MANY OF YOU know about our adopted black kitten Koda and have enjoyed following his adventures. And you know of our/my deep attachment to him. He stole my heart in about the first 30 seconds when he came up to me out of the dark woods on a cold March night this spring, hungry and wet and cold, but full
AT THE CHURCH O THE PINES it is late July, and in the midst of political dysfunction, human ignorance and other annoyances, things are living and growing and blooming as they should. Which is reassuring and, on a Sunday morning, restorative. From its nest tree, the eaglet screams to its parents for more fish. Chipmunks chip. Red squirrels scold. Sparky
THE GREAT MUCKY MUCK said he still wasn’t through. Not after his lynch mob, his riot, his coup. It wasn’t enough–he still needed more, For the crowd to still love him, to chant, to adore. The fact that there wasn’t one brain in the throng Was no sort of problem, it made him feel strong! What brains had once been
AND SO THE BIG DAY finally arrived at the Church O’The Pines. The day that Junior—the baby Bald Eagle from the nesting tree 150 feet from our Caretakers’ Cabin—after much squawking and debating, and should I or shouldn’t I, and maybe,maybe not—Junior decided. It was time. Time to fledge, to leave the safety and security of the only place he/she
THE GREAT MUCKY MUCK was worse than we thought. His soul–if he had one–had long since been bought. There wasn’t a heart where his heart ought to be, For a brain–just a black hole, screaming me, Me, ME, ME!!! He had some strong points–that surely was true, But none that we’d want–not me and not you. A liar, a cheater,
SOMETIMES, IN THE DAYS we spend at our island cabin on Rainy Lake, I return in memory to the days of my boyhood. The happiest ones of all were spent nearby on Lake Kabetogama—family vacations where I fell in love with big pines and loons, rocky shores and the great Canadian Shield. In my Deep Woods, Wild Waters memoir, I
THINKING ON THE despicable ‘replacement theory’, first sprouted amongst Neo-Nazi, racist, and white-supremacist outlets, now going ‘mainstream’ and promulgated by Fox News and various Republican figures… and the clear motivation for the Buffalo mass shooting… From my book, ‘Old Turtle and the Broken Truth’… “The man took the broken truth to his people—those who lived with him, who spoke as
SPRING HAD SPRUNG but then retreated Our little Simon now feels cheated Into his bed he has repaired He stuck his nose out once, and dared To test the air and sniff the breezes Then, “Holy Hell, Good Lord, Sweet Jeezuz!” Or something like those words he uttered Turning inside-out at the door he muttered All the way back to
AS THE CALENDAR INCHES TOWARD SPRING, as the chickadees sing their bright, two-note song (they’re saying, “Spring’s here,” in case you wondered) my thoughts begin to turn toward the Road Scholar trips I’ll be guiding this coming summer. And to memories of the many wilderness trips I’ve led in the past. One of my favorite parts of every trip was
IN MY MOST RECENT OLD TURTLE book, ‘Questions Of The Heart,’ the wise old heroine speaks to some of the great concerns of life. She speaks of love, of play, of sorrow, of family, of death, of the meaning of life itself. In the section quoted below, she speaks directly of evil. During a time in which lies are labeled