I KNOW A LITTLE SOMETHING about reflecting waters. I have paddled over them all my life, from Lake Superior to the Northwest Territories–literally scores of trips upon clear waters reflecting blue skies and starry nights. I am not an expert on ‘reflecting pools’, unlike our current *president. But it seems his pool has a few problems. The main one is…
FATHERS DAY WONDERINGS: When I was a boy–and I suspect this is true for a great many of us, boys or girls–one of my great goals was to someday make my dad proud of me. And by extension my grandfather and uncles. And on this Fathers Day I wonder–how many of those previous American fathers and grandfathers, the ones who
HERE AT THE CABIN-IN-THE-WOODS, we are prevented by exigent circumstances from following the national news on a minute-by-minute or even hourly basis. Or sometimes even daily. These circumstances involve the feeding of birds (and sometimes deer and raccoons while also trying to prevent the deer and raccoons from getting into stuff we don’t want them getting into and… well, nevermind).
MAYBE WE’RE ALL REDSKINS NOW. I have always found it interesting–in fact, fascinating–that in this land, virtually all of the Indigenous Peoples’ names for themselves–Native Americans’ names–translate to one thing. The same thing. Nearly every one. And that name is, simply, ‘The People.’ Or, ‘The Human Beings.’ Thus I use that name in my ‘Old Turtle’ environmental/sociological fables. But it
THE WARBLER AND THE MADNESS: And so I returned from guiding another group into the wildwood. And it was fine and grand, filled with scarlet tanagers and towhees and wood ducks and 116 other species, including a ridiculously beautiful little yellow warbler caught by photography in mid-song. We lunched on overlooks high above the Mississippi Valley. We wandered among wild
MONUMENTS AND REALITY: When my beloved Great Aunt Mary–essentially my grandmother on my dad’s side–passed away, we gathered up her old shrub rose, over a century of age, and replanted it in our garden. When I was a boy, this wise and gentle woman, an elementary schoolteacher, had tasked me to help care for it, telling me she had done
WITH THE DESPICABLE IDIOCY jokingly referred to as the current American ‘Administration,’ doing so much intentional damage to so many, it is important to remember that life goes on. In all its countless iterations. With its joys and sorrows, sufferings and triumphs, and the in-and-out, moment-to-moment daily breathing of simply being here. This past week I led a birds-and-wildflowers expedition
SO THERE’S THIS THING trees do. They reach for the light. Habitually. Always. Relentlessly and inevitably. This imperative may also be called aspiration. As in, trees aspire toward something. Toward the sun, of course. They never reach it, the trees, not all the way to the glowing sun. But they reach towards it. They aspire. And in doing so they
HERE AT THE CHURCH O’ THE PINES, it is a mild morning with a breeze out of the south. Such breezes are helpful this time of year in bringing some of our wandering members, whose wandering may have carried them very far to the south, back home and into the fold. It’s a wonderful time, and the church choir seems
ONE OF THE GREAT advantages of living in the forest is that we are surrounded by real things. Nothing phony, no lies, no ‘misinformation.’ This seems helpful in keeping one’s bearings, in maintaining a stranglehold on truth, and in nurturing a sense of perspective. Among the ‘real things’ that help in this endeavor are the real creatures that live here,