The Coyote and the Cottonwood

THE COYOTE AND THE COTTONWOOD: How Kinship and Connection can Heal the Earth and Ourselves proposes that our well-being is rooted in interdependence, with each other and the natural world.

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Welcome!

I am a family physician, writer, photographer and community activist whose career includes stints scaling up HIV treatment in Mozambique, overseeing a large urban public health department and, most recently, directing a community clinic in Santa Fe, New Mexico. My work has been published in McSweeney’s, The Nation, and newspapers in Cleveland, Seattle and Santa Fe. I spent most of my spare time cultivating and rewilding my acre and a half homestead, and finishing my first book, THE COYOTE AND THE COTTONWOOD: How Kinship and Connection can Heal the Earth and Ourselves.

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About Wendy

My path to medicine was an odd one. I started college pre-med but veered into politics after a bad grade in chemistry. Upon graduation, I worked for an environmental organization coordinating the 20th anniversary of Earth Day in Ohio and then in the state legislature. After a short time, I observed that most of the people in politics had very little “real world” experience. I decided that if I wanted to be a better policy maker, I needed to hear peoples’ stories to understand how the system was failing them and how to best improve it. Medicine seemed a great vantage point for that listening project.

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I remember that this land is not mine. I am no more the center of it than the bear or the magpie. It was here for eons before I was born and will be here after I am gone. I belong to the land more than it belongs to me. The people native to this place have long understood this principle and made offerings whenever taking something for their use, a kind of wild tithe, the small gift ceded to our co-inhabitants.

From THE COYOTE AND THE COTTONWOOD