Orion Magazine

Donovan Arthen DIRECTOR OF FINANCE AND OPERATIONS Ananda Bagiackas CUSTOMER SERVICE SPECIALIST Amy Brady EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AND PUBLISHER Tracie Butler-Kurth PHILANTHROPIC STRATEGIST Christopher Cox EDITOR AT LARGE Camille Dungy POETRY EDITOR Amanda

the pilgrimage occurred daily,lugging water from the springor balancing the baskets of grapes.

IN MODERN secular societies, religion is often considered antiquated and its traditions a fossil of benighted people dwelling in a medieval worldview, lost in reveries of salvation. Some look down on piety as primitive, and ritual practices as childl

DADIMA PRACTICES yoga every day. She had been studying abroad in London and just returned to India when she began her practice, around the same time she married a naval officer. His mother suggested she drop out of college after the wedding, which sh

“IT WANTS TO BE WINDY,”Papa would say of Sila, the weather. “It likes to be cold,” he’d say in December when the Monitor heater in Papa and Gram’s home ran nonstop, the temperature at -40 to -50 degrees Fahrenheit for days. Sila is alive, his words t

THEY TROMP THROUGH the bush with purpose, voluminous ears fanned forward, trunks raised and waving. Pausing, they sway shoulder to gray shoulder, blinking their long-lashed eyes. They are silent as they look down at their dead. Moments pass, until at

NATURE HAS ALWAYS soaked me in waterfalls of wonder. In a redwood forest, when I crawled into the hollow of an ancient tree and listened to its centuries of stories. By a lake, as I watched thousands of flamingos suddenly take flight. In the ocean, w

Some days, I walk the long dirt road,and beg the birds to shoutfrom the alder and cascarain hopes that I will look up.If only I could maptheir flighty unknowns. Instead, I fall, stumble, fall again,if only to be emptymaybe then, I will wear nothingne

AS WE ENTER Namdapha National Park and Tiger Reserve in Arunachal Pradesh, where sunlight first touches the Indian subcontinent, we begin to see them: butterflies, mostly solitary, sometimes in a tiny group, indifferent to us but also quick to levita

If Thoreau dropped down into my body like some alien bodhisattva and inhabited it this afternoon, he’d not allow himself such a restricted ramble inside this corridor of wire fencing. Nor would he start at the main beach, nor follow the path up to th

IN 2014, a groundbreaking New Zealand law granted legal personhood—with all its rights and responsibilities—to the rainforest Te Urewera, a former national park and the spiritual homeland of the Ngāi Tūhoe. A new board reflecting the Tūhoe worldview

In the strawberry patchsifting through sticky roots spiders drip from garden glovesback to the off-blood color of mulch and dying berries. We gather all the torn outplant limbs in sacks and head back to the green garbage bins, surroundedby gopher hol

A LONG THE WINDING ROAD clinging to the edge of the Ocoee River, dozens of makeshift memorials marked each tight turn. I drove past hillsides streaked with a thin dusting of snow, crossing from Tennessee to Georgia, back to Tennessee, briefly to Nort

The reading canceled,we drive out to the cemeterysit beneath the aroma of cedarshis parents’ stones as seats I upon Otto, you on Helenpassing his Collected Poemslike a bottle, reading outour favorites for the wind Words scatter light as finchesinto t

Considering softness,considering each leaf a brief and lonelylyric, considering, especially, the bladeswhich have browned with a sun-sweet leisureand thirst for time, what is a gentle wayto imagine this reckoning? We who speakthe language of home kno

THE TITLE character is Velutha, a low-caste worker in a pickle factory and part-time handyman at the Ayemenem home, with whose matriarch he falls into an epic and criminal love that ends in tragedy, and the small things are exactly what they sound li

IN HURSTON’S masterpiece, we meet Janie Crawford—a complex, curious, sensitive teen—as she awakens to life’s possibilities and heartache beneath a flowering pear tree in her grandmother’s home in West Florida. Navigating deep, familial wounds of ensl

SHADOW IS DOWN on his luck when he takes an undefined job with the mysterious Mr. Wednesday. His ensuing road trip across the lonely interstates of Middle America quickly evolves into a hero’s journey worthy of Sir Gawain. The guiding premise of Amer

MOVING TO a new town in a new state is hard enough without adding the pressures of both puberty and finding your religion. Originally published in 1970, Judy Blume’s coming-of-age story, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, remains relevant half a c

TAIWANESE AMERICAN writer K-Ming Chang’s first story collection, a follow-up to her fearless debut novel, Bestiary, is a concoction of both the thrilling and the mundane—one is interchangeable with the other in a world where everyday objects take on