I am not happy. My grandkids are. We are at the park after school. I am reading email on my cellphone, when I stop to look up. Teo and Eva pick up two large sticks and begin to play Star Wars with them. They are serious in their characters, but [...]
Farmers are connected to the earth physically, economically, and spiritually. They understand what’s going on with the earth and have for six thousand years. I am talking to a friend of mine who farms in Iowa. It is pheasant season, which is mostly an excuse to walk the land. [...]
I love the ocean. I grew up on the prairie and in the woods, but the ocean calls to me. I’ve tried to share with my children, the beauty and wonder of the world as I’ve experienced it. So my daughter Katie and I hire a couple of kids in [...]
It’s early morning in Crescent Meadow. Dew sits on the grass. While other hikers are still asleep in their tents, I walk silently on the soft earth among the fallen giants. The redwoods here can reach twenty feet in diameter and live to be over 2000 years old. They’ve been [...]
I am sitting in the middle of the Temperance River on a large bolder. It’s late fall, and there is the edge of winter in a light north breeze. The sun is warm and there are a few white cotton clouds in a too blue sky. Water the color [...]
We are three hours south of Medellin, Colombia crossing the Cauca River and heading into the mountains. The Cauca is muddy and roiling from the rains and licks the bottom of the one lane bridge. Another hour and one muffler later, we are still struggling up a two track into [...]
Once, when distance meant time, I traveled by train from Winnipeg to Churchill on Hudson Bay. It was a two-day trip though endless taiga forests comforting in their vastness. I spent time meditating on how small and insignificant we humans are in relation to the world. Churchill was a one [...]
It’s a sunny day. I woke up to two significant events. The first is president elect Donald Trump. The second is my raspberry patch. I have late bearing raspberries and they are a source of pleasure for me. I feel like I am getting something directly from nature when they [...]
Four hundred and fifty miles from nowhere, at the edge of the arctic circle, we started downriver on our fourteenth day. Or it might have been the twentieth. One loses track of time in the wilderness where there are no calendars or weekends. We are on the Thelon River. It [...]