Nature
Nature
Nature
Garden Constellations
The yard looks still. Winds riffle green-coin leaves, slim white-preened bark. Sage blooms rust and scratch, each purple nodule at last breaking in breeze to settle in a riverstone crevice. Pale roses wilt. Ridges curl, brown-strafed. Below, roots mottle and twist, an endless lurching and creeping through undersoil. Ants hustle through flagstone fissures, scream a
Sunshine on Apricots
The smell of a sun-warmed apricot transports me backwards in time, reliving a day spent picking fruit fresh from the tree with my great-grandmother as she regaled me with stories of living in a sod hut on the Colorado-Kansas border. Orphaned at an early age, she traveled west with her relatives, rode in a covered
Cheyenne Mountain State Park: Colorado Springs’ Hidden Gem
Cheyenne Mountain State Park is a hidden gem nestled quietly in the foothills just south of Colorado Springs. It’s among the more well-known recreational areas near the city. With 22 miles of hiking and biking trails, 61 camping spots, and 52 RV spots, Cheyenne Mountain State Park is the perfect place to get out and enjoy
Altitude Sickness
Tourists are wonderful. Sometimes the locals make fun of them for driving badly or for trying to do too much sightseeing in one trip. Things here in the Pikes Peak region are alien to many, tourists in particular, such as mountain driving, rapidly changing weather, and thin air. It’s the funny things our city’s guests
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Mars
I’m curious about the hitchhikers that will make the trip to Mars with humans. Each human who goes on the trip is a complete ecosystem consisting of millions of species of single-cell and multi-cell organisms. The success of these hitchhikers, which colonize both the inside and outside of our bodies, just may become the real
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Novels and Collected Works
Vacant Lots: A Butterfly Hunter Considers the Sacred
The simplest definition of “sacred” in the Oxford English Dictionary has always seemed to me to be “set apart,” and that’s probably why I’ve never felt very happy with the word. I’ve never much liked the idea of things being “set apart.” Somehow, in my staunchly Republican family, I acquired a stubborn egalitarianism. But I
Be Careful of Little Lives
Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider her ways and be wise: Which, having no chief, overseer, or ruler, Provideth her meat in the summer, [and] gathereth her food in the harvest. –Proverbs 6:6-6:8 Scripture praises ants, children are mesmerized by them, and yet ants in the garden are so commonplace as to be easily
Ode to the Great Black Swamp
The classroom rug was a little crusty, stamped with squared-off primary colors. At its far end, the beautiful Miss Chantry sat cross-legged in white stockings and a plaid wool miniskirt, while the rest of us sat “Indian style” upon the rug before her. From a stack of old favorites, she selected a crisp, clean book
Recycling a Well-Tended Garden
Recycling a Well-Tended Garden She side-bends and stoops after decades of puttering limber-up work-in-dirt yoga, knee bends to growing graces. Her garden sprawls on its back, open palms to June sun, humming a hover and rest like the blue darner. Her fingers spread compost, sifting the strumming of vegetable patches into mantras – mantras learned
Mongolian Shamanism: A Return to the Beyond
The revival of an ancient religion has taken Mongolia by storm. Decades of oppression and religious conversions could not stop Mongolia’s first religion, Shamanism, from surviving. The hundreds of years of Chinese influence over Mongolia before the turn of the 20th century brought in heavy pressure for the region to convert to Buddhism. A majority of