A Note to Our Readers

Dear Readers of LWON, Like everyone else, the People of LWON are still adjusting to life with Covid-19, especially those with kids at home, parents at large, and full time jobs, remote and not. We’ll be posting less frequently for a while, but please keep coming to visit every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. We’ll keep serving […]

Watching and Waiting

From my apartment most of the view is a small parking lot, a few stories below me, lined by vines and a few weedy trees. The last few weeks, a mockingbird has been loudly claiming this as his territory. On and on and on, a few phrases of a song he’s learned, then to the […]

Holding space

I have begun to visit the trail behind my house with religious devotion. It switchbacks up a sundrunk slope, mostly melted out from the snow, and tops out at a cliff overlooking the valley where I live. I go because it’s spring, and the smell of thawing soil and sweetening ponderosa bark calls me outside. […]

Migrants

Three weeks and approximately two lifetimes ago, I went to Rock Springs, Wyoming to meet some migrants. The pilgrims in question were mule deer, a whole herd of ‘em, who trek each spring from the sere sagebrush valley where they winter to alpine summer pastures, devouring fresh green-up as they wander. Along the way they […]

The trolley and the psychopath

This post first appeared March 27, 2015. It’s not irrelevant March 25, 2020. Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A trolley carrying five school children is headed for a cliff. You happen to be standing at the switch, and you could save their lives by diverting the trolley to another track. But there he […]

Rewilding

The afternoon Seattle schools closed, I sat at my desk, pretending to work as if our society weren’t being turned upside down. When I looked outside, I saw a gaggle of girls in private school uniforms. This is normal; I often see kids on my street walking home from school and to one another’s houses, […]

Talking On and On

“It was nothing to just sit on the phone for an hour, wrapped up in those long curly cords,” writes my friend. “An hour-long phone conversation was totally normal. In my teenage years, I could just sit on the phone all night long.” That’s a comforting image, isn’t it — my friend but younger, curled […]

Microdosing Hope

Hands go up for questions at the end of a talk and someone asks, “What gives you hope?” I say the usual, believing the future to be long, all sorts of twists and turns in the plot.  No, not that. Too weak. Too…hopeless. I’ve got to go home and think about this. So, here’s what […]