January 07, 2020
Greenhouses toe the line between the natural world and the built environment. They protect crops by controlling natural forces such as heavy rain, cold, and strong winds. Though they contain aspects of the natural world like water, soil, plants, and microbiota, they are still highly cultivated and thus disconnected from the wilderness.
Read More
November 21, 2019
It is difficult for me, and I imagine for many of my generation, to step outside and engage with the natural world in any way without worry. Is this the end? Will we lose it, all of it?
Read More
October 17, 2019
I don’t know which lens to wear to handle the news that the world, as I know it, might be ending in my lifetime. It’s not real, I think, I hope, because it doesn’t seem to be happening to me.
Read More
September 05, 2019
The siren song of my body cries out in panic, alerting me to the foregone conclusion of catastrophe. Something terrible happened to you, it says. Do not blossom like the dogwoods or magnolias or tulips. Shut up and close down, lest something terrible happen to you again.
Read More
August 27, 2019
God of the stars, God of the endless black, God of the silence, God of knowing and not knowing. God in the questions and fears of childhood. God of it all. It's a mantra of my heart that beats with the movement of the mystery.
Read More
February 21, 2019
I knew Mary Oliver's work well enough to mourn her, to recall the way some poems snag you with their fishhook beauty and won’t let you go until you have reckoned with them. Perhaps most of all, the sacred imperative to give your whole self to a place and time—the endless and proper work of paying attention.
Read More
November 15, 2018
When I’m feeling optimistic, I wonder what kind of future world we’ll live in, how children could sit around imagining the monsters of eras past and whisper climate change between cupped hands. When I’m feeling pessimistic, I don’t like to wonder about the future.
Read More
October 11, 2018
As September waltzes into October, nature extends an invitation for all to come outside and join in its pleasant song. And once you begin to notice its melody, fall takes its time to rise to a crescendo.
Read More
September 20, 2018
I hear in the forecasters' voices how they hate, respect, how they cannot help but admire such a powerful, mesmerizing creature. I admire her, too. I'm not a good evacuee.
Read More
September 04, 2018
I wonder how many other layers of reality I’m ignoring. How thin is the little layer of my attention? What are the trees saying? What is the sky saying?....birds seem to be calling me out of the human-words echo chamber entirely.
Read More
August 02, 2018
While entering Arches National Park, it is near impossible to stand beneath these natural rock formations and still be worried by the generalities of life. Life, as you have known it, is suddenly on pause. Your life transitions into snapshots as you wander the land in awe, feigning focus on putting one foot in front of the other while your eyes are bound to the monoliths that breach the sky.
Read More
April 04, 2018
This is the season of excess: of mud and vast fields, of chattering birds clinging to trees like black leaves. In a few weeks frogs will sing so loudly you will hear them two miles away. Weeds and flowers and grasses will bolt upward, charged by the lengthening light.
Read More
March 15, 2018
The earth, the whole of it, is our garden. Our cross-thatched Eden, a checkerboard of beauty and clutter and devastation. The fertile fields we work and play upon—and litter with our stash of trash and ravish with our wars. Our squash and our squashing.
Read More
February 20, 2018
In Orion, ionized clouds larger than cities and planets billow into space. Stars swarm and explode in a glorious million-year dance. The scientists and reporters say all of life’s ingredients are there. Before I knew of science, my eyes taught me the ways of the cosmos. I could look up at the night and feel at home.
Read More
February 15, 2018
At the moment, the assumption to question is that we humans have a right to be on earth and that it will indefinitely support us. When the very ground is taken from beneath our feet, where can we stand? What is left to us, when the familiar forms of our physical existence are taken away? Nothing, perhaps—yet I wonder.
Read More
January 11, 2018
I've had climate change anxiety since college, but bringing a baby into the universe intensifies it. My anxiety no longer only extends the length of my lifespan. I tell my husband Taylor I regret having a child because I can't stand the thought of Jackson in pain. He holds up our son’s wiggly, plump body. "You really wish he didn't exist?"
Read More
November 02, 2017
...truth be told, this field offers nothing worth my time, has no economic value, is not going to end anyone’s suffering, is not going to bring down a tyrant, and I would be better off focusing on the efficiency of my day, the tasks, that which I can control in this little world of mine...
Read More
October 24, 2017
Beyond my grandma’s living room, I talked to the birds, often to birds unseen. Some calls were easier to imitate than others. The bobwhite sang back most consistently, once I finally managed a passable whistle and could parrot its low opening note that quickly slides upward. In hayfields and from meadowed hills, I called out—the low bob, the high white—and it called back.
Read More
October 19, 2017
I start over, trying different tricks, until I can prop each bloom in a semi-erect position. How ridiculous. I know it will be useless. I am perfectly conscious of setting up a sad masquerade. What is this pathetic comedy for? My own sake, I guess. These sunflowers are in agony, maybe already dead, but I have to pretend I’m doing the impossible to rescue them. I’m doing it, no matter the cost.
Read More
October 10, 2017
The radar confirms what I sense. An amorphous green mass, outlined with yellow and red, tilts from the well of Texas to the roof of Michigan. I wait for it—the sky like a pressure cooker, eager and dangerous with its current of heat and force.
Read More
September 19, 2017
I make it a point on this walk to find nature, identify and tag it silently, like an urban anthropologist. It feels like progress. It feels, perhaps, like a down payment on the benefits I’d get from a day in the woods, a week in the mountains, or a night beside the ocean. It’s not the woods, but maybe it’s close enough, I think.
Read More
May 23, 2017
I’ve spent much of my adulthood astonished by what I was supposed to learn in school but didn’t or forgot. The earth’s mantle, stardust and the miraculous heart, which pumps two thousand gallons of blood every day. Did God make me forgetful of the body and the earth or is forgetting my sin, a feature of the fall?
Read More
October 27, 2016
Read More
February 12, 2016
Read More
September 29, 2015
Read More
August 19, 2015
Read More
May 08, 2015
Read More
March 12, 2015
Read More
October 21, 2014
Read More
June 17, 2014
Read More
November 26, 2013
Read More
April 10, 2013
Read More
January 16, 2013
Read More
September 12, 2012
Read More
September 13, 2011
Read More