It’s the start of the new year. Another year of anxiety stretches before me. It’s a strange thing how my life has become a day-in-day-out struggle with worry. Of course, worry is not all that stretches before me. If I try, if I just try, I will hear and see and experience more than worry. […]
Read more "A Different World"Life bores deep holes in us in hopes the nature of what we are might sink into us…. —Jim Harrison There is a truth found in running long miles each morning. There is a realization that comes at the end of the first-half of the run that however tired, however hard the wind blows, however hot […]
Read more "The Nature of What We Are"At 12:45 this afternoon the temperature is -2. The wind is blowing 30 miles per hour. The windchill is -27. The fact that the sun is shining does not soften the inhospitableness of the afternoon. The wind moans; snow cuts through the air; drifts climb steadily higher against the shed and house. There will be […]
Read more "Late February Thoughts"It is the end of a year. It was not an easy year. I look back on the year past and wince shielding my inner-eye from the pain of my mother’s illness and death, the blur of unexpected activity, long hours spent on the road traveling between Minnesota and Illinois: winter weather, freezing fog, snow […]
Read more "There Is A Field"I wake now to the gray skies of November, mornings begun in darkness, workdays ending in the same. Final skeins of migrating geese stretch pencil-thin against the clouds; snow squalls blow suddenly from the north, halt, then blow again. The sun makes its appearance, apologizes, and disappears. The wind bites. The temperature drops. Winter returns. […]
Read more "Winter Again"Frost touched northwestern Minnesota early Thursday morning. Just like that, summer ended. We now watch the forecast closely, tarps at hand to cover late-ripening tomato and pepper plants. Beets and carrots are pulled; soups simmer in stock pots and slow cookers. Yellow squash is blanched and frozen. Spent plants are gathered and thrown atop the […]
Read more "Inevitable Change"It’s a misty, overcast morning. The air is primed for rain. The sweet corn calls from the garden. It’s time — perhaps past time — to pick and process it for winter storage. The summer winds to a close on these last days of August. In northwestern Minnesota summer announces its exit without equivocation. The […]
Read more "My Question"I have thought much since January how life is tentative. I have known abstractly the brevity of life – how war extinguishes breath, the soldier and civilian’s; how famine weakens and illness encroaches; how epidemics — smallpox, tuberculosis, yellow fever, and cholera —sweep aside generations in their path. Polio was the childhood fear of my mother. […]
Read more "I Walk"A decent day is promised after two days of high winds, rain and cold temperatures. It’s hard to give up an early June weekend to inclement weather — hard on my mind; hard on my body; hard on my creativity. In the face of the cold and rain, though, I slept late Saturday morning, sleeping […]
Read more "Consider How the Lilies Grow"Plant quiet like a seed within your heart And let it grow and split that organ through. Let the fierce root rive all such walls apart, Let the dark flourish, let your words be few. Out of the earth and dreaming in the sun Though the years burgeon, it is well […]
Read more "Eiseley: Plant Quiet Like a Seed…."
Pennington Co Sect: 24 