When John Muir, a wilderness mystic and founder of the Sierra Club, wrote, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe,” he was reflecting on his profound relationship with California’s pristine alpine wilderness. But Erik Davis posits something further. In his kaleidoscopic history of spiritual California, The Visionary State, Davis proposes that Muir was also making room for an innovative, new “rootless tradition.” California dreaming, it seems, has it own dream logic.

Hard as it is to discuss, we all have to decide what to do with our bodies (and those of our loved ones) once they expire. Many of us wonder what would be the most ecologically sensitive route