Orion Magazine

MILESTONE BIRTHDAYS invite reflection. What have we put into the world in all this time? Are we what we imagined we’d be? A publication like Orion does not survive without continually reconciling the need to stay true to one’s founding principles wit

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Soon, or before long, or at some point, we will know with the sureness of age what this all was about. That is what we were told. Soon we will know, for instance, who we are. How we once were one thing and now we are not. How we were young just momen

YUCCA FlLAT, Nevada, of the early 1950s is a diorama of modern America. Beneath desert stars a faux suburbia has been constructed, with ranch-style homes, utility poles, and pantries filled with canned food. Mannequins in floral dresses and mid-centu

The last time I visited earth I wore a skin of human flesh, vulnerable skin covering that body on its way to letting go, bones broken like the left-behind umbrella in a branch storm, all having been such fragile holy ones. As a human, there was littl

Loop, WHORL, ARCH. Friction ridges that are yours and yours alone. Grasp, touch, feel, cling. And push away, using this most sensitive part of your body to cleave yourself from all around you. It is the Age of Fingerprints, a time when traces of Homo

IT WAS ONLY THE ELEPHANTS and us and maybe some dolphins. By us, we mean the ones with opposable thumbs. The ones who could see our reflections and know: that’s us. Or not us, just a reflection of us, but that seemed a minor point for a long time. Wh

Thank you, moon, for following across the pond while I walked, for bringing me to the shore to say goodnight. The affection of your speech is inside me. That is exactly where I want it. Has anyone I’ve loved ever been anywhere else? You followed over

DON’T WANT THIS to be the thing. I hate feeling guilty about stuff. But the thing is, I’ve run the numbers, and I’m pretty sure this is the thing. Have you ever done a tarot reading? There’s this card, the Eight of Cups, that shows a caped man slinki

THERE WAS ALWAYS a period of grief after harvesting the fields—when, after so many days of the combine coming through for the corn, the specks of husk shining in the long rays of the last summer sun, the fields turning back into mud, all the work we

ETYMOLOGICALLY SPEAKING, the origins of the English word noise are disputed, as some adhere to its arrival in English via the Latin noxia (meaning “hurt, harmful, injury, damage”), but others believe its route to be through the Latin nausia, literall

Welcome to the Ignocene Offspring of the Holocene Eclipser of the Anthropocene Murkier than the Miocene All of these the Recent scene Yes including Paleocene Not to mention Pliocene Oligocene and Pleistocene Confused? Mizzenmister you ain’t seen Noth

WHEREVER YOU TRAIN your attention for long enough, boundaries dissolve. And yet, if we define, as Earth systems scientists do, geological eras as stretches of time whose material markers trace through lake sediment and rock, then perhaps we can use t

HOMO SAPIENS are decisively altering the conditions of earthly life, but we are not the first to do so. Some 2.4 billion years ago, cyanobacteria began to radically shift Earth’s biogeochemical trajectory. Through photosynthesis, these minute aquatic

HAVE WE MISSED THE OFF-RAMP to Eden? Did we denature the leafy green paradise of plants and animals that was Earth? Is nature even “natural” anymore, now that we’ve paved and polluted all over it? Let’s say you have a knife, and you change the blade,

from the other side of the Mekong River I bury my face in a vague prayer It was only a nightmare soon passing by A grandmother washes clothes by the wooden bridge Her daughter sings a lullaby the stilt house swings on lanky acacia legs Slow rapids li

I RECENTLY RETURNED from Antarctica, where I’d looked at ice fashioned from snow that fell way back before sound became symbol. Whatever words I had to name that which sat before me did not stick. They’d slip off the slick surface and tumble into an

WE WERE OLD. We were weathered. We lost our youthful looks. We dotted Japan’s coastline. We stood at human height, sometimes taller. They called us “tsunami stones.” Our faces were carved with messages: build on higher ground. remember the last calam

IT’S 1434. A merchant and his wife pose for a double portrait. Nearby, four oranges glow from their windowsill. The merchant is an Italian in Flanders, dealing in cloth and tapestries. The trees have made their way from China, offering up their fruit

Tantie and I share the breadfruit picked from the tree her father planted with his own black hands. She only picked what she needed, a tenderness passed down from the soil-workers of our family line dragged to these islands to build empire. Paradise,

SALT IS AN ANCESTOR. Older than ocean, old as stars. Salt flows through your saltwater body even now like blood, as blood. Salt is nonnegotiable, necessary for the working of every single cell. Salt is time. Evidence of how long since evaporation. Re

I USED TO TAKE DURIAN for granted. A fruit could be had for a few hundred bahts in my Bangkok childhood. There were seasons when it seemed like durian was everywhere—after every dinner, a few morsels of the creamy, yellow flesh. Not again, I cried. N

THIRTY YEARS AGO, I learned how to hunt mushrooms with the guidance of a renowned naturalist, Bill Isaacs. For five summers, my son and I went mushroom hunting with Bill, in a class sponsored by the Santa Fe Community College, at different sites in n

What era are we in? The era of not knowing. In that there is so much to know, the only recourse is not to know. Or, we are incapable of knowing what we need to know. Which, like everything, can have a good side and a bad side. The bad is that we don’

BACK IN 1991, I pitched a different name for this time on Earth. That was the year before the Earth Summit in Rio produced the first climate treaty. I’d been reporting on human-driven climate change since 1988 and was writing my first book on the iss

BY THE EVENING of March 14, 2020, my pantry was so full it spilled out onto the floor. How much grain could I hoard? How much pasta would carry my family through COVID-19? I wanted security. I wanted to be snug as a British badger in slippers, cozy i

J.ROBERT OPPENHEIMER is probably the figure from the twentieth century who comes closest to a myth. In Greek mythology, Prometheus brought fire to mankind by stealing it from the peak of Mount Olympus; Oppenheimer dived into the smallest unit of matt

Part of the contract one makes with God when they live in Vermont, a hundred miles from the ocean, is we’re not supposed to worry about hurricanes, and yet, our weather is changing, making plans of its own, pinning a little red pinwheel of despair to

THERE WAS ONCE A GIRL who was taken from her settlement by a bear. In the depths of his cave they hibernated. When she was hungry, he brought his paw to her face and delicious fat poured from it. This way she stayed plump and happy. Sometime later wh

IN THE BEGINNING, God created the heavens and the earth. On the sixth day He got around to man. “And God blessed them; and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the

WE CRAWLED naked from the caves, staggered in from the hunts, to find someone had planted a seed. Our hands, stained with charcoal, ocher. Bodies spent, but swirling with beasts we’d beckoned, then painted as they emerged. From another realm. Into ou

There, at the bottom of being, where the water that makes this planet a world is the color of spacetimethe octopus— with her body-shaped mind and her eight-arm embrace of alien realities, with her colorblind vision sightful of polarized light and her

IN THE Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, there is an Atari game. Playing How to Become a Fossil, your task is to achieve fossilization, and therefore a future beyond your lifetime. But it’s difficult. Your avatar animal

A FEW YEARS AGO, I took a flight from New Orleans to the spot known as the Bird’s Foot, where the Mississippi splays into three, clawlike distributaries and finally empties into the Gulf of Mexico. The plane was a four-seater, and it flew low enough

THE ANTHROPOCENE is officially grounded. No, this warning does not pertain to those marvels of science engendering time aloft by engineered finagling of lift, thrust, or flotation—which would include balloons, zeppelins, propellered or jet-fueled win

Friday morning. Niagara falls. Along a curved railing, five languages join in tolerances for wetness. A red umbrella sucked out of a fist disappears over the precipice. Everything converges. A guide stops his group to speak about Canada geese raised

MY MOTHER’S STORIES were beautiful and sad and dark. We read them in her native language when I was very small, and they collected in my imagination, narrated by her voice. When I turned five, I started school in California and learned new stories: T

HISTORY AND STORY both were more or less imported into Middle English from the same Old French root, and the division between them has always been very porous. Thus, John of Trevisa, in his 1387 translation of Higden’s Polychronicon, calls Herodotus

Maples, still wearing their big-handed leaves. Cotoneaster, red again with new-clustered berries. Sunlight and shadow. Squirrels. Once, a one-day blizzard of birds whose bodies gleamed feathered enamels. It wasn’t hunger, this looking. It wasn’t thir

ONCE—IT WAS SO LONG AGO NOW I don’t really remember, but let’s say I was in my midtwenties, living in a house on the banks of a white-water river in rural Oregon, the house I still live in—I had a dream. I’m no trained interpreter of dreams, mine or