendous excavation that must of taken place. Or did they bore a tunnel? If so, that must have been a big powerful machine. The engineering feats of the 20th Century are a wonder to behold for their sheer scale and complexity. The long-term costs of these projects, though, have not been so wonderful.

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