Orion Winter 2022

THIS FALL we had the pleasure of cosponsoring a few stellar events. In September, Orion contributing editor Ross Gay joined host Randy Cohen on his Person Place Thing podcast to discuss parents, pawpaws, the admirable democracy of pickup basketball, and Ross’s new book Inciting Joy. A few weeks later we officially launched our autumn issue with a memorable conversation between Orion contributing editor John Freeman and legendary author Sandra Cisneros about her new poetry collection, Woman Without Shame, and related essay, “The Beautiful Unforeseen,” featured in the issue. Then Lulu Miller, Robert Michael Pyle, Scott Black, David Quammen, and our bug-loving friends at the Xerces Society joined us to celebrate the release of our newest diminutive anthology, The Book of Bugs: The Best Writing about Insects, Arachnids, and Other Arthropods…

THERE WILL BE those in your life who swear by the ticking clock. Thirteen minutes. Eleven and a half minutes. However many minutes it takes for the furtive center to transform itself into your soft golden prize. Others will begin cold and let things soak obediently for a while, as the French mandate. A troubled few prefer to switch off the heat halfway through, because the wait, for them, is the game. (Do not trust them. The burner is their trigger; anything is their trigger.) And there will occasionally be those armed with life hacks, who urge you, for instance, to prick a hole in the bottom that allows an exit for the myriad pressures forging within, or to add oil or baking soda to the water so the shell…

THE MOSS in my yard is spreading, climbing up the hill from the maple-shaded glen, sprawling over small boulders, softening them. In an electric green revival after a long winter, it reaches as if it wants to touch everything that can be touched. It’s even beginning to carpet the less moss-friendly sunlit patches of lawn. I say lawn, but it’s not really a lawn in the traditional sense. In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find actual grass in it, unless you count the crabgrass that grows with the weeds. When I first moved to this Massachusetts house, a modified colonial ringed by woods and set back from a winding two-lane road, I often woke up astonished that I was still in my bed. Caught in my own domestic version…

TONIGHT, after three years in the skyscraper shadows, the ratty abandoned lots bordering tech-money opulence, the soul-wringing poverty and relentless ambulance scream of it all, I saw my first San Franciscan skunks. As in plural. As in two of them. As in black-and-white and bounding across the street, their tails lush and large, their pointy snouts pointing them ever deeper into the great adventure of Being. Maybe I cried a few joyful expletives, or maybe I wet myself a thimble’s worth, or maybe I merely stopped and stared and smiled over the unexpected encounter. It was a rush, a fantastic Mephitis mephitis blur. Understand, dear reader, that the bulk of my discretionary time is spent rambling and roaming, combing shrubs and climbing trees, poking into the nooks and cramming into…

WHEN I WAS YOUNG, my father would talk about the rain. How it usually fell during certain times of the year, and the farmers could count on it. Over a relatively small span of years, my father’s generation saw the rain falling less and less frequently—and when it finally did come, it would fall in great downpours, often flooding the fields and destroying the already weakened crops. Farmers started to lose their farms and their livelihoods. People were going broke. Food was becoming more scarce. Food prices started to escalate. And the situation was getting worse quickly. As I grew up, I studied how the climate crisis was ravaging vast parts of the African continent. It’s tragic and ironic, because Africa is responsible for only 3 percent of global emissions…

MY MOTHER GREW UP in the town of Chidambaram in South India, bathing in the sacred kulams (traditional rectangular water basins). Chidambaram’s ancient Tamil name is Thillai, which is also the name of a sacred tree (Excoecaria agallocha) that grows in the saline waters in the nearby Pichavaram mangrove forests. The town itself was once enveloped by these forests. Thillai Kali Amman is also the name of a goddess, and a modest temple was built for her in Chidambaram. This goddess is highly unusual as she has two different presentations: one fierce, facing east, and one peaceful, facing west. Some years ago, my cousin Visu took me to visit Thillai Kali Amman’s temple. I performed the ritual clockwise circumambulation of the goddess. Circling the square stone plinth surrounding her icon,…