Curt's Ponderings From The Bioshelter

One of the oldest, continuously occupied villages in Alaska is the village of Healy Lake.  Archaeologists estimate that the Healy Lake Athabascans have enjoyed continual habitation there for over 11,000 years.  My family members are newcomers to the lake.  We began going there in 1967 (I think).  We helped one family build a cabin there and later built one ourselves.  It is a place of life and beauty and has become an especially sacred place in my heart. We travel by boat to Healy Lake in the summer, launching in the Tanana River near Delta Jct., cruising downstream to the mouth of the Healy River and then up the Healy for a few miles to Healy Lake, itself.  Crossing the lake one can’t help but notice the skeleton branches of dead treetops sticking up, out of the water.  Clearly, at one time there were significant, forest ecosystem-supporting islands there. As we cross the lake I remember enjoying a picnic at the top of one of those now-submerged islands with my mother, brother a

When my daughter was in the sixth grade I brought her with me to the arctic village of Anaktuvuk Pass.  The church in Anaktuvuk Pass needed a new pastor and I was flying there to help them begin the process for finding one.  I thought it would be a great experience for my daughter to see and experience another part of Alaska and a bit of the way of life that goes with living in that place. My daughter loved it.  She attended school for that week and therefore met a lot of new friends very quickly.  She learned to play aku-aku (a game about making people smile), Norwegian Baseball, and probably a number of games I never heard about.  As a father I was overjoyed to recognize in her a joy that I share: the joy of going to new places, meeting new people and learning new things. Dorothy (Dodo) Hopson, the clerk of session at the church also befriended us, and made sure we got a sampling of the local foods.  Our favorite was masu root, a wild vegetable that grows in the tundra and tastes

It has been well over thirty years since I first began work in Christian ministry.  My first paid service was as in my college days when I served as a Lay Pastor at the First Presbyterian Church in Fairbanks.  The church had two worship services, one in English and one in Iñupiat Eskimo. One day I asked one of the elders at the Iñupiat service why the Iñupiat people accepted Christianity so quickly and so whole-heartedly in Alaska’s arctic.  As near as I could tell it had happened within only one or two generations.  At the time, many of my own college classmates were questioning the validity of the whole concept of faith (let alone accepting Christianity), and the Iñupiat response stood in such contrast to what I was seeing elsewhere that I couldn’t help but ask the question. The elder gave a two part answer.  He began by telling me the story of Maniilaq, a prophet from the Kotzebue region who hung hides to dry-cure above his house.  He told the people that these hides would mark

The day came when we decided to grow more of our own food.   We live on the side of a mountain with rather poor soil and, rather than spend a couple of years building soil in our subarctic home, we would simply buy some.   One company advertised rich soil, but guaranteed to be low in weeds the first year; they had sterilized the soil.   As neophytes in gardening this sounded good to us; how could fewer weeds in the first year be a bad thing? We did grow some things that first year, but not nearly as much as we did in years to come.   We were simply ignorant of the society of organisms needed to make soil productive.   We had never heard of mycorrhizae or any of the other “plant friends” necessary to make soil productive.   And so our first year, with this essential soil community sterilized away, was a bit of a disappointment.   In later years, the soil turned out to be much more productive…and we learned that some of those unexpected wild plants were also tasty—unexpected “gues

In this video David Suzuki, who brings science to millions of people across Canada and beyond, describes the impact of anything that is growing exponentially.  Basically, exponential growth means any upward graph that doubles in a predictable time frame. What issues are expanding exponentially, and why is understanding this video so important?  Here are the graphs of factors currently growing exponentially as listed by Larry Rasmussen in the graphs section of his book, Earth Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key (Oxford University Press: 2013). Note that two others not listed include ocean acidification and combined land-ocean temperatures word wide.  Note that since I got the following two graphs from different sources, they are more up-to-date than the ones from Rasmussen, thought the trend should be clear in all cases.

In an interior Alaska January the sun doesn’t come up until nearly 11 A.M.    When it finally peeks above the horizon,   the frost crystals that have formed on top of the snowbanks to sparkle, bringing joy and a renewed sense of wonder to my heart.. There is something appropriate about a late dawning sun making its appearance at a planning retreat—or at least it seemed appropriate to me at that particular retreat.   The planning team needed new energy for its work of making connections between the disparate parts of the church.   Although everyone present knew it was important, no one had any real desire to work on it.   The work was lagging, and the presbytery was suffering because of it. Amazingly, right near the 11:00 A.M. dawning, someone spoke words that had life in them.   “We need real people to make these connections, in the flesh.   We need to go to the churches, not conference call with them…”   Energy entered the room.   Ideas began to surface so fast it was hard

--> There are times when someone speaks and what they say seems magical. It was a -20 F day at the Knox Retreat Center in interior Alaska.   Along the edges of the lake where the trees met the ice a parallel edge   formed, a curtain of ice crystal suspended like fog in the air, restricted only to the edges of the lake.   It was cold outside and the wood stove inside provided both heat for the building and a charming ambiance for the people to gather. Fourteen people had traveled from across the state to spend time together renewing their connections and revising the purpose and plans for their work.   One of the purposes for the group has to do with building connections and communications between congregations across Alaska.   This is not simple since nearly half of the presbytery’s congregations are in rural Alaska, without connections by road, and often with extremely slow internet connections.   How do we communicate and build relationships that would make a

The snow alternated in its fall between a diagonally downward trajectory to downright horizontal. Even with all the clouds and snow, the sky remained bright.   The reflections off the white ground and the frosted mountains gave a brilliance to the whole day. No self-respecting goose would ever fly in this weather , I thought.   We’re wasting our time. I turned my thoughts away from catching food to observing the place in which I sat.   There was a brilliance to the light, glistening through the snow.   There was a majesty to the wind, blowing from the north and shaking the dwarf birches in front of me.   There was a joy to the whole day, sitting in white parkas and snow breaches alongside my hunting partner, just watching nature do its thing.   I realized that this was one of those moments of awareness.     Why is it,   I wondered, that people seem more likely to experience a special closeness to God—even a sense of spontaneous worship—when they are experiencing the gran