The thing about the world as we’re coming to know it now—a world in the process of changing at timescales we can perceive from the relatively puny span of a human adulthood—isn’t just that extremes pile up. No, the thing is that these extremes cozy up to one another in bizarre and frankly disturbing ways.…
The question of how to live with the wind is answered with bitter resignation and gritted teeth. How to talk about the wind—without cursing—has different answers. I’ve been a volunteer observer for the National Weather Service for more than fifteen years now. My duties involve recording temperature and precipitation data; wind isn’t part of the…
The view outside has become tiresome.
I don’t think I’m supposed to say that. I’m not a fundamentalist, but I’ve steeped myself in a tradition of natural history that holds the world as sublime: a wellspring of solace and inspiration and revitalization, source of and target for gratitude.
Such qualities are sorely needed these days, and so I started writing a post on the theme weeks ago. The rough start I made framed a dissonance between the constructed world of news and current events (the “urban” of this site’s title) and the unbuilt environment of ridgelines and woods and grasslands (the “wild” outside my door).
I am not, as I have mentioned in this space before, fond of the wind. In its rush to be elsewhere, air on the move unsettles my universes: the interior one as well as the world outside. The agitated limbs of the ponderosa pines outside the windows might well be emblems of the jittering of…
For the past couple of years, I’ve pulled my barn coat off the hanger for the first time each fall and thought, I gotta get a new coat. But then I’d think, Nah…it’ll go one more year. The holes in the front pockets came first. I thought almost daily about patching them, but put such…
That spring doesn’t arrive early here, 8900 feet up in the Colorado Rockies, probably seems self-evident. I’m in the habit of saying that Groundhog Day is a worthless barometer for the changeover from winter to spring, because in my experience winter simply doesn’t end in February. If I adjust my expectations, though, and stop focusing…
There’s a certain irony in the fact that winter, when I’m inclined to spend more time inside, may be the season when I’m most likely to be hyperaware of the weather. Presumably this is because snow affects our access more than does summer weather—although road closures in 2013 due to fires and flash flooding point…