Last Saturday I attended a meeting of SE Utah writers that the Utah Arts Council held in Moab. This meeting followed a reading that the Moab Poets and Writers—a group specializing in nature writing—sponsored the night before, a reading in which yours truly participated. It was a pleasant and interesting series of events all around, but something happened during [...]
Saturday, June 13. As I was coming up out of Crossfire I heard voices. Much has happened lately in our small, southeast Utah town, so I was curious about who might be coming into the canyon. I saw a woman on the rocks above me, well off the trail, turning back in response to a [...]
I’m getting ready to crack the spine on Terry Tempest Williams’ latest book, Finding Beauty in a Broken World. Over a year ago, I heard her read a little from the pre-publication draft and attended a workshop she conducted. It was apparent to me that she had changed her approach to her audience somewhat as well [...]
[Greenfrog, aka Sean, is a piquant concoction of Mormonism, Buddhism, and Lawyerism living in the Denver, Colorado area. He describes himself as an amphibious creature who "breathes Mormon air and swims Buddhist waters, both quite happily." I became acquainted with him through his comments on posts at A Motley Vision. Field notes he contributed to some of my posts (see here, and here, scroll [...]
by P. G. Karamesines
Blake’s angel, for all his winks and nods,
Wouldn’t have it, though it hangs for having:
Drop of down and blush quavering on the rim
Of ripeness, playing at a fall.
Pendant at the tip of a branch astray
From the greater fruited spray
Where sister peaches cluster meekly
Beneath green custom, this one sweet dangle
Trespasses air my side [...]
Chin on sandstone
She turns her head to see
The sky running toward her—
The last sun on the last water.
Who can count the knots in the braid?
Through the cottonwoods
Mourning doves’ blue ballads purl:
Coo-ahh, hoo-hoo-hoo.
Day lifts from the mesa.
Stars bloom unevenly:
White hyacinths
Through pewter snow.
She stands to go
Where friends have grown a fire.
At a bend she startles a [...]
I’ve been thinking about shaming language, rhetoric meant to motivate others to action by attempting to arouse feelings of guilt, unworthiness, or disgrace —how unhealthy it is, not just for people’s psychological well-being but also for the environment. So I thought I’d run a couple of posts about how using guilt to motivate folks to change their behavior toward the earth and its natural [...]
The welcome post for WIZ stated the following:
We launch Wilderness Interface Zone knowing nature literature is something of a spiritual and artistic frontier for Mormons…and yet not. With Joseph Smith’s First Vision, Mormonism certainly stakes a defensible claim in the tradition of finding God in the wilderness. Couple this claim with belief in eternal progression, [...]