So long 2012. I feel like I should sum up the year, but I won’t. Because my only New Year’s resolution is to do more of what I know I must, rather than sweating what I suspect I should. Today I saw one of the oldest living creatures on the Read more…
The sounds of this place. Really, the birds. And so much green. The farm land is so beautiful—though it has taken over what was once prairie. Today, we drove north from Auckland toward the northwest coast and the great Kauri trees of the Waipoua forest. These trees can grow for Read more…
So, one of the girls in our group was fined $400 for trying to bring a banana into the country. This is a true thing that happened. She forgot it was in the bottom of her backpack, did not declare it, and when it was discovered via x-ray she had Read more…
I may understand intellectually how it is that I just lost a whole day, but I don’t get it. We left Laramie at 9 am on Thursday morning and now it is Saturday morning. Friday: poof. No good travel writing starts at the airport or on the plane. As with Read more…
As the sun set tonight over the prairie in what Paul Gruchow lovingly describes as “boring pastels,” so too did it set on my time here at Shortgrass. We will pack up and head out in the morning. I have to keep telling myself that I did what I set Read more…
Today I was agitated. I couldn’t focus and couldn’t seem to walk off my agitation. Why I was bugged doesn’t matter, the fact is that it prevented me from concentrating and I need to figure that part of me out because I get bugged all the time. I get mad, Read more…
I felt moved (after a kind nudge) to do something more with the bit about wind in yesterday’s post. It turned into 1700+ words about how we like to think we enrich the landscape. Once I was already moving across the page, I felt inspired to poke at a newer Read more…
It would be easy to say that today was a total bust. I didn’t finish a book, I didn’t increase my word count.But it can’t be about word count alone. It can’t be just a job, or it makes no sense. Just like it can’t be about getting the giant Read more…
Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being kept blowing me away, all afternoon. I would read a few subsections and have to just sit and stare into space for awhile. I didn’t finish the book; I didn’t want to rush it. She talks about the nature of personal, spiritual, and material Read more…
I started today with a long walk up the road. It’s a gravel road, lined on both sides by seemingly endless expanses of close-cropped grassland. Between the road and the parallel barbed wire fences that keep the grasses from escaping, is a narrow gully full of clumps of weeds, deep-looking Read more…