Roses are red;
Their odor is heady.
LONNOL month’s here–
Are your Valentines ready?

It’s Love of Nature Nature of Love Month on Wilderness Interface Zone, and we’re looking to publish love abroad.  Do you have a message of friendship and love you’d like to send someone? WIZ is looking for original poetry, essays, blocks of fiction, art, music (mp3s), videos or other media that address the subject of love while making references to nature.  We’ll also take the flipside: We’ll publish work about nature intertwined with themes of love.  Besides original work you’re welcome to send favorite works by others that have entered public domain.  So if you have a sonnet you’ve written to someone dear to your heart–even and perhaps especially your pet hamster Roley Poley or faithful horse Old Paint–or perhaps a video Valentine or an essay avowing your love for a natural space near and dear–please consider sending it to WIZ.  Click here for submissions guidelines.

Besides rolling out a (hopefully) heart-embroidered carpet of love-art, we’ll also be running two WIZ, nature-laced, romantic DVD giveaways, Typhoon, starring Dorothy Lamour and pre-Music Man Robert Preston, and a Pre-Hays Code movie, King of the Jungle, starring scantily clad Buster Crabbe as Kaspa the Lion Man.

We hope you’ll join the celebration.  Let’s warm up February with fond feeling.

It snowed today, for the first time. October 6th.

When my family moved to southeast Idaho, we knew that Winter was one of the by-products we were choosing. That “W” is capitalized, because winters here are real winters—you couldn’t survive without shelter. In Utah Valley, where we’ve lived the last ten years, you likely couldn’t either, easily… but there’d be a chance. Some random steaming garbage pile might keep you warm at nights if you found yourself homeless.

Not here.  We now live in Idaho’s Siberia. You’d think that, farther north in places like Sandpoint, it would be much colder, but no. The carryover from Washington state’s more temperate coastal climates makes the panhandle and other, more northern places a much easier place to grow things like tomatoes, for instance.

Here in Idaho’s Siberia there are miles of landmass and ridges of mountains to keep us from any friendly ocean breezes. In January it dips down toward negative twenty. And the winds are to be reckoned with—tearing in from the southwest, lifting sod off the fields before the ground freezes, withering the branches of any non-hardy fruit tree.

You plant your Polly peaches northeast of your house, here in southeast Idaho. The Honeycrisp apples and sour pie-cherries and, perhaps, the pears and plums might survive (all these are currently imaginary—a vision dancing in husband’s head and mine.) But not the peaches.

Our new home is hyper-insulated. Six-to-ten inches of polyurethane foam keep the elements away, and our body heat, so far, has been enough to keep us toasty and warm, even at that lethal six-o-clock hour when bare feet hit concrete floors and children shiver through showers.  But it’s coming. I know it is. My Viking blood is waking up, warning me, prompting me to drag out the giant tupperwares full of snow rompers and wool socks and mittens and hats and thermal underclothing.

We have neighbors close by who warned me that the key to life in our new little city is to “live it up in the summers and fall. Take every second you can and enjoy them… because when winter hits, everyone shuts themselves indoors. You don’t see anybody. And it drags on so long… the snow. The cold. The isolation.”

I asked him, don’t you go out to play in the snow.

He shrugged. “Yeah. But it gets so cold. Cross-country skiing and sledding just aren’t fun in below-freezing weather.”

Of course, he’s part Samoan and part Jamaican—he’s not used to this. Well, neither am I; I grew up in Northern California. But my Viking ancestors will jeer at me from the other side of the veil this winter if I don’t make the attempt…

Winter and I are going to be friends. I’m determined.

So this morning when the first snow started slanting down, soaking our alfalfa field and bringing out the sweetness of it’s purple smell and swelling the gutters with puddles, I shook it off. I  piled coats on my kids, snapped the baby into her fleece bear-hoodie and we walked to our homeschool co-op.

On the way home, two of my children slogged through a puddle. They were chattering by the time we got home and whimpering a bit. They will learn about winter, that the friendship has boundaries.

I fed my kids lunch and made my year’s first pan of cottage-friend potatoes, the most wintery of foods. My husband came home from work tonight and spent eight hours prying the lid off the boiler that heats our house and examining the rusty innards. I sense    already that his friendship with winter will involve more of a wary respect. And I admit I’m nervous. For me, friendships can be awkward at first. I get overwhelmed. I have my moments of despair: Did I say the right thing? Did I do something that revealed too much of my vulnerability, too soon?

Today I watch the snow fall through the big French doors and the windows that look south, east and north from our kitchen/dining room. I pretend nonchalance and think of the flakes as gifts. I allow the excitement to well up inside me at the prospect of four-foot drifts, of building a sled hill in the backyard, of cross-country skiing on the groomed trail by the icy-jade river that runs through our town. Of family snowball fights and cozy evenings cuddled around a TV screen watching movies that aren’t too scary but are scary enough to send my five year old shuffling to our room in the middle of the night, asking to be kissed and tucked back in.

We chose winter, and so winter will be a highlight of our year. We will make friends with winter. I’m determined.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sarah Dunster is an award-winning poet and fiction writer. Her poems have been published in Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought, Segullah Magazine, and Victorian Violet Press. Her short fiction piece, Back North, is featured in Segullah’s Fall 2011 issue. In addition, Sarah’s first novel Lightning Tree will be released in spring of 2012 by Cedar Fort. Sarah has six children and one on the way and loves writing almost as much as she loves being a mom.

For the second year, we’re making February “Love of Nature, Nature of Love” month on Wilderness Interface Zone.  To celebrate Valentine’s Day, all month long we’ll publish poetry, essays, blocks of fiction, art, music (mp3s), video or other media that address the subject of love while making references to nature.  Or it could go the other way around: We’ll publish work about nature that also happens to give a nod to love.  That presents a wide field of possibilities.  We’re seeking submissions of original work or you can also send favorite works by others that have entered public domain.  So if you have a sonnet you’ve written to someone dear to your heart–even and perhaps especially your dog–please consider sending it to WIZ.  See the submissions page in the navigation bar above.

Also, February 24th is WIZ’s birthday.  We’ll be two years old—a toddler now.  To celebrate, a couple of posts will offer presents to our readers.  Because without you, dear readers, where would we be?

There’s more than a slight hint of thaw in earth and air.  The light is growing longer.  The first waves  of the Canadian geese migration are rolling through the southern Utah county where I live.  Hen-and-chicks and stork’s bill are beginning to preen.  The coyotes are pairing off.  February is a good month to warm things up.  Got love?  Celebrate it here on WIZ.

Okay, maybe they’re not doing it like that.  (But oh, what I could have and would have done with such technology in my wild child days!)  In fact, maybe they’re not going out into the Mystery much at all, if Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods gives an accurate account of how children and nature have fallen out of love.  But there must be some kids still getting out there, developing lightning-fast reflexes from chasing lizards, solving the whole-body puzzle of climbing a tree, honing their future driving skills by walking on logs across creeks, etc.

It’s in the hope that nature children still exist somewhere that Wilderness Interface Zone is issuing a call for nature poems and short essays written by children.  The works may address any aspect of nature and the child’s relationship to it.  Poems should be 50 lines or under and essays 150-1000 words.  If you have a budding nature photojournalist in your family, we will consider posting his or her photos.  Children ages 6-18 are invited to submit work to pk.wizadmin@gmail.com from July 6, 2010 to July 31, 2010.  Depending on how many submissions we get, we’ll post them in batches off and on July-August.  Parents and kids: Please review submission guidelines here before submitting.

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 year (maybe earlier), so start drawing up your People Month writing plans now.

I decide to explore this living organism called a city.  Much more seems to be going on here than is visible on the surface.  The landscape before me is teeming with life like a tree, with roots extending deep into the earth and branches soaring into the sky.  Lightning and water flow hidden through arteries giving life to all.  Burrowing under the city’s skin I enter one of the arteries called a subway.  Here I am transported to another time.  As I emerge, not knowing what to expect, my eyes take time to adjust to the changed scene before me.  A person reeking of urine and dressed in rags asks for money.  I get a sandwich from a guy at a deli.  Someone follows me calling out that he knows me, but I’ve never seen him before.  This part of the city is old.  The scale of all I see is different.  Ground Zero lies in ruins.  People around me share where they were when it happened.  There is a wall lining an entire street with flowers and graffiti-like markings.  One of the scrawlings says, “I sat in silence watching.”  Why are all these people here?

By chance I run into a friend from high school.  I don’t know what to say to him.  He doesn’t say anything, so we pass each other on a piece of concrete called a sidewalk.  How do I make my mark?  How do I make a difference?  I run into a friend from college.  He lives here now.  We talk as though we were not in a foreign place.  I forget that I am the foreigner.

An obsession begins to develop towards this strange wilderness.  I feel at home for the first time in my life even though I am alone.  But I’m not alone.  This vast landscape is layered with people, surfaces, textures, and materials that combine infinitely to provide me the community, music, crime, art, filth, food, and beauty that I need.  Every stranger I pass on the street helps contribute to make each of these parts of my life here possible.   Again I burrow into the city’s skin.

I emerge reborn, now a child of the city, confident.  I am ready to begin.  I know where in the landscape to place my stick.  I enter a box called an elevator and fly upwards, unseen, as high as is humanly possible, to the top of an Empire.  Here I stand on stones carved out of the earth by human hands.  These stones suspended 1250 feet above the street allow me to see the grandest achievements of Humanity.  It is February 14th at midnight.  Sleepless in Seattle comes to mind.  Except my love is not coming for me.  My love is already here, all 8.3 million of them.

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Jonathan is an architect and blogger who loves talking about sustainability, the environment, buildings, and cities.  He has worked in Orlando, San Francisco, Portland, and now Salt Lake where he is approaching one year in Utah working for the LDS Church.  He blogs at green mormon architect and salt lake architecture and is looking forward to a return trip to New York next month.

I sit at my computer desk with a blank document in front of me. I gaze out the window at the never-ending rain. I yearn for the sunlight that time forgot.

I have no ideas for stories. My mind wanders on other subjects that connect with the real world I live in every day.
 
Wait! There still is a small bit of hope. A hope that is so small, I never see it. I must search diligently for it. I must ease out of the fears, out of the worries, out of the fast and the slow lane. I must stop.
 
I picture myself in a grassy field. The sun shines warm on my face, I hear a bird singing, and the whole field is filled with a tingling sensation that I long for.
 
I somehow have a desire to run. But I am growing up, I think to myself. I have no time for such childish little games.
 
However, my legs are moving.
 
Go ahead, a voice inside my head says, go ahead and let yourself fly. Set me free.
 
My fingers now dance over to the keyboard. I type, slowly at first, but soon I am going faster and faster on the keyboard.
 
I begin to fast-walk in the field. Soon I am jogging. Then I start going at a full-out run. My heart skips, and my fingers pause…
 
Suddenly, I leap into the air and fly. Fly like I mean it! I fly, and nothing else matters to me.
 
My fingers are now dancing, flying with the story. Flying with my heart, and my soul…
 
Finally, I land ever so gracefully and softly. I walk for a little, and then find myself at my computer again.
 
I look out the window to see the sun peeking over a cloud, and the thunderheads moving away.
 
This is my chance! This is the opportunity I have been waiting for! I leap up and throw on some shoes, running outside and into the fresh air.
 
Into freedom.

Why do we cityfolk so often imagine it necessary to leave the paved world to enjoy the natural world? I can remember one Sunday at Brigham Young University, walking from campus back to my apartment along the south border of a parking lot, just looking at the bushes. Some still had leaves, others were bare. Some had berries. One of the berried demanded my attention: each of this bush’s berries had three leaves growing in to and out of the berry. Perhaps they had once been petals from the flower? I don’t know, but it was new and fascinating and question-generating.

A neighboring bush was already naked of leaves in preparation for the coming winter, but the younger branches were covered in a soft, pleasant fuzz. The closer to the main trunk, the more likely a branch was to be bare, but those further afield had their own fur coats. Was this for winter protection? Was the fuzz there year round?

I ran my fingers along the fur-covered stems; they reminded me of velvet-covered antlers, though each individual hair was longer. Touching them, however, covered my fingers in a sickly, gray grime. I was sobered, forced to witness the contamination of the air, and as I tried to wipe clean my fingers, I was struck by the filth that I must be breathing, that I and the bush must be enveloped in.

Really, it should not be necessary to travel to a National Park to experience the joys of nature. All we need to do is experience it at the micro-level. In her essay, “The Sense of Wonder,” Rachel Carson said, “we can escape the limitations of the human size scale.” I think about this. The summer before I met those bushes, I met the Grand Canyon. And although I had seen hundreds, perhaps thousands, of photographs of the Canyon in my life, when I first saw it with my own eyes I couldn’t breathe. I’m lucky I didn’t fall in, wide-eyed, too enraptured to notice my doom. The only natural vista I can imagine that could be more powerful in terms of scale would be seeing the Earth from space.

But there’s another scale of beauty equally intense. Beauty on a small scale. Remember the mayfly? Small, transparent and fragile. Yet infinitely complex. Purple and green at the same time. The endlessly intertwining veins in its wings a lesson in simple beauty—the complexity of the universe captured in microcosm—in a flitting life that lasts one day. And what of the mayfly’s shimmering eyes? Or its cotton-candy legs? This is the natural beauty of the small that is always with us.

Another time at BYU as I was walking from my car to my apartment, I spotted a small bit of cotton floating through the air. I caught it and examined it, but it wasn’t a piece of cotton at all: it was a tiny gnat-like creature dressed to the nines in its own mink coat. The fine, white fibers surrounding its body were a lesson in gentility, and I stopped, frozen on asphalt, to gaze upon this tiny, exquisite creature. It had a black body like any gnat’s I had ever seen, but the addition of its fine white coat made it a thing of rare grace.

Beauty is all-around and ever-present. And though I enjoy going somewhere lonesome—just me and the natural world—Nature does not abandoned its lovers when they reenter their lands of concrete and steel. The world is a beautiful place, and even when we are far from the Grand Canyon, the simple beauties of a mayfly, a becoated gnat, or the whorls of our own fingertips are always available to those who look, who take the time to see.