Featured Articles from Issue 56
I was surprised to see Jane sitting up when I arrived. I hadn’t seen her out of a hospital bed in the four years since she’d moved into the nursing home in Sutton’s Bay. Though her health was generally good, she could no longer walk. At well over 500 pounds, she’d developed neuropathy and recurrent infections in her legs.
Giwitatigweiasibi. Nottawaseppi. Huron. There are many names for this river birthed in a swamp, meandering south through the center of Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti and onward to Lake Erie. Cos-scut-e-nong, sebee,“burnt oak river,” connecting upstream and down, invites us to a wider sense of self, neighborhood, and community. I spoke with Rebecca Esselman, Executive Director, and Jason Frenzel, Director of Community Engagement, both of the Huron River Watershed Council, about our local river.
Elizabeth Kolbert has spent decades reporting from the fault lines of our planet—melting glaciers, vanishing species, rising seas, shifting microbial worlds. In Life on a Little-Known Planet: Dispatches from a Changing World, she gathers essays that feel at once intimate and planetary, investigative and philosophical. The title itself is telling. For all our satellite imagery and data modeling, Kolbert suggests we are still strangers here.
Across many traditions, spiritual teachers have taught that the “ego” is not an entity, but an activity. What we call ego is ongoing psychological activity—memory, comparison, fear, desire—generated moment by moment. It is something that we are doing and not something we fundamentally are. Ego/self is a pattern of self-attention and linguistic framing—a contraction created through self-referencing.
In Unfiltered and Unapologetic, Judy McCutcheon writes with the urgency of someone who has spent years watching women shrink themselves to fit expectations that were never designed for them in the first place. The book positions itself as both a guide and a challenge: an invitation for women to examine the habits, beliefs, and social pressures that encourage quiet compliance instead of confident leadership.
As children emerge from the cocoon of toddlerhood and begin their journey into the world, the 21st century parent must decide where and how their child should be educated. Public school is often the obvious choice, but other families may choose private, charter, or alternative schooling. A small number choose to homeschool. More wish they could, but find it unrealistic due to employment or other extenuating factors. In Washtenaw County we are blessed with a myriad of options. One such option, Ypsilanti’s Kindred Journey School (KJS), sits in the happy medium between private and homeschool. KJS is perfect for families who relish the individualized curriculum and close personal relationships that homeschooling offers but are unable to do so themselves. Serving Kindergarten through fourth grade and growing every year, KJS seeks to nurture the individual child and foster connection between peers, educators, and the local community.
More from Issue 56
Before the calendar changes, before the jackets disappear, before adults agree that winter is finally over, kids start pointing things out. The light looks different. The sidewalk feels warmer. The air smells like wet dirt, not cold metal. Something has shifted, even if no one can quite name it yet. In Ann Arbor and surrounding areas, spring reveals itself in small, almost secret ways—and those clues teach kids something important about the world and about themselves.
Unless we spend time exploring the underlying causes of our stress, ultimately nothing will change. A yoga practice can help us do just that. One of the gifts of yoga is that it helps us cultivate greater self-awareness. By getting on your yoga mat, you are taking time to slow down, be mindful, and see what you can learn about your body. With ongoing practice, you are better able to listen to your body and give it what it needs on a daily basis.
In the early 2000s, co-owners Marcia Stroko, Patricia Barrett, and Sharon Stroko were inspired by cultural anthropologist Angeles Arrien to create a place where guests could focus on self-development. In a January 2006 guest book entry, guest F. Rowe shared, “Thank you for having such a wonderful atmosphere in your home inn and surroundings,” thereby recognizing that Rustic Gate is not only a space for visitors, but also a family home
The U.S. Department of Energy states that, “enough energy from the sun hits the earth every hour to power the planet for an entire year. There are obvious advantages to solar PV technology. It produces clean energy. It has no emissions, no moving parts, it doesn’t make any noise, and it doesn’t need water or fossil fuels to produce power. And it can be located right where the power is needed, in the middle of nowhere, or it can be tied into the power grid.”
