Tag: nature
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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
If you click the link from John August’s above tweet, you’ll learn, as I did recently, 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. Shane Perez, a self-described “urban explorer” and photographer, apparently snuck onto…
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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…
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Trees Of Life
When was the last time you touched a tree? I see them often, I walk past them, I benefit from their biology every day, but I rarely touch them. They are no longer an inescapable element of our daily mechanized, plastic lives. Perhaps we wanted it that way: the inception of brick and steel and…
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On The River
The sky is clear and the air is clear and the air smells clean. So clean. The wilderness of northern Wisconsin is still very wild. Evergreens clog the air. It’s perfect, this time of summer. Glory defined, with a high of 75. And it’s a perfect time to ride the Brule River, which snakes through…