Tag: nature
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Recent Views
More photography here and on my Instagram. From our go-to park last fall: Little man enjoying the ball pit at his cousin’s birthday party: The inside view of Madison’s capitol dome: Turns out kids love swings: A few shots from probably the last snowfall of an extremely mild winter:
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Quotes from the Underland
I’ve only made it through the preface of Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane—an “epic exploration of the Earth’s underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself”—yet rich quotes abound: “The same three tasks recur across cultures and epochs: to shelter what is precious, to yield what is valuable, and…
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Circle of lives
Somewhere on the Internet I stumbled upon this print from the artist Nina Montenegro’s series Against Forgetting: It struck a chord in me not only because I’ve been reading the tree-centric novel The Overstory, but also because six days ago I became a father. And I’ll tell ya, I know I’m barely a week into…
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Done gone fishin’ in the Northwoods
Spent a few days in the Northwoods of Wisconsin on a fishing trip with my dad and friends. Beautiful weather, fresh air, fishing, a rental cabin, film noir in the evenings. Not bad livin’. I took a few photos and videos along the way. The tree stumps outside our rental cabin had some nice colors:…
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Pinery Boys: Songs and Songcatching in the Lumberjack Era
Got Pinery Boys: Songs and Songcatching in the Lumberjack Era as an unexpected Christmas gift from my dad. Given our shared appreciation for and history in the Northwoods of Wisconsin (though not in lumberjacking or songcatching unfortunately), this was a delightful read. It’s partly a reprint of Franz Rickaby’s 1926 collection Ballads and Songs of…
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Autumn in Asheville
I’d heard a lot of great things about Asheville, North Carolina, so my wife and I finally made a trip there happen to meet up with some Durham friends for a long weekend in the mountains. Surprise: It was wondrous! Our Airbnb was a cabin on a mountain farm in nearby Black Mountain, complete with…
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Recent Views
More photography here. One of the many things I love about fall and winter is sunrise happens later in the morning, thus allowing me to go for a run in the darkness of the morning without having to get up at WHAT o’clock. On a recent run I broke my rule about not taking pictures…
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Winter was always winter
Edwin Way Teale, Wandering Through Winter: Winter is a time of superlative life. Frosty air sets our blood to racing. The nip of the wind quickens our step. Creatures abroad at this season of the year live intensely, stimulated by cold, using all their powers, all their capacities, to survive. Gone is the languor of August…
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The sunrise, it comes to me
A poem The sunrise, it comes to meA rippled grace bound for the trees.Coming and coming, it comes,sent from the yonder colors, that arebillowed in atmosphere.What is otherwise clear must contendwith a cloudy obstruction thatgets the best view of all:A panopticon dawn,but for me, the mere morning. The melange, elementalin joining sky and water into…
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Crunchy Cons
In Station Eleven, survivors of a global pandemic and subsequent post-apocalyptic chaos decamp to an abandoned airport in Michigan and eventually establish a Museum of Civilization, comprised of assorted artifacts from life before “year zero,” when the pandemic paralyzed the world and rendered much of the stuff that had comprised their lives useless. The Museum…
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The Shepherd’s Life
Really enjoyed James Rebanks’ The Shepherd’s Life: Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape, a memoir of a sheep farmer told season by season. I followed his Twitter account for a while and enjoyed the seeming simplicity the stream of sheep pics depicted. Reading this memoir, however, disabused me of any assumptions I’d made about the life…
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I Ran Here for the Sunrise
A poem I ran here for the sunrise. I ran here straight down a concrete corridor, a road slippened by snow, past a corner store where coffee and pie rise to life in manifest alchemy. With my breath steaming in locomotion I approach the boulderow, a stone sluice of Sisyphean resolve—bulwark against the lacustrine, but this morn like poppy…
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Fishing for Failure: On Writing’s Pain and Gain
“Writing and fishing are both art forms built for optimists.” So says Nick Ripatrazone in a wonderful essay at The Millions. I’m inclined to disagree. Writing and fishing, though art forms indeed, feel more often like science projects built for masochists. Writing and fishing are laborious. They take a lot of time, most of which is spent…
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Snow Bank Stories
On my block the snow banks reign. They billow with the winter, building girth with every snowfall and polar vortex. This winter has been especially harsh. The banks are bloated with layers of snow that together tell the story of the season. The inch in late November sits at the bottom, hugging the frozen tundra and…
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Dharma Island
Disney owns the Lost mythology, so why not a Dharma Initiative attraction on Discovery Island? :: http://t.co/AppFOyDL7V— John August (@johnaugust) January 13, 2014 John August’s above tweet informed me that Disney World used to have a wildlife attraction on their massive property called Discovery Island, which was abandoned in 1999 and left to be overrun by wilderness.…
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Silence Is Beholden
I was on a solo hike a few weeks ago on a beautiful northern Californian day in Shasta Trinity National Park. It was a weekday morning, so I had the place to myself. I followed the Waters Gulch trail for about a mile or two as I trekked the path toward Packers Bay. The river…