I have been gone a long time, holding my breath. Here is my first blog back in a year: Clumps of wet snow clog the landscape. Limbs of aspens, not yet fully leafed, bend over with the weight. June 1st and the world outside my window is heavy with snow. After one of the driest winters I can remember, I welcome this late winter with open arms, luxuriating in wetness, grateful for this small reprieve.…
I’ve hopped the Divide and traveled south of home, landing in Gunnison for a few weeks of concentrated writing, trading five consecutive weeks of winter storm warnings for a rolling sage brush chaparral. From the bench where I write, I can see across the valley through floor to ceiling windows to watch cars speeding toward Mt. Carbon and Crested Butte. The highway groans with restless hearts, I think, as I imagine people in their private…
The arrival of Spring catches me off guard. As the planet tips the hemisphere where I live to equal night and day, I have forgotten its quickening. These long months in lockdown have me subdued. I’ve kept myself flattened for so long that I’ve forgotten what deep full breathing feels like. Scarcity is a second skin. One I wear far too easily. More difficult is to let it slough away. Today I realized the discipline…
“One must have a mind of winter” –Wallace Stevens I learned what it means to be human at the hands of winter. It came to me in a bleak time, when I’d retreated to a cabin in the Rocky Mountains to live alone with my dog, after a series of gut-punching losses that triggered dread for each dawning day. It was February—for me, the darkest month of the year, a month so brittle and cold,…
“I know what the world is made of and I still love all of it” –The Solace of Open Spaces Sixteen years ago, my mountain cabin burned to the ground. In a matter of hours, all evidence of the life I’d lived—signed and annotated books; photos of me at five, eight, fifteen; a broadside gifted to me by the poet and writer Kate Braverman with a spontaneous poem she’d written on it—was reduced to two…