By Kathleen Stocking Sun contributor The ad on Craig’s List offers free kittens. It’s one of those downy spring days with everything the softest shades of green and yellow under a pale blue sky. From the big woods behind my house emanates the baby powder smell that comes out of the ground when winter’s finally […]
I wanted to have African-American relatives long before I learned that, through marriage, I did. It just made sense to me that with the Stocking family in America for almost 400 years that sometime, somewhere, somehow, we had married people who were black.
I dreamed about him when I was working in the prisons of California. I felt him one night in the room as I was falling asleep and thought I could smell him. I missed him at a subliminal, subconscious level all the time but missed him consciously, in ways I’d never anticipated, on the days after work when I was tired and saw no hope for my students, most of whom were going to be behind bars for a long time and, if they got out, would have no families, no jobs, no future.
When dolphins wash up on shore in significant numbers, we suspect there’s something wrong happening in the ocean. It’s just not what we expect. It’s not a natural phenomenon. We may not know what it is exactly, but we guess that, whatever’s happening, however unknown or unknowable to us, it’s got to be about more than dolphins simply taking a notion. Why don’t we have the same common sense intuition about the children at the U.S.-Mexican border?
Our default perspective is from our own place and time. This is natural. It cannot be otherwise. Yet it’s sometimes fun to engineer a shift in the way we see and experience things, and by so doing create more awareness. You can put on the 3-D glasses for another time period by trying out earlier modes of transportation. Some of these are a little hard to find but walking, our original mode of locomotion, is always available. Travel by canoe, ox-cart, stage coach, sleigh, schooner, steamer and train will take a little more effort in the way of arrangement-making, but all are still possible.
There are approximately 250 volunteers helping out at the Inland Seas Education Association. “We’d be unable to function without all the amazingly talented and amazingly dedicated volunteers,” says executive director Fred Sitkins. There are doctors, lawyers, teachers, fish biologists, interior decorators, housewives and retirees of all kinds, including retired school administrators, pipe fitters and electronic hospital equipment salesmen.
You don’t really know where you’re from until you’ve been somewhere else and come back. That’s because anything is only itself in relationship to some other thing. A day is only a day in relationship to the night. An apple stands for every fruit until you’ve tasted a mangosteen. America isn’t America until you’ve been to El Salvador.
By Kathleen Stocking Sun contributor Dear Leelanau, The mournful roosters of Guatemala call out over the waters of Lake Atitlan, “Oh, lost, where are you,” the sound lingering in the foggy dawn. My neighbor’s roosters in Lake Leelanau say, “Cock-a-doodle-doo,” like the roosters in Mother Goose, and the roosters of Thailand scream, “Now, you’ll die, […]
Kathleen Stocking will give a 30-minute lecture about African-American pioneers on Glen Lake at the Empire Museum at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 2. Please spread the word among friends, neighbors, and while waiting in the grocery line.
This is the story of six female photographers who fell in love with the Leelanau Peninsula and found a way to share that love through their photos. In our July 11 issue we profiled Jane Fortune of Leland for her work discovering female artists of the Italian Renaissance, many of whom are described in her book, Invisible Women. Fortune’s work, for which she just received an Emmy, inspired our effort to showcase the work of female photographers on the Leelanau Peninsula.