Last Friday night my son dug two of the last three holes needed to set our remaining fruit tree starts. We didn’t manage to plant any of them that night because he and my daughter needed to gather their things together for the early start they faced the next morning. They were to travel to Moab [...]
Forgive, please, the late, overhasty and not especially informative nature of this post, but I wished to get something up for Earth Day before the opportunity passed. As usual, consider yourself invited to report on your own Earth Day activities in the comments section.
Here in SE Utah, Earth Day opened gorgeously. Warm and blue. To the south, [...]
April 21, 2009 (pre-Earth Day)
Today, as I head out for the trail into the canyon that will take me past the dead coyote, I decide to call that trail Coyote Trail, or maybe Coyote Way, to remember that coyote mouldering at the trailhead. As I pass those remains, I try to satisfy my curiosity about the [...]
Parts of this entry rise a little above-average personal in nature. I don’t mean to make this an “alms before men” post. I want to try to show how easily — for me, anyway — thinking can slide between my experiences with animals and the ones I have with people. Also, I don’t remember ever having written down the “Hillbilly [...]
I don’t like to tell people what to do. In fact, except for my kids, who lack imagination where performing necessary tasks is concerned, I’ve come to dislike it extremely. Well, even then. But I’ve been thinking lately that Mormons appear to be beeline people, traveling in more or less straight lines between this or that field of responsibility [...]
April 13, 2009
Why do I still do this? Why, at my age, do I follow as if I were nine years old unmarked, unpaved trails away from what I know into the wilds of what I don’t know? That’s how this striving creation—part light, part water, part air, part earth, and all aspiring flesh—shows itself [...]
As I walked out of a nearby canyon last week using the same trail where I reported having an encounter with a curious coyote, my nose detected gases given off by putrefaction. Somewhere nearby, bacteria were at work breaking down formerly living tissue to simpler matter, dispersing an organism’s worldly goods to its biological heritors.
To this we must all come. [...]
The Ellen Meloy Fund has awarded their grant of $2000 to Amy Irvine, author of Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land, to support her work on her upcoming book, Terra Firma. This is the fund’s fourth annual grant.
She competed for this grant last year, too, when the award went to Joe Wilkins.
Since then, [...]
(On “Pond at Thompson’s Station” by J. Kirk Richards)
by Tyler Chadwick
The sun has been misplaced.
Or, if you’d like to get more
Biblical, it’s returned
to the dove’s abyss—or
was that Milton? I can’t be sure
as I dance so near the beginning
with words so supple they
bend into themselves until
only the landscape remains:
the field flushed white, hills
seduced into bed
by cloud [...]
by William Blake
Sound the flute!
Now it’s mute!
Bird’s delight,
Day and night,
Nightingale,
In the dale,
Lark in sky,
Merrily,
Merrily merrily, to welcome in the year.
Little boy,
Full of joy;
Little girl,
Sweet and small;
Cock does crow,
So do you;
Merry voice,
Infant noise;
Merrily, merrily, to welcome in the year.
Little lamb,
Here I am;
Come and lick
My white neck;
Let me pull
Your soft wool;
Let me kiss
Your soft face;
Merrily, merrily, to [...]