The powerful rising up of protests and marches worldwide made me go back to some photos of the women and children I met in Malawi in October. We are all here together, thrown into this amazing existence. We stand together against those who would divide and diminish us.

Thoughts from walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain and from my essay in the collection Inspired Journeys (Wisconsin University Press, 2016) on traveling: "We were walking, after all, through yellow gorse and purple heather. We were following a scallop shell through eucalyptus, oak, fern, vineyards of delicate curling green. We stood in buildings nearly animate with age and use. The breath-taking beauty of the world. Beauty beating at us from all sides. Beauty and culture and history and privilege and conquest and suffering and loss. Beating at us. And the monkey mind running back and forth. The monkey mind jerking at its chain: the sacred music and the monkey-grinder music. Arguing with your husband, irritable with your friends, doubtful of your worth. Tired of yourself. And worried about those hips, too. The frailty of flesh, the loosening of fleshy parts.

Wasn’t this like every day of my life? “Isn’t every day a spiritual quest?” I asked the friend I was walking with. And every day open to transcendence? How that golden light illumines a field of grass? How the furred hills lie down gentle as sleeping animals, and the rain brushes your face in a moment of requited love? The ritual greeting: buen camino. Could these weeks of walking be anything less?"

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Very pleased that my Knocking on Heaven's Door is the winner in the science fiction category of the 2016 New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards, as well as being the winner in the category of fiction in the Arizona Authors Association Book Awards. Knocking on Heaven's Door is a thought experiment about panpsychism--the idea that matter is permeated with consciousness (mind or, perhaps, spirit). It's an idea I keep thinking about.

The men and women from the village of Chisangano, Malawi come out to greet Peter and me and the staff from Soils, Food, and Healthy Communities. We also have a wonderful video of me dancing with them. Those of you who know me well know how much I love to dance! But the documentary guy I hired to accompany me everywhere (okay, Peter, my husband, to whom I gave my little Nikon camera) didn’t turn off the video (I don’t really know how to do that either) and so that video is twelve minutes long, with ten minutes in total darkness, filming the inside of his pocket. These small-holder farmers also showed us their fields and talked about how they were getting increased yields with new practices of intercropping and burying the remains of some crops like cow peas into the soil. They are withstanding the current food emergency because they have adopted new agricultural practices and are providing their children and themselves a more diverse diet. We stopped to sing many times this day.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Weather

You say, “It’s hot!” and mean “Is it hotter than it was last year?” You say it’s hotter than it was last year and mean “I take too many plane trips. I let the water run when I brush my teeth.” You say there was hardly any snow pack this winter and mean “The children of my grandchildren will be refugees selling seed cakes from a stall by the road.”

You say “spring” and mean “I hope there are bees left in the world.” You say “summer” and mean a certain science fiction movie. You say “fall” and mean something is falling from your fingers and you are letting it slip to the floor and you don’t know how to stop that and you don’t even know what “it” is. There’s nothing you can feel in your hand.

You say “Beautiful day” and mean “This moment is all we have.” You say “wind” and mean the old god. You say “weather” and mean grace.

You remember when talking about the weather used to be code for nothing important to talk about.

But the person you are talking to is too young to remember that.

We need good views. I suppose I mean this politically and socially—as well as just the usual drop-dead gorgeous landscape of the Southwest I love very much, those red rocks and blue skies and drifting white cumulus clouds. I suppose I mean interior views, too. We need to look inside and see the beauty and complexity that we also see outside in the world of mountains and plants and animals and microbes. Because we are that world, too. We are not separate. We need good views, and we have plenty of them, and we need, sometimes, to just stop and stare.

My friend JJ Amaworo Wilson, author of the wonderful speculative novel Damnificados, recently reminded me that customer reviews on amazon work some special magic for that book. Neither of us really know what that magic is…possibly, 25 reviews mean the book is more likely to be discounted and then promoted by amazon. Or maybe 200 reviews turn the book into a pair of ruby-red slippers that take the writer to a New York publisher’s office and five minutes of time to complain about the state of publishing today. Maybe we get turned into flying monkeys. JJ and I really don’t know. We only know that people tell us again and again that reviews on amazon and Goodreads and elsewhere are important. So this is a request. If you have read any of my recent three books, and if you liked the book, please post a quick review? It doesn’t have to be long, and it doesn’t have to be literary. Short and sweet and conversational is just fine! 9/10s of a review is about “showing up.”

And if you didn’t like the book, well…just send me an email. ;)