I’m honored when I can be of use, or my writing or interviewing or organizing inspires someone. The latest example of that comes from my friend Andrew Engelson, who created the Cascadia Journal and was inspired by my latest daysong, The Singing Bullets of Soft Secession.

In his article Cascadia and Soft Secession from Sept 26, 2025, he makes some points every resident of Washington and Oregon should know:

1) Washington and Oregon together pay $37 billion more in federal taxes each year than they receive back in funding or services. That imbalance will no doubt grow after the GOP’s scorched-earth federal budget eviscerated federal programs.

2) the federal budget continues to swell, funded by Cascadia tax dollars. The biggest open secret in United States politics is that Republicans don’t care one iota about balanced budgets – they care about dumping your hard-earned dollars into things they love. Things like $925 billion for a bloated, wasteful military. Or a $150-billion immigration enforcement system, which is more expensive than most nations’ military budgets. Or a $20 billion bailout for Argentina, led by a Trump ally who has bad hair and likes to wield chainsaws during his rallies.

If we achieved true independence, Cascadia would be free of those wasteful obligations…. I’m of the opinion that separation is now necessary and right, and as the US Declaration of Independence itself states, it is sometimes necessary for “one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another… And while I agree with Paul’s assertion that Cascadia has primarily been a cultural idea, I think we’re in a new, urgent era in which Cascadians must also begin to think of it as a political and perhaps even national idea.

Here’s where we disagree. I am of the opinion that the cultural must always precede the political. I made a quick call to David McCloskey to ask him this question specifically and, as usual, he leaned on his long experience in envisioning (& living) a bioregional/reinhabited response and told me “putting ideology first undercuts the whole bioregional project.” He used the phrase “eco-cultural” to illustrate the kind of consciousness required to make the shift to whatever comes after the United States of America, which, like anything else, will not last forever. (& putting a slain podcaster’s face on a coin is a sign that something has to shift in the U.S.A.)

Separating out Washington and Oregon from B.C., Idaho, Western Montana and the Alaska panhandle and that stretch of California from Cape Mendocino north will only result in more splitting of watersheds and eco-zones. Until the people here are ready to revolt, we’re better off becoming Cascadian in our own lives, in our own art, in our own cultural efforts. Hell, getting a few of these Cascadians at our 9th Cascadia Poetry Festival Oct 10-12 would be a good start for me.

For David McCloskey’s Rx for people sympathetic to reinhabitation, his essay from Cascadian Zen Volume I notes:

POSTFACE: CASCADIAN ZEN IN ACTION I
BR Basics: 22 Ways to Come Home

Immersion First!

Pay Attention! Learn to Listen!!

Get Grounded in Place!

Let Go the Ego! (UnLearn Projections!!)

Ask Real Questions! Be Open to Surprise!! Even so, Still Need to Quiet the Internal Noise & Social Babble, to Allow the World To Speak & Become Our Teacher!

Life-in-Place: Discover the Distinctive Character & Context of this Region as a Whole Life-Place. Learn How Our Implicate World is Woven in- Depth on Many Levels,

Unfolding thru Time. How Our World Works: Energies: Follow Energy Flows! How Process Generates Form
through Pulses, Streamings, Rhythms, Waveforms…

Through my daysong project, my serial poem that re-enacts history of some events in Cascadia, my daily writing of a Cascadian Sentence (more on the shift from American Sentences to Cascadian Sentences is coming soon) my work on Mapes Creek all point to an effort to be more solidly HERE. “Your head can be anywhere but your feet have to be somewhere” Peter Berg said & I am trying to live that.

Andrew Engelson did say the daysong I wrote was a “lovely stream of consciousness meditation.” I am honored by that description, but am partial to what Robert Duncan said about such streams:

The poem is not a stream of consciousness, but an area of composition in which I work with whatever comes into it. Only words come into it. Sounds and ideas. The tone leading of vowels, the various percussions of consonants. The play of numbers in stresses and syllables. In which meanings and ideas,themes and things seen, arise. So that there is not only a melody of sounds but of images. Rimes, the reiteration of formations in the design, even puns, lead into complexities of the field. But now the poet works with a sense of parts fitting in relation to a design that is larger than the poem. The commune of Poetry becomes so real that he sounds each particle in relation to parts of a great story that he knows will never be completed. A word has the weight of an actual stone in his hand. The tone of a vowel has the color of a wing. “Don’t mess up the perception of one sense by trying to define it in terms of another,” Pound warnd. But we reflect that the ear is the organ not only of hearing but of our equilibrations.

What will arise in this bioregion between now and January 2029? We’re tracking.