Orion Fall 2023

SHORTLY BEFORE those of us with steady doors would take shelter behind them, I ventured out to the Poor People’s Campaign’s National Call for Moral Revival at Second Congregational Church, where James Shearer growled from the pulpit, “Homelessness shouldn’t exist.” From the pews behind me, I heard just then a fragment of an exchange that reminded me of Samuel Beckett. PERSON 1: I know what you’re thinking. PERSON 2: I’ve always loved you for that. Perhaps we were there to air our lack-luster socialist ambitions, but mostly I think we were there for James, the raspy-voiced founder of Spare Change News. An erstwhile student reporter, James lived between friends’ houses and Boston-area shelters for twelve years before starting a street newspaper with the aspiration of creating something both by and…

IN THE SUMMER of 2021, I strapped my two small children into the car and drove twelve hundred miles through hurricane rains and clouds of wildfire ash to can peaches with a woman I was terrified of falling in love with. We had been dating for six months, but she had never spent more than a day with my children. Now we would be living together for two weeks, and by the end of it, we would know whether or not we were going to become a family. Every summer for the past four decades, my girlfriend’s family has gathered in Wisconsin for peaches. The fruit arrives on a truck twice during the season, driven up from a fifth-generation family farm in Georgia by another multigenerational family business that saw…

THE NARROW PATH drops a foot from the sidewalk as I follow Rosemary, head wrapped and eyebrows slim, away from the road. I had asked her how many plants she had, eliciting a chuckle and a beckoning wave. Counting greenery in Nairobi should be a Sisyphean task. Lush forest can’t help but grow here. Fierce equatorial rays are tempered by altitude; rich red soils are fed by the cool waters that give the city its name. “Thousands,” she replies simply. Below us spreads her brood: row upon row of banana, fig, and rubber trees; bougainvillea, fern, and jade, covering all but a few muddy foot trails in this terraced nursery pinned between unceasing traffic and the fluctuating edge of the Nairobi River. Rosemary has been cultivating this patch, doing her…

"WHAT DOES THE LAND WANT?" We gather in ceremony to hold this central question, trusting the forest will answer in its own time. Around the circle we introduce ourselves to our host, this magnificent nine hundred acres of unceded Kashia and Southern Pomo territory, situated above the Russian River in Sonoma County, California. Once a church camp, the area is now lovingly stewarded by Shelterwood, a collective of queer, Black, and Indigenous organizers committed to restoring the forest and healing this ecosystem. I and three others who fundraise on behalf of Shelterwood are here this crisp May morning, which happens to be my fifty-first birthday, to connect more deeply with land and water. We each bring something of significance for the ceremony. A song, a totem, a blessing. I have…

WHEN MY FATHER DIED, I began making weekly visits to a public grief house. I mean greenhouse. For seven Mondays, I rode the streetcar across town to warm myself in a glass building full of plants. No one had warned me that hard-hitting losses sometimes take the form of ordinary problems such as temperature-related discomfort. I had not seen this play out in stories, so I was not prepared for the cold current that entered my body and spread like ice through my veins. I did not know ski gloves and wool fleece would be my mourning vestments. For seven Mondays, I sat with leaves the size of airplane wings under a glistening dome. I basked in winter sunshine, buried myself among the dripping fronds of palms and cycads. The…

FOR YEARS, my mother hauled me to St. Mary’s Parish. Sunday mass was a habit for most Boston Catholics, but one she, and I, would eventually shed. On the church’s brick steps, I dreaded the misery that awaited me on the pew, granite-hard under my scrawny child’s body. I knew the purpose of my presence was to feel small, earthly, and sinful. “Let us proclaim the mystery of faith,” the pastor commanded. Today, I enter another temple at 9:00 a.m. Other days, 9:30. Like mass on Sundays, adult lap swim at the Northwestern Connecticut YMCA is rigidly scheduled. Unlike at church, my attendance at the pool requires a reservation. At the edge of the pool, I shiver, adjust the leg bands of my swimsuit. I regard the water with a…