Wilderness Interface Zone

My happy thanks to everyone who participated in WIZ’s People Month.  My list of folks for whom I’ve felt deeply grateful includes:
Th.
Nephi Anderson (via Th.’s gravelly voice)
Mark Bennion
Tyler Chadwick
greenfrog
green mormon architect
Elizabeth R.
And, of course, many thanks to WIZ’s loyal readers and commenters.
I appreciate each writer’s help keeping People Month on WIZ interesting and fun.  We’ll do it again next [...]

Th. writes of this recording, “This is a selection from chapter three of Nephi Anderson’s Dorian (1921), perhaps my favorite Mormon novel. This chapter will be featured in an upcoming series of posts I’m doing on Anderson for Motley Vision. Dorian may be read online. The birds are from Soundsnap.”
For Th.’s–Eric Jepson’s–bio, go here.

Listen to Mark read “Letulogy.”
Uncle Howard,
At sixty, your traces stalk the hollows
of grocery stores from here to Snowflake,
Arizona. A thatch of curly gray hair
shuttles past the cash register, your cow-
milking hands pull a list out of an empty wallet.
You are forever in the next aisle over,
shaking a watermelon, picking at your
mustache, laughing with the manager
over [...]

Listen to Patricia reading “The Pear Tree.”
When early autumn’s storm wrung from the clouds
Summer, wearing the last thundering rain thin
And sharp on the wind’s rasp; when thorns
Of the first frost bloomed over the grass,
And the morning glory hung brown and bitten
On the garden fence; on those first nights
Of cold window glass and the drip of [...]

As deeply as I feel the charge from hearing a coyote call close by or catching the wood-and-water chuckle of wild turkeys, as fully as wind flittering through cottonwood leaves inspires me to listen and to breathe, I appreciate the sing-sound of the well-turned human tongue. 
Sometimes, in lonely canyons, when there’s no one else there, I’ve heard [...]

by Tyler Chadwick
 
1. First
“She’s like an apple
in a water balloon,”
the doctor says. They watch
their fruit unfold across
the screen in light movements.
Submerged beneath her sea
enclosed by silent walls,
slow fluid breaths inspire
her ripening, baptize
the room in innocence.
Within this matrix
of tranquility,
they sense her beckoning
through sound’s translucent waves,
calling from her still place
into time’s raging sea
for a Return. Then Light
ripples [...]

It seems strange to think that sitting with what’s left of a woman who second-mothered me most summers and for two school years of my life is yoga, but it was the most heart-opening practice I’ve done.
What’s left? A bag of bones, draped with a thin and mottled fabric of skin. Bits and pieces of [...]

As the bus exits the Lincoln tunnel and enters Manhattan, I strain my neck to look out the window at the buildings towering over me in the narrow corridor called a street.  I am overwhelmed with awe at the beauty and majesty of this new environment.  I can hear, feel and smell the city breathing [...]

If you’re doing the human being thing with any gusto, you’ve more than likely experienced moments of awakening, of not only feeling more alive yourself but of feeling the lives of others around touching your life, dancing through, affecting and changing who you are, entwining into your being (you can read about some of my [...]

In my dream, people mill at a fair, trying things they’ve never before done.  There’s horseback riding on flashy steeds and archery with brightly fletched arrows. 
At the fair’s farthermost edge, wings rest upon the green.  Their colors—kite colors—catch at me.  I cross the field whispering, I’ve always wanted to try this!  An attendant helps me [...]