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Rarely does the first day of Spring actually feel like the first day of Spring, but it’s happening this year. Just this week there are brown buds opening to the softest greens, early bulbs breaking through winter earth, morning air sifting in through still-bare trees, sharp on the skin but…

I had a poster of Violeta Parra for years before I finally heard this song. I just knew that she was the John Lomax of Chile, and that she was a great influence on Victor Jara, whose music I did know I give thanks to life, she says. Que ha…

One of the central ideas behind these writings was to slow my daily life down just enough to take a quiet walk through nature and observe the earth as she came alive, mark the passage of her silver cousin through the night sky, marvel at the sly dance she does…

A whisper-switch of a moon, a thin-lipped, upended goblet of a moon, a tickled by sun and flooded by night moon, a help me I’m lost in the trees at the horizon moon, a see you on the other side moon I wish she would drop the illusion, this crazy…

The elm and hackberry branches are thick with brown buds today, only the willow presents her green bonnet. The earth begins to glow. The air fuses river mud with winterberry bramble. Wind and rain both present with power and new life The Worm Moon is new tonight and the land…

Bridle hand caresses turns in a road that leave dust hard in the wake of the horses, past homes that live in the darkness. There are roots beneath the stables, bathed in darkness, waiting on the softest rain Children appear in a cloud, astride the horses, all entering a clearing from…

Two days before Christmas in 1943, the Liebmann Building in El Reno, Oklahoma, burned to the ground, including my grandfather’s Woolworth store. He relocated his family to Cushing, a few counties to the east, and took over the store there. Mom was 20 years old and was attending a small…

The change is real tonight, the buds are swelling above, the green is coming alive below, the air is damp in the way only spring air can be damp. It’s really not official yet, but winter, you are down for the count. One image that always comes to me when…

I close my eyes and let the warm late winter rain glisten my skin as I carry on shirtless where just two weeks ago I was here in five layers with my hood cinched up tight around my warmest winter hat – the one I tossed, metaphorically, into the river…