Story is ancient culture, tested at many a fireplace and hearth.

Someone starts a story, perhaps one old itself or from that very day, about finding a source of water, an animal encounter, a veteran tree, planting seeds. Perhaps about a difficult choice, what was right and wrong. Maybe a great moment of transgression in life, a child given responsibility over the horses, a young woman about to give birth, an elder preparing to lead a death ritual.

Story was always about guidance. It tells us how to live well. It tells us of journeys, both inner and outer. It is intended to create agency, to encourage individuals to feel they can make the new kinds of choices for thought and action.

We don’t know what to do, how to decide what is best, how to create planet-spanning change. We’re in a tight spot. It would be easy to believe nothing is working. What now?

These chronicles are mostly not directly about climate. They are stories about transformation and transgression, things that jolt us out of current thinking.

You will find in these chronicles tales about kind black hounds and fisher foxes, about the sea that is not the old sea; an ancient isle now abandoned in the North Atlantic that is called “earth”; the whales who came back; the ancient tree older than the forest it stands in; the wandering poet looking for home; the kindness of coastal farmers who rescued fishers wrecked on rocks; the wild men and women of the boreal forests; what “enoughness” might mean, how it can connect us to places and nature; how we find words that bring people together.

At the end of each Climate Chronicle, you will find a short Commentary on the koan and the story.