Just before dawn, stand in the cool desert. Eastward, a dark butte protects you from the light that soon will strike. The oblong moon hovers, waning, in pale silver sky. Walk, and your foot crunches the gravelly earth, loud in the silence. But then it isn’t silent, is it? Before and behind you birds make music. Skinny lizard skitters ahead of you. Farther on, a soft young cottontail disappears into the rattlebush. Wend between the sticky green leaves and furry-globe pods of creosote. Meander...
Should I be surprised at how unnerving it is to write a memoir? My mother died of Alzheimer's disease, so someday I may forget who I have been. I better finish the story before it’s too late. I recently reread a poem I wrote years ago, a kind of memoir in fewer than two hundred words. It includes references...
When I was in high school, I discovered a cure for anxiety-driven insomnia: sleeping outside. When I returned from a summer in Afghanistan between my junior and senior years, I suffered reverse culture shock. I’d lived a slow, down-to-earth life in Kabul, where homes seemed to grow out of the soil. I woke up to rooster crows and donkey brays...
The crucifix that once hung in Nada Hermitage’s Sangre de Cristo Chapel in Crestone, Colorado formed me. Created by Santa Fe artist Dan Davidson, it combined both wood and bronze. And instead of a dead Jesus with eyes shut and head to the earth, it portrayed an ambiguous moment just before death. The young...
I am old enough to recall when Americans got our news from a daily newspaper and thirty minutes of televised evening broadcasts. This left more than twenty hours to hear other voices and see three-dimensional, living creatures. My adult life has been bizarre enough to take place mostly in wilderness. There, the voices include loons, coyotes,...
Happy New Year! The greeting may sound glib at the beginning of 2024. But joy expresses courage in the face of pain and flaunts hopeful resistance in the face of angry disrespect. I remind myself that Christ is born and risen, never to be eliminated from our...
Children, there was a girl. She lived in a small village On a tall dry mesa the size of ours. She did what you do. But her ears heard more than sounds. You hear me talk And know I am bigger than my words: They come from inside me. This girl heard a word, But it wasn’t inside her. She was inside the word. She stayed as still as the Stone canyon walls, And let herself be spoken. That word, which made The desert and the sky, The mesas and the arroyos, The rain and the girl, That great word of our...
For centuries, Christians have prayed special verses called "Oh Antiphons" during the week before Christmas. Each verse begins with the word Oh and uses images from the Jewish Testament to ask God to come into our midst as "Emmanuel," God-with-us. Tessa Bielecki beautifully introduces the context for the antiphons here and presents the antiphons here in a form that can be prayed either alone or with others. My own idiosyncratic take on the antiphons, using animal images for Christ, grew out...
Here in the North, leaves fall through lightAnd leave last dry scattered whispersAlong the earth. Lives fall like leaves,Out of season some,Torn by storms too soonFrom shuddering branches. I remember them. Lives fall like leaves In autumn.Some rain...
Our latest Fire and Light podcast is now available: "Breathing Room for the Spirit." We explore ways to create breathing room in a world of speed and utility. We describe a recent desert camping trip and I recite “Superbloom Toast,” the poem that appears below. Since April is National Poetry Month, we ponder the value of poetry and its...