The water has dislodged bits of dirt and debris that were on the skin. Oblong air bubbles nestle comfortably into neat circles within the architecture of the skin. It looks messy to my naked eye which can’t bode well for looking with a microscope but perhaps, I think, zooming in will erase the uncertain edges.

Nope. Under the scope, the previously miniscule lines of water are rivers. Pin pricks of air bubbles are parade balloons.

I decide to try a dry mounted slide instead, but the second bit of snakeskin that I snip off disappears when I attempt to blow away some of the dirt that was dislodged from the swipe of the scissor blades. I blow the snakeskin straight down the draping arm of my robe (alas, yes, I’m wearing a bathrobe).

I have some learning to do. But I’ll keep trying.

In 1665, not long after the microscope’s invention, Robert Hooke published his most famous work: Micrographia. (I’ll include the subtitle here, too, because I always want my own titles for everything to be exactly this long-winded: “Micrographia: or, some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses, with Observations and Inquiries thereupon.”) Based on observations Hooke made through his microscope, Micrographia was the first published book to include illustrations of magnified plants, insects, and other specimens, and therefore the first time most people got to see images of tiny things up close. His book was a sort of field guide to the very small, an initiation into the hidden worlds all around us. Micrographia was mind-bending not just for the scientific community of the time, but for the general public as well. It was a huge hit. (It’s still a hit: new editions continue to be published, almost 400 years later.)

Part of what I love about Micrographia, and what I assume has been much of its appeal over the centuries, is that Hooke was looking very closely at presumably very ordinary things—flies, fleas, nettles, seaweed, duck feathers—but the closer he looked, the more astonishing these things became. He found ornately structured forms, tricks of light and color, patterns that gave way to patterns that gave way patterns.

Here are a few of Hooke’s engravings:

This is also what I have loved about looking through my microscope (I’ve gotten a bit better at mounting my slides). Even at the lowest level of magnification, you enter into a different world, and you have this tingling sense that if you continued looking closer and closer, there would continue to be more to see. Far beyond the power of my microscope—which is a simple light microscope, the sort you could find in a high school classroom—there would still be patterns within the patterns, there would still be order and sense in the structure. And you don’t need any expensive equipment to dive into hidden worlds. As some of my favorite writers who look at small things have taught me—Lucy Jones and David George Haskell among them—bringing a hand lens outside is more than enough to immerse yourself in a square inch of space.

Each hidden world becomes an invitation into layered realities that, at every scale, have texture, structure, function, purpose, relationship, and mystery. And the concepts of scale and relationship start to bend and stretch in strange directions.

Whether you could zoom out from a single hay-scented fern and into a full view of the ecosystem it inhabits, or zoom into the diverse microbial community that inhabits its own vast landscape on a single frond of that fern—both views would provide you with a view of a world with complex relationships that we, in many cases, are nowhere close to fully understanding.

Every time I look through my microscope I begin, and begin again, to get a sense of just how much there is to see.

Here are some of the specimens I’ve been looking at:

During the panel that I was on, entitled “Birthing Belonging”—alongside Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, Joi McAtee, Gerardo Abboud, Bishop Evilio Menjivar -Ayala, and the musical talents of Ben Sollee who played his cello to a recording of a dawn chorus of birds—I spoke about the chapter in my book entitled “Axis Mundi” and the importance of sacred centers for bringing us into a deeper sense of our belonging within an interconnected confluence of beings.

So imagined my surprise and delight when I later opened my email to see that Richard Rohr had featured an excerpt from the very same chapter in my book, that very same day!

And what an honor, on any day, to be included in one of the wonderful Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations. A warm welcome to those of you who have arrived here since then!

I wanted to share here a longer excerpt of the chapter, “Axis Mundi” from Mother, Creature, Kin.

And I want to invite you to share your own axis mundi.

Where are your sacred places? What are the sites / encounters / experiences that center you and orient you to the world? Where are the poles around which you turn?

AXIS MUNDI

My first fragment of memory is of my mother. We are standing together in golden, waving grass. There is the sense that the sun is setting behind us because what I see in the memory is not our physical bodies but our shadows, cast before us, wavering as the grass bends and circles in the wind. My mother and I are holding hands, and in our silhouettes there is no distinction between where she ends and I begin. And the grass of the rolling plains grows and reaches through our conjoined image.

When I was one and two years old, we lived on a Nature Conservancy preserve that spanned more than fifty thousand acres along the Niobrara River in north central Nebraska—a landscape of Sandhills prairie, bur oaks, and bison. Later we would move to Omaha, and shortly after to Oklahoma. For a long time, I wasn’t sure that this grass-memory with my mother was of a real moment. Perhaps it was an impression, a vague recall of a distant place and time that my mind gave shape to, filling in the blanks.

But my mom confirmed that this did happen: she remembers it, too.

This memory has been with me for a very long time. It has had different things to say to me at different points in my life. We all have these, I think: encounters with the living world that not only stay with us but take on more meaning and power over time.

Perhaps it’s an early memory that stays firmly planted, or an unexpected swell of awe, or a fleeting but deeply felt connection. These experiences can become fixed points, poles around which parts of us will always turn, orbiting again and again around the truth that lies at their center.

* * *

One of my favorite questions to ask people is whether they experience the sacred in the living world. Everyone I have ever put this question to has, near-immediately, answered “yes,” even if they would not call themselves spiritual or ever employ the word sacred. The affirmative answer to that question is also always paired with a specific place or experience. I’ve heard countless stories of what I’ve come to think of as axis mundi experiences: encounters that have pulled someone into a deep experience of felt belonging upon the tiny bit of Earth that they find themselves upon.

It’s often very simple: a passing deer or a bathing bird that somehow opens a window into their sensory being, and, from there, the relationship flows freely, not between I and it, but I and thou.

Within the study of religion, an axis mundi is a sacred pole, literal or figurative, which is fixed in a particular place, connecting Earth to the realms of heaven, underworld, and divine. These holiest places are often mountains, as in the case of Mauna Kea on Hawai‘i’s Big Island, known by the Indigenous Kanaka Maoli to be the umbilical cord—the place from which the world emerged. Mount Meru in Hindu mythology is the home of the gods and the center of the universe. An axis mundi may also be a cosmic tree, as in Norse mythology, or a temple or a shrine. In Islam, the Ka’aba in Mecca, which pilgrims circumambulate seven times, contains within it the stone given to Adam upon his expulsion from paradise, that his sins might be forgiven. The cosmic world turns around these poles, providing a mythic context for understanding one’s place in the universe.

I’ve come to think of axis mundi in two ways: There are capital-A, capital-M Axes Mundi: those most sacred of places for cultures or religious communities—those world-beginning places whose mythological histories weave the people into the past, present, and future of particular landscapes. And then there are small-a, small-m axes mundi: those small, daily irruptions of majesty, those any-place-based encounters with the sacred.

I define “sacred” as that which pulls us beyond the bounds of our individual selves, envelops us within mystery, and gives us a glimpse into the vast, entwined, eternal network of living beings that we are in relationship with. A simpler way of saying it: the moments when we are most fully human via our awareness that we are fully entangled, down to our nuclei and electrons, in the Earth and the cosmos. Such an orientation does not require a belief in God or gods. The living world can illuminate this understanding in the forms of awe and wonder, as well as in the forms of grief and loss.

And such illuminations can arise spontaneously into our consciousnesses, precisely because this sacred truth is always present everywhere upon the Earth, whether or not we are aware of it. Those small-a axes mundi, then, arrive as discrete moments in particular places. They are the moments when that sacred reality comes into focus, inviting us to orient ourselves, even if briefly, to the particular, small bit of the cosmos where we have placed our feet. Perhaps this has happened for you upon reaching the summit of a mountain, or while sitting beneath the boughs of an old growth tree, or simply while hearing the voice of a bird you recognize from your childhood home.

Which is to say: whatever we believe (or don’t) about God and gods, about holy texts and pilgrimages, all of us hold within ourselves the potential to be pinned in place by a sacred pole. And in this time when there is so much disconnect from the living world, so much separation, in this time of razed forests, deserted pockets of warmed oceans, and the echoes of extinct species, orienting ourselves around these fixed points becomes more crucial than ever.

We are a species in need of centers. Place-based centers. Particular place-based centers, around which we can build our orientation to the world. Places that ask for our attention and care as sensory beings. Small-a axes mundi that guide us in moving through this uncertain time.

“There are no privileged locations,” writes Scott Russell Sanders. “If you stay put, your place may become a holy center, not because it gives you special access to the divine, but because in your stillness you hear what might be heard anywhere. All there is to see can be seen from anywhere in the universe, if you know how to look; and the influence of the entire universe converges on every spot.”

I have come, then, to see this memory of my mother and me in the prairie grass as one such convergence, an enduring manifestation of the sacred. A pole that has, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, pinned part of me forever in that prairie grass. It is one way of organizing my relationship to sacred place.

Since my own daughter’s arrival into the world, this memory has returned again to ask me a question. What is it to be a mother in a time of ecological collapse?

Please share your own axes mundi below!

A few months ago, my daughter and I saw a film at the Middlebury Art Museum called Ancient Beacons Long for Notice, by artist Dario Robleto. It fascinated both of us—so much so that we went back to see it again the next week (Aspen’s request, which I gladly obliged). For Aspen, at 4, this was because it included outer space (especially Saturn) and a stunning, moving, shifting series of collage images. For me, it was these two reasons, and also because it told the story of Ann Druyan and the making of NASA’s golden record.

The record—launched into space in 1977 aboard Voyagers I and II, the first spacecraft destined to leave the bounds of our solar system—is essentially a time capsule of planet Earth, intended for alien life. According to NASA, it is meant “to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.”

The team who created this record was led by astronomer Carl Sagan. Producer and director Ann Druyan served as Creative Director of NASA's Voyager Interstellar Message and was charged with choosing and curating what sounds should be engraved onto the record.

The sounds include: The howls of wolves, waves upon the shore, thunderstorms, the calls of whales. It included positive human and cultural sounds as well—music, chants, laughter, and greetings in 55 languages. (You can listen to some of the Golden Record soundtrack here). But when Ann suggested that they include, also, sounds of violence, sounds of marching for justice and sounds of protest—sounds that shared a fuller truth of the human experience—NASA refused.

Ann’s solution was both subversive and radical: She secretly recorded her own heartbeat and brain waves via EKG and EEG as she engaged her mind and body in thoughts about love (she and Carl Sagan fell in love during their work together on the record and ultimately married), about war, about racial segregation, about people fighting for a just world, and about grief, loss, tyranny, joy, and generosity. In doing so, she intended to convey a deeper truth, via her own vital signs.

She had these vital signs converted to sounds and engraved onto the record without NASA’s knowledge, operating under the belief that, should an alien civilization ever find the record, they would be able to decode these sounds and know their meaning.

She later described the sounds as “fireworks.”

As Kingsley Spencer writes, “just after the sounds of a rocket liftoff and a mother soothing a crying baby, you’d hear about a minute’s worth of ‘rggggghrgggh popop popPOP whirr—swish rgghhhhh.’…what you’d be hearing is the sound of love. Real, actual love. The sound you—your actual brain cells—make when you experience something so amazingly inescapable and profound you immortalize it on a Golden Record and hurtle it across the cosmos at 40,000 mph...”

Voyager I and II are now more than 15 billion miles from Earth, hurtling through empty space. It will be forty thousand years before they come anywhere close to another planetary system.

Here is the Robleto’s artist statement about his film:

“Ancient Beacons Long for Notice (2024) is the third film in Dario Robleto’s trilogy engaging the history and legacy of the Golden Record. Attached to the deep space probe Voyager upon its launch in 1977, the Golden Record was a gold disc carrying a selection of images, languages, music, and sound to represent the complexity of Earth’s lifeforms and cultures. Produced by a team of scientists led by Carl Sagan, the Golden Record was a hopeful gesture, purposefully edited to put humanity’s ‘best face forward’ in a first-contact scenario with other forms of intelligent life; any trace of war, injustice, famine, or environmental decay was avoided. Ancient Beacons Long for Notice considers the implications of this ethos across time and space through new research about a forgotten document: the first audio recording of warfare, captured in 1918 at the Western Front of WWI. Robleto’s film posits: ‘What is our moral obligation to a full accounting of our actions—the good and bad—to not only our progeny but to the memory of humanity that is carried into an infinite cosmos and, potentially, shared with entirely different life forms?’

What a beautiful question. “What is our moral obligation to a full accounting of our actions?”

As I’ve continued to mull over the film and Ann Druyan and the Golden Record over the last few months, Druyan’s vital signs recording has conjured another set of questions for me as I’ve also been thinking lately about wildness and what within the human experience can be considered “wild.”

I’ve been wondering: Were these sounds of Ann’s vital functions not as wild as the calls of the wolves and the whales—unfiltered human experience and emotion?

Do our vital signs, or the trillions of bacteria living in our guts, or our rich emotional lives indicate that the human body is an inherently wild landscape? And: how can we think about wildness as both microcosm and macrocosm, from our own vital functions and senses, to our existence as sentient beings in the universe?

How does wildness intersect our self-awareness and self-knowledge? How can we continue to complexify and expand our understanding of the wild as something that contains the multitudes of ourselves? Is our tendency toward violence wild? Is our ability to temper and counter violence wild? What about our capacity for love and compassion? How do we determine where the wild exists in the human body and experience, and where it ceases to exist (if it does)?

“What is our moral obligation to a full accounting of our actions?” And what is a full accounting of ourselves as Earthly creatures?

These are some of the questions I’m thinking about of late.

If you have any insights or questions or wild inklings or other responses to the Golden Record or otherwise, I’d love to hear them.

Please join me and poet for a conversation in her “Words for Wandering” series! Michelle’s debut collection of poetry, Between Latitudes, is a stunning and intimate reflection of interior and exterior life, climate change, and navigating transformation, set in the landscapes of Alaska and California.

We’ll be talking about our new books, migrating forests, and more! Please join us!

Wednesday, June 18th at 8pm ET via Zoom: Register here!

This is our first spring in our new town and it has been a slow emergence. Not like childhood springs in Oklahoma when the first green usually appeared in February and it was a full-on riot by March, until the summer heat took a lot of that green back.

Here we are, all the way into May in Vermont, and the trees are just getting their leaves. The tulips bloomed yesterday. The daffodils are bobbing their heads.

I’m noticing spring in a particular way this year and with a particular intention: as we learn the seasons in a new place, I’m hoping for some imprinting to happen.

A PBS article about animal imprinting (specifically, about a flock of wild turkeys who imprinted onto a man named Joe Hutton) says: “Imprinting refers to a critical period of time early in an animal’s life when it forms attachments and develops a concept of its own identity. Birds and mammals are born with a pre-programmed drive to imprint onto their mother.”

This is the sort of thing I usually think about when I hear the word “imprinting”: a biological drive for young animals to attach themselves to a mother, a parent, or a parental figure.

But as of a few days ago, I’ve started to think about that word differently.

I was back home in Oklahoma where I grew up. I hadn’t been back in almost seven years, the longest I’ve ever been away. Too long. Over the last couple of years, I’d started having recurring dreams about going back. In these dreams, whatever story was unfolding, it somehow always led to me walking the streets of my childhood neighborhood. I would wake from the dreams with a longing lodged deep in my chest and a thirst I knew I could only quench by putting my feet back in that place.

When I finally did set foot there again, stepping out of the airport, it was the smell that hit me first. That warm-sweet-heavy spring air small. The recognition was intense. And it kept happening, nearly every moment of our visit, like a riotous spring emergence in my mind, body, and heart: dormant memories sprouted; quietly locked away sensory recognitions rushed forth and bloomed in a kaleidoscope of color; a familiar cultural language unfurled its leaves to soak up the sun.

It broke my heart over and over again during our week there.

We’ve been trying so hard, my family and I, to find a place to stay, to make a home. We’ve now arrived in Vermont and we are content here. We have, finally, made the commitment to stay.

But until returning to Oklahoma I didn’t realize how much my sensory systems had been on constant high alert, grasping for place-familiarity; how I’m always pocketing little recognition seeds. I didn’t realize just how much I longed for my Norman community. How hard I’ve been working to hoard landscape details in all the places I’ve lived since leaving Oklahoma, so that when, say, the spring flowers bloom again next year, I can say: “Oh, I remember you,” and feel like I’m weaving myself into some kind of a pattern.

Spring beauty, trout lily, coltsfoot. Spring beauty, trout lily, coltsfoot.

I’ll repeat them like a rosary until next year.

“Imprinting provides animals with information about who they are.”

Yes. And is this also true? Landscape/place imprinting provides us with information about who we are.

“Imprinting refers to a critical period of time early in an animal’s life when it forms attachments and develops a concept of its own identity.”

Yes. And would this, too, be true? Landscape/place imprinting refers to a critical period of time early in our lives when we form attachments to places and develop a concept of our own identity.

What science of imprinting is at work in the way that our childhood landscapes and homes and places make their mark on us? What is it about those first places that burrows so deeply? That leaves us with critical information about who we are? That tethers us forever to those early attachments and develops some concept of our own identity?

During our week in Oklahoma, I didn’t have to try to feel at home. I didn’t have to go looking. I didn’t have to catalogue, gather, make the effort to see the patterns. Neither did my body. It was all right there around me, in me, with me. Home simply was. I simply was home.

The first night there, laying in bed, I felt my entire body relax and…what’s the word…unshield itself. I felt belonging.

I most often have either bad dreams or neutral dreams or no dreams at all. But that first night back in Oklahoma I dreamed I was leading a small cotillion of canoes, a thriving community, through a salt marsh.

When it was time to return to this home in New England, one of the voices inside of me—perhaps that young animal-me who came to know herself in this scorching hot, red-clayed, beautiful place—said: Stay. Stay here. Please stay.

It is spring in Vermont and it is beautiful. The ephemerals are here and Aspen and I sat in the yard for hours this week planting seeds and listening to the brook.

Home will be an ongoing practice.

I love reading advice columns and a couple of years ago I read through the archives of Cheryl Strayed’s Rumpus column, “Dear Sugar.” As I’ve been missing Oklahoma this week, I was remembering one piece of advice where Strayed quoted from the poem “The Blue House” by Tomas Tranströmer.

The last two stanzas of the poem are:

In this particular piece of advice she was giving, Cheryl Strayed wrote, referring to this poem:

“I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”

Somewhere out there is the ghost ship that carries the life in which I stayed in Oklahoma.

Somewhere, right here in my body, is a deep imprinting of that place that I will carry with me, always.

Next year, the ephemerals will bloom in these woods.

Spring beauty, trout lily, coltsfoot. I hope I’ll remember their names when I see them again. And perhaps with every passing spring those flowers won’t speak only of spring’s arrival, but of the ongoing arrival, too, of home.

The imprinting of places seems slower and more painstaking as adults. But I believe it’s possible. I also believe it’s reciprocal. As we put wildflowers into the soil and grow a garden and learn to be part of this community, we are both imprinted upon and imprinting ourselves in this place.

What places or landscapes have imprinted themselves onto you?

Does anyone know of any writings, books or otherwise, that speak to this sense of landscapes imprinting themselves on us? I’d love to read more about it!

Why we should love ourselves? she asked. And: Should I love myself?

My answer to her latter question was uncomplicated: YES, of course you should love yourself. You are a wonderful, funny, bright, strong, courageous, curious, caring person and you are deeply loved and you deserve so much love, from the people around you and also, especially, from yourself.

But why? she asked.

Well, because…I started to falter. Why should we love ourselves? It was of course clear to me that my daughter should love herself. And that all of the people I love should love themselves. And that a universal truth of being human is that we ought to love ourselves. That in doing so, we can build ourselves a strong foundation, from which we can extend compassion and forgiveness and resiliency and grace, to ourselves, but also to others. We can weather storms. And that a foundation of such love is essential for reflection and growth and healing and mending and non-violence and understanding and also for healthy boundaries and knowing what’s right and what justice is and how to care for one another.

But that explanation escaped me in the moment because I had come hard and fast upon the fact that I struggle, every day, to truly love myself. What, I wondered, does it look like to practice self-love? I realized I hadn’t thought about that in a while.

I’m generally optimistic and positive and find joy easily. I work—not always successfully—to practice self-care, which I suppose is a form of love. But I don’t think I can honestly say that I’m actively, deeply self-loving, either. My internal monologue is often a running stream of self-criticism (which always fails the test: Would you ever say such things to a friend? Of course I wouldn’t!). Insecurities and fears are not only frequent residents in my brain, they are, and I squirm to type this, comfortably at home.

As I’ve reflected on such things, I’ve realized just how much time and space these thoughts take up: so much time; so much energy. It’s exhausting. What does it serve? Who does it serve? The answers, again, are clear: Nothing. No one. Though, it does serve to reinforce a notion of the self—of my self—as something that is siloed and isolated.

Reflecting on Aspen’s question, I realized, too, that raising a daughter who loves herself, means not just explaining to her the reasons why we should love ourselves, but also modeling self-love for her. I would have to practice it, too.

It’s telling, perhaps, that my first thought about more intentionally practicing self-love was that it feels indulgent. Selfish.

My second thought, more helpfully, was to re-read a quote from Thich Nhat Hanh’s Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet:

“Humans are made only of non-human elements. Humans are made of all our ancestors. The mountains, the river, the rose, the planet are all made of non-mountain, non-river, non-rose, non-planet elements. When we can see that, we are free. ‘Human’ and ‘mountain’ are only labels, designations, without any real substance. They don’t have a separate existence….There is a mountain in us, do you see? There are clouds in us, do you see? It’s not only that we were a cloud or a rock in the past, but we are still a cloud and a rock today. In former times we were also a fish, a bird, a reptile. We are a human being, yes, but at the same time we are everything. Seeing this, we know that to preserve other species is to preserve ourselves. This is interbeing, the deepest teaching of deep ecology.”

This was the reminder I needed, one I’ve received, in many different forms, many times before, and will likely need to receive many times more: that my “self” is not the ego-centered tangle of neuroses and fears, desires and wants, capitalism-derived ideas of “success” and “failure,” that I too often feed. This idea of self is siloed and isolated. Rather, the self is something far more expansive and mysterious, beautifully entangled—down to our electrons—with the world. We are fellow creatures of the Earth. We are animals. We have physical, warm-blooded bodies built of mountains and clouds. We are breathing air exhaled by trees.

Coming at it from this direction, the pathway to love is far more clear. The reciprocity is abundant and waiting. Not self, but selves. Not, as Thich Nhat Hanh says, “I am,” but “I inter-am.” That compassion and love and care is available to us in a ceaseless flow. To love ourselves is to love others. To love others is to love ourselves. This extends to family and friends and strangers and also crows and moose and ladybugs.

In this way, self-love becomes not just an ecological practice, but a way of remembering what it is to be a human being—one species among many.

This is a lot to try and communicate to a 4-year-old (though she is, always, far more intuitive and able to pick up on things than I expect). It’s a lot to communicate to my 38-year-old self, too.

You are wonderful and kind and deeply interesting and wise and beautifully imperfect and strong and you have something to teach me.

It is easy and natural to say such words to Aspen. To my husband. To my friends.

It is even easy to say them to the brook alongside our house.

And though the same words catch in my throat, and though I’m still a bit unsure, and though I have to whisper them, I say them to myself.

Imperfect, absolutely. But I can start to get my heart around the practice of it.

There is a mountain in us, do you see? There are clouds in us, do you see?

Reading this week:

And, for the first time, turning the pages in a physical copy of my book!

MOTHER, CREATURE, KIN is available for pre-order HERE.

“Tell me again,” she’ll say, and I can feel her focus, how she is processing in real time, catching new details, or new layers of meaning, wanting to keep the story alive and present.

She also narrates her life from her 4-year-old perspective, and it’s a delight to hear what constitutes a major plot point. (We went out to breakfast the other day and she looked up at me after receiving her bagel and said, “It’s unbelievable how much cream cheese I got from this lady.”)

I have to work to remember that while we’re often doing the same activity or sharing an experience, the stories we might relate afterwards are often completely different. It makes me extra grateful that she is a willing and enthusiastic narrator of her experience.

We went to Nebraska in early December to visit my dad, stepmom, grandmother, and extended family and friends. While we were there, my dad asked if he could take Aspen to see a prairie. Glacier Creek Preserve, just northwest of Omaha, is a restored tallgrass prairie, part of which my dad first visited around fifty years ago as an ecology student at the University of Nebraska. Now, as a retired botanist, he visits frequently as a volunteer who helps with their prescribed fire program.

This—restoring grasslands—is one of the central narrative threads of my father’s life. Prairies not only serve as some of his major plot points, but they also make up a large part of his understanding of himself and his place in the world.

His love of prairies is something he passed on to me: in the specific sense of what has become my own growing interest in learning more about this landscape, and in the broader sense of passing on the possibility—or necessity—of caring for place. So, I was touched that he wanted to share the prairie with his granddaughter, bringing that braided story into a new generation.

I was also curious how she would receive that story, braid it into her own understanding.

Approximately 98% of Nebraska’s tallgrass prairies were lost to the plow and development between the 1860s and today. This prairie at Glacier Creek was cropland not so long ago. It thus does not have 1,000-plus year old topsoil or an unbroken legacy of biological diversity. It is barely an infant in prairie terms, a mere half century old.

One of the many things I love about considering the stories of landscapes is that they are so very long and mysterious. Their time stretches and turns and layers far beyond our own time—behind, ahead, above, below—and far beyond much our understanding. But this doesn’t mean we can’t have real and meaningful relationships with landscapes in the present moment, and even through generations, when our time and the land’s time intersect and interact.

This, too—the touching down of our stories upon the wide story of the land, or, perhaps better stated: the wide story of the land folding us briefly into its long life—is an opportunity for, an opening into, love.

If I were to trace the narrative arc of six generations of my family in Nebraska, it would tell a story of deep relationship to the land, but not an untroubled one. It’s a story of the plow and of displacement, of successful and failed projects of control, and finally of restoration and healing, of seeking to make amends.

As we walked the trails at Glacier Creek, evidence of similar stories were everywhere to be seen on the landscape, in ways I could read, and in ways only my father and uncles (also prairie ecologists) could read, and certainly in ways none of us could read. There were square patches of recent burns where native grassland species will grow more vibrantly in the spring, there was a stark delineation between restored prairie and cropland. There was a weathered graveyard where an early pioneering farming family is buried, many of whom died very young. There was a trim line of modern homes, running along one of the surrounding hilltops.

And there were three generations of one family, walking together in the cold wind and bright sun, each of us holding this particular, brief intersection of ourselves with this landscape.

The land, too, is a storyteller and story receiver. The prairie and its layered stories has shown up in our family, over and over.

“Tell me again,” I find myself saying, and I can feel my own focus, how I am processing in real time, catching new details, or new layers of meaning, wanting to keep the story alive and present. How I want to be sure that I fully understand.

For Aspen’s part, she pulled on a dried, golden blade of tall grass until the top few inches popped off in her hand and became a magic wand. Waving it, she took off running, the prairie grasses swaying above her head on either side of her path.

Mother, Creature, Kin available for pre-order!

You can now pre-order my forthcoming book, MOTHER, CREATURE, KIN: What We Learn from Nature’s Mothers in a Time of Unraveling.

“In prose that teems with longing, lyricism, and knowledge of ecology, Steinauer-Scudder writes of the silent flight and aural maps of barn owls, of nursing whales, of real and imagined forests, of tidal marshes, of ancient single-celled organisms, and of newly planted gardens. The creatures inhabiting these stories teach us about centering, belonging, entanglement, edgework, homemaking, and how to imagine the future. Rooted in wonder while never shying away from loss, Mother, Creature, Kin reaches toward a language of inclusive care learned from creatures living at the brink.”

Writing workshops for the New Year:

(Re)Connecting to Creative Practice: Finding ritual and rhythm in the midst of uncertainty

With everything going on in the world, it can be a challenge to maintain both the joy and the discipline of creative practice, and to remember and re-inhabit it as worthy and valuable. Over three sessions, we’ll explore together ways of reconnecting to our writing as a creative and nourishing practice, weaving together elements of ritual and community.

For the duration of the three-week course, participants will have the option to write together every morning over Zoom. These writing sessions will entail a brief check-in followed by time to write in silence and community.

Dates: January 9th, 16th, 23rd from 7:30-8:30pm EST (plus: optional morning writing sessions from 8:00-9:00am, weekdays from January 9th-23rd)

Cost: Sliding scale, $25-$75

Register HERE.

Writing Creatures:

Is there an animal or plant you’ve been longing to write about? Are you looking for ways to bring more wildness into your writing? Over three sessions, we’ll delve into the world of a creature we’re interested in learning more about, stretch our writing practice across the species divide, and consider how writing can be a space to build bridges of empathy and care with the living world.

Dates & Time: February 6th, 13th, & 20th, from 8:00-9:00pm EST

Cost: Sliding scale, $25-$75

Register HERE.

Continuing this short series on love, I wanted to take a moment to share several of the creatures featured in MOTHER, CREATURE, KIN, and why I was inspired to write about them. This was the first time I’d ever done this much of a deep dive into the lives of other-than-human-beings (I still barely scratched the surface). The effort, limited though it was, cracked my heart open in ways I did not expect, and was not always prepared for, and am still working to understand. 

I’ve been explicitly and implicitly cautioned against anthropomorphizing, especially in creative writing about plants, creatures, and ecosystems, and I’ve heard it said that love is not objective or scientific. Well, that’s okay. With deep gratitude to the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer and others, I no longer believe that love and science are mutually exclusive. Not only that, I fully believe they can be mutually inclusive. Love can serve rigorous science, and rigorous scientific study can deepen love. I’m comfortable striving for a deepening knowledge, alongside a deepening love, even if it only ever leads to mystery and to unanswerable questions. Even if I stumble along the way and write about it in my limited language and inevitably make mistakes in attempting to express the lives of other creatures.

These are several of the creatures that have started to teach me what it means to trust love as an ecological practice and to allow creatures to do the work of opening our hearts as we do the work of learning about their lives and their worlds. They helped me to understand that mothering practices, too, extend across such boundaries. Whether or not we have children of our own, we are all creatures—children—of Earth’s body. We are interconnected beings, intimately tied to the lives of others. That intimacy invites us into practices of care and attention—to both give and receive nourishment within a widening circle of care. 

Here, then, is a sneak peek at three of MOTHER, CREATURE, KIN’s creatures:

North Atlantic Right Whales 

“In this way, their movements in these early days of their lives together are a perpetual, revolving conversation: two bodies in motion like the moon orbiting the earth, held close by the tether of gravity.”

On a bright January morning off the coast of Georgia, I met Spindle and her newly born calf aboard a small boat operated by three members of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. A whale mother and her calf are rarely more than a body-length away from each other in their early months of life together. They spin and breathe and nurse in each other’s close company. Fewer than 350 right whales remain and female whales in particular are being killed by fishing gear and ship strikes. This species is losing its mothers. Meeting Spindle and her calf as I learned about the plight of this species brought me, painfully, into the heart of my vulnerability as a new mother, ever concerned for the safety and well-being of my own child.  

Barn owls:

“But it is not, in fact, the eyes of barn owls that crackle and spark. It is the ears. The body and mind of a barn owl are wired for sound. The map by which the owl navigates and survives her world is built of vibrations through air.”

As I watched a clutch of barn owl chicks hatch and grow, I learned about the aural existence of the barn owl. With a brain that is wired for the world of sound, this bird can strike prey in tall grass and in total darkness. The barn owls appeared in my life in a moment when I was struggling to set bearings. Learning about the deep sensory belonging of the barn owl helped me to make sense of why, in that moment, I felt uprooted and adrift and guided me as I began practices to establish my own belonging. 

Salt marshes:

“I came to the tides to ask: what can be learned from the beings who inhabit the edge—the creatures who do not resist the ebb and flow of water but exist as part of it, who live because of it?”

Salt marshes are liminal ecosystems, mediated by the ebb and flow of the tide. As I was beginning the work of understanding what mothering might look like in this moment of perpetual change, I was having a hard time finding ecosystems which reflected this sense of ongoing transformation—until I came to the marsh. While facing sea level rise and other threats, marshes also model resiliency, adaptation, and how to exist and find agency within change.

Mother, Creature, Kin available for pre-order!

You can now pre-order my forthcoming book, MOTHER, CREATURE, KIN: What We Learn from Nature’s Mothers in a Time of Unraveling.

“In prose that teems with longing, lyricism, and knowledge of ecology, Steinauer-Scudder writes of the silent flight and aural maps of barn owls, of nursing whales, of real and imagined forests, of tidal marshes, of ancient single-celled organisms, and of newly planted gardens. The creatures inhabiting these stories teach us about centering, belonging, entanglement, edgework, homemaking, and how to imagine the future. Rooted in wonder while never shying away from loss, Mother, Creature, Kin reaches toward a language of inclusive care learned from creatures living at the brink.”

Writing workshops for the New Year:

(Re)Connecting to Creative Practice: Finding ritual and rhythm in the midst of uncertainty

With everything going on in the world, it can be a challenge to maintain both the joy and the discipline of creative practice, and to remember and re-inhabit it as worthy and valuable. Over three sessions, we’ll explore together ways of reconnecting to our writing as a creative and nourishing practice, weaving together elements of ritual and community.

For the duration of the three-week course, participants will have the option to write together every morning over Zoom. These writing sessions will entail a brief check-in followed by time to write in silence and community.

Dates: January 9th, 16th, 23rd from 7:30-8:30pm EST (plus: optional morning writing sessions from 8:00-9:00am, weekdays from January 9th-23rd)

Cost: Sliding scale, $25-$75

Register HERE.

Writing Creatures:

Is there an animal or plant you’ve been longing to write about? Are you looking for ways to bring more wildness into your writing? Over three sessions, we’ll delve into the world of a creature we’re interested in learning more about, stretch our writing practice across the species divide, and consider how writing can be a space to build bridges of empathy and care with the living world.

Dates & Time: February 6th, 13th, & 20th, from 8:00-9:00pm EST

Cost: Sliding scale, $25-$75

Register HERE.

Winter Light on Moss, falling (a workshop from Kerri ní Dochartaigh)

Check out this upcoming winter writing workshop from the fabulous Kerri ní Dochartaigh, on November 28th.

Outside my window, the season’s first snow is falling. The ground is still warm and green and I doubt much, if any, will stick. It may even turn to rain by the time I’m done writing this short essay. But I was just out there with it for a few minutes, feeling it land wet and cold on my skin, a welcome embrace. “Hello, snow,” I said. And then, I felt as though I’d been woken up.

Over the last week, I’ve been struggling to stay awake. We lost a dear family friend a few days ago, a woman I’ve known since before I could form memories. Several days later, another friend passed away, suddenly and unexpectedly. Then came the election.

I was reminded of how being awake to love often means being equally awake to grief. And how it can be tempting to stay asleep. And how, in closing ourselves off to sorrow, we can close ourselves off to love as well. It’s felt easier over the last couple of weeks to be in a restless, uneasy sleep.

But this morning’s snow opened my heart up again.

The only thing I can fathom that will get us through the time ahead is love. While I will continue to do my part in creating the sorts of institutions I hope to see in the world, political and otherwise, I don’t inherently trust or rely on them. There will be times when those institutions might help and times when they do the opposite. They are, I think, fundamentally unreliable. But we can choose, again and again, every day, to rely on—to stay awake to—love.

Love invites us into wonder, joy, awe, compassion. And yes, love also means awareness of not only our own pain and suffering, but the pain and suffering of others, human beings and more-than-human kin alike. But love is big enough to hold such things, while also offering us a way through. It can be a fire where transformation, change, and possibility are forged. It can be a place of warmth and light where we can simply be. It can be a pathway—infinite pathways, really—connecting us to the world around us and to its many extraordinary beings, with compassion and understanding.

Love does not mean a lack of rigor. It does not mean that we accept blindly or that we don’t hold others accountable. It does not mean inaction, though I think it invites us into many different forms of action and expands our understanding of what action can look like. The practice of keeping our hearts open to love does not mean the absence of anger, frustration, or bewilderment, nor does it mean permission to forgo careful study or self-awareness.

Today, I am reminded that I trust in love. I am reminded that trusting love, choosing love, is a practice that I can (re)dedicate myself to. I’m reminded that I trust you. I trust your heart. Whoever you are and whether or not you will ever read this, I trust your capacity for love. I trust the power of that love. And I believe in the potential of what can happen when we direct that love, not only to our fellow human beings, but to the beings that live and breathe in the living, breathing world around us.

In How to Love, Thich Nhat Hanh writes: “Love is a living, breathing thing. There is no need to force it to grow in a particular direction. If we start by being easy and gentle with ourselves, we will find it is just there inside us, solid and healing.”

This morning’s brief snow, easy and gentle, permitted me a moment to be in the presence of something solid and healing. I’ll keep working to stay there, and to return there when I’ve found I’ve wandered away.

When things feel uncertain and hard and heavy, there are many gifts we can offer to each other and to ourselves, but the most extraordinary one is also the simplest: love.

Stay tuned for three more Tuesday reflections on love. Coming up next week: “The Wisdom of Creatures.”

Mother, Creature, Kin available for pre-order!

You can now pre-order my forthcoming book, MOTHER, CREATURE, KIN: What We Learn from Nature’s Mothers in a Time of Unraveling.

“In prose that teems with longing, lyricism, and knowledge of ecology, Steinauer-Scudder writes of the silent flight and aural maps of barn owls, of nursing whales, of real and imagined forests, of tidal marshes, of ancient single-celled organisms, and of newly planted gardens. The creatures inhabiting these stories teach us about centering, belonging, entanglement, edgework, homemaking, and how to imagine the future. Rooted in wonder while never shying away from loss, Mother, Creature, Kin reaches toward a language of inclusive care learned from creatures living at the brink.”

Writing workshops for the New Year:

(Re)Connecting to Creative Practice: Finding ritual and rhythm in the midst of uncertainty

With everything going on in the world, it can be a challenge to maintain both the joy and the discipline of creative practice, and to remember and re-inhabit it as worthy and valuable. Over three sessions, we’ll explore together ways of reconnecting to our writing as a creative and nourishing practice, weaving together elements of ritual and community.

For the duration of the three-week course, participants will have the option to write together every morning over Zoom. These writing sessions will entail a brief check-in followed by time to write in silence and community.

Dates: January 9th, 16th, 23rd from 7:30-8:30pm EST (plus: optional morning writing sessions from 8:00-9:00am, weekdays from January 9th-23rd)

Cost: Sliding scale, $25-$75

Register HERE.

Writing Creatures:

Is there an animal or plant you’ve been longing to write about? Are you looking for ways to bring more wildness into your writing? Over three sessions, we’ll delve into the world of a creature we’re interested in learning more about, stretch our writing practice across the species divide, and consider how writing can be a space to build bridges of empathy and care with the living world.

Dates & Time: February 6th, 13th, & 20th, from 8:00-9:00pm EST

Cost: Sliding scale, $25-$75

Register HERE.

Winter Light on Moss, falling (a workshop from Kerri ní Dochartaigh)

Check out this upcoming winter writing workshop from the fabulous Kerri ní Dochartaigh, on November 28th.

I dug up the hibiscus at the end of June. My mom came over with flowerpots and three decades of professional landscaping know-how. She told me how far out from the central stalk to place my shovel and then how to angle the blade inward as I pressed it into the dirt with my foot, so that the roots would come out encased in a cone-shaped cocoon of soil. I worked my way around the plant, which was chest-high and three feet wide, nervous that I might sever some central root, that I would make a careless mistake in attempting to give this favorite perennial a new home.

We dug up the hibiscus because we were scheduled to move to new house a month later, in a new state: from southern Maine to central Vermont. My mom suggested that we take some of the perennials we’d planted a couple years earlier along with us. I welcomed this idea—bringing tended plants along felt like bringing some essence of one home over to another. (And, given that I’d far underestimated how big the hibiscus would get when I’d first planted it, and it was now looking cramped and crowded in its corner of the garden, it seemed a wise idea.)

Our decision to move had been made, in some ways, over the last few months, and in some ways, over the course of nearly a decade of conversations between my husband and I about what we wanted our lives to look like and, more recently, where and how we wanted to raise our daughter. We were excited about the pending move and…I was nervous. Nervous that I would sever some central root in uprooting us one more time, in this attempt to give our family the home we’d long been dreaming about and felt we had finally found.

The hibiscus sat in its flowerpot in the driveway, tucked up against the side of the house, as, on the other side of the wall, we packed, and packed, and packed some more. It wilted a bit in the afternoon sun and refreshed again in the evenings when I soaked it with water.

I wilted a bit every day, too. Little and big pangs of missing what we would be leaving behind arrived in my heart weeks before we actually left. Family and friends of course. But also, all the small bits of earned recognition that comes from being in a place over time: the trees that lined our walk to the park which we would not see turn fiery red this autumn. The familiar faces at the cafe. The feel of the wind that was always tunneling through our backyard. The smell and sound of the sea.

And then we would bring a carload of belongings to our new home, up and over the White Mountains and into the Greens; this new home with the little brook running by and blooming lilac and the sun that rises over the mountains before spilling slowly into the valley. And I, too, would refresh.

The hibiscus was one of the last things to be loaded into one of our last carloads of boxes. I wondered if, with all the stress of transplanting, perhaps it wouldn’t have the energy to bloom this August as it usually did.

My mom was here visiting us in Vermont when we put it back into the soil. She dug out a cone-shaped hole, pulled the plant from the pot, and placed the it into the ground, instructing me to give it ample water for a few days.

In those early days, we started getting to know this new place. We noticed how the wind doesn’t blow nearly as much here where we’re tucked between the mountains. How the clouds unleash unexpected downpours, even when no rain is predicted. How friendly and kind the neighbors are. The smell and the sounds of the splashing brook.

I miss all of the people and familiar places I knew I would miss. I miss them dearly. And, for the very first time—over many moves, over many years—I have been surprised to notice that I don’t feel homesick. Rather I feel as though we have, at last, arrived home. Our roots here are young and tender, recently transplanted. It will take time to make our anchors, to work our way deeper into this place. But I no longer feel the prickling uncertainty that has been lodged near my heart for so long.

I feel ready.

Last week, the hibiscus bloomed.

one thousand whispers of water pull around my feet

smoothing over round stone

when a small movement in the air focuses my line of sight to a point

smaller than my thumbnail

~ ~ ~

an inch worm

is lowering herself

~

~

~

on an invisible line that swings her wide in the air’s lightest breath as

the creature drops

inch ~

by ~~

inch ~~~

down to the fast water

she must not know, I think, where she’s going

and my second thought

is to intervene, or else this little life will surely be lost to the current

because what does an inch worm know of rivers?

and

how easy would it be to sweep my hand through the air, catch the thread, pull her to safety?

but my hand is stayed and she lands

—how gracefully!—

on an edge of roughened stone at the water’s edge.

~-~-~0

there performs the simplest of miracles:

takes a drink of water

then long minutes run over the water as she toils back up her lifeline,

up to the waiting branch where uneven geometric shapes have been eaten out of the leaves

she twists and spins bends and unbends

~~—~~~—- ~~~~~~_~~~~_~~~— ~~~~

every molecule of her spring-green body engaged in this act of ascendance

all for a drink of water.

I imagine that sip, that quenching of thirst

perhaps the tiniest, satisfied sigh

I imagine the river gods I don’t know how to speak to are shaking their heads at my bafflement

What does this little life, they muse, with its human feet in the current, know of rivers and worms?

Perhaps they too have been tempted to intervene

to sweep a hand and pull us to safety

for how many now suffer from another’s misguided thirst

the river is running and mothers are crying out for their children

how many lost in our failure to witness the worthy miracle that is ablaze within each of them

we cannot undo it

we cannot undo it

we cannot undo it

but, oh my gods, that it could be undone

~-~-~

there are driving thirsts that cannot be quenched.

but maybe those river gods still trust us enough, for now, to stay their

hands, to let us find our landing place,

to dedicate entire afternoons to the blessing of a sip of water,

to then be willing to engage every muscle, every molecule, in acts of

our

own

ascendance.

~

I’ve been thinking a lot about “homemaking” and what it means to create domestic spaces that are inclusive of the living world outside our doors. Homemaking can feel like an outdated word. However, when I think about it in relation to the question that often sits at the very center of my being—“What does it mean to make a home?”—then new dimensions and possibilities seem to spill forth.

I loved Camille Dungy’s book Soil. These lines in particular have stayed with me: “What folly to separate the urgent life will of the hollyhock outside my door from the other lives, the family, I hold dear. My life demands a radically domestic ecological thought.”  

A radically domestic ecological thought.

What are the practices such a thought might invite us into?

Since last spring, I’ve kept an occasional list of what I call “Home Inventories.” It’s been a very simple, practical way of logging movements, objects, seasons, perfunctory rituals, daily practices of inhabiting—often hardly worth mentioning—that make home familiar.

Here on the first day of Spring, I wanted share several of those lists.

^{Inventory I: Lost and Found Objects}  

^{A log of a toddler’s tireless practice of making and re-making home}

^{Tree Finder book (most recently on the arm of the chair in Aspen’s room, previously in her red wagon, previously in her toy bin, previously in the corner of her bed)} 

^{My jeweler’s loupe (purchased after a workshop with Lucy Jones when she spoke about carrying one with her so as to be able to look at small things like moss and lichen.) A month after vanishing from my purse, the empty case left behind, I finally found it at the bottom of a reusable shopping bag.}

^{My watch (still missing as of this writing)} 

^{A black, two-holed button set upon on my desk} 

^{A quiet blade of grass placed in my hair} 

^{A small, sharp stone in my pocket (discovered by sitting upon it)} 

^{A bandaid with cupcakes on it, stuck to the elbow of my striped shirt (impressively hard to remove)} 

^{A toothbrush, rolled in newspaper, at the bottom of my backpack (...what?)} 

^{Two blue magnatiles zipped into the pocket of my computer case}  

^{A miniature umbrella from the dollhouse, standing on my bookshelf} 

^{So very many pieces of tape, everywhere} 

^{Inventory II: Things Buried, Unburied, Growing in the Garden} 

^{A log of the homemaking work of beaks, critters, squirrels}

^{Aphids on the aspen tree (being farmed by ants for their honeydew)} 

^{Peanut shells poking through the soil in the raised beds (buried in autumn by squirrels)} 

^{The “weeds” we let grow in our backyard last year, which produce dozens of plump, bell shaped flowers in white and purple} 

^{A riot of maple seedlings growing in our gutters, in the cracks in the porch, in the pile of mulch, in the herb pot} 

^{Volunteer squash plants—ten of them!—growing from seeds buried in the compost that I hastily spread in early spring} 

^{The daisy fleabane, which grows taller and more vigorously than the tallest of the flowers we’ve planted} 

^{Inventory III: A (Partial) List of Home Rituals} 

^{The perfunctory patterns of life that come to define home}

^{For months, trying and failing, every morning, to get a three-year-old to eat breakfast} 

^{Aspen and Dada morning dates to our local coffee shop, where Aspen is now a regular}

^{House Sparrows, House Finches, Northern Cardinals returning to the trees in March}

^{Aspen’s “garden tours,” given to lucky guests. Includes, always, the apple trees, the aspen tree, and the doorbell on her playhouse} 

^{Walks around the garden} 

^{Weeding the garden} 

^{Mulching the garden}  

^{Playdates with Bubba (Aspen’s name for my mom) on Friday afternoons}  

^{Early family dinners of: whole wheat noodles, curry, “big salad” Seinfeld-style, rice bowls, pizza} 

^{Evening walks or bike rides around the “neighborhood loop”} 

^{Watching Mr. Rogers Neighborhood on rainy afternoons and evenings} 

^{Bedtime routine: snuggling, books (read by Andrew), songs (sung by me…This Pretty Planet, Waltzing Matilda, Row Row Row Your Boat)}

***

What are some of your homemaking practices and rituals?

Two Spring Workshops

Writing at the Edge (Virtual):

In this time of ongoing ecological transformation, how do we write about our home places? Over three sessions, we'll explore three transitional ecosystems: salt marshes, the fluctuating border between forests and grasslands, and places where human development meets "wilderness." Each offers us a glimpse of what is possible at the edge and invites us to peer at what is held within fluid boundaries. What can be learned from the beings who inhabit these edge-landscapes?

April 11th, 18th, & 25th from 7:00-8:30pm EST​

To register, or for more information, click here.

Writing at the Edge (In-Person):

A three-part writing workshop exploring ecology of salt marshes, the legacy and work of Rachel Carson, and how to weave edge-places into our writing in a time of uncertainty. Held at several locations within the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge between Scarborough and Wells, Maine.

Sunday April 28th, Sunday May 5th, and Sunday May 12th from 12:00-1:30pm EST

To register, or for more information, click here.

January 6th

We go to sleep, my family and I, held in the sweet anticipation of the season’s first snowfall. I don’t know if it’s the excitement, but Aspen awakes at midnight and can’t get back to sleep.

At 2:30 am, all of my back-to-sleep efforts failing, my stress levels rising and patience evaporating, I give in. Accept it, accept it, I tell myself. I take a deep breath and pick her up and say into her hair, “Let’s go look at the snow.” I bring her to the living room and pull back the curtain to show her the beginnings of the storm. The ground has a dusting. Outside it is blue and orange in the way that snow keeps the night lit and visible, reflecting all the ambient light. A smile spreads across both of our faces. And then I refind my breath and my balance and I’m glad to be awake with her, to share in this quiet moment of winter’s arrival.

Plus: I think I want to show Aspen the snow as much as I want to see it for myself. Finally, finally, snow. For there is an anxiety that’s been increasingly at home in my body these last few years: the seasons are, persistently, not as they should be.

Until now, here in the first week of January, we haven’t had even an inch of total snowfall here in Portland, Maine, leaving us 14 inches behind December’s average. The days yo-yo between frigid cold and springtime warm. At Christmas down in Boston, my brother-in-law’s lilac bush was budding.

A few days before Christmas, heavy rain brought the worst flooding to Maine’s Androscoggin River since 1987 (and even that was a flood which happened in late March, on the cusp of spring, not in mid-December).

January 7th

Thirteen inches of fluffy, cold, beautiful snow falls. We eat maple syrup snow cones and dig out winding pathways through the yard and make snow angels and shovel and shovel again and come in for tea and then head back outside, like we’re trying to cram in as much winter as possible. Neighbors go by on cross-country skis and small children are pulled in sleds. Something tight around my heart relaxes.

January 10th

50 degrees, heavy rain, and 60 mph gusts of wind. More flooding. Portland experiences the third highest tide ever recorded. In a matter of hours, the thirteen inches of beautiful snow melts and then is gone. The sun comes out and we wear only light sweaters. On the phone, my friend tells me she’s having trouble shaking a sense of impending doom. We laugh together, uneasily. It’s the same uneasy laugh I shared with my neighbor a day earlier, as we were shoveling snow and waiting for the rain. I can’t shake the tightness that has returned around my heart, either.

January 11th

This is a reality of climate crisis. It will, increasingly, move from facts and data, scientific articles and talking heads, to live here, in the bodies of more and more of us. It will become felt and sensory. Of course, it’s been alive in the body of the Earth and in the bodies of many of Her people for a long time now. People who are seeing their coastlines vanish or their forests burn or their crops parched.

A question comes to live in me: how on Earth—literally, how, on this transforming Earth—do we inhabit our bodies as they inhabit ongoing ecological change and uncertainty?

February 13th

Somehow, an entire month passes since I began this short essay. I haven’t returned to it, perhaps because I’ve been avoiding my own question: “How do we inhabit our bodies as they inhabit ongoing ecological change and uncertainty?” I haven’t arrived at any answers.

The ground outside is, again, bare of snow.

I compel myself to read this question again and to sit with it for a while. Then, I remind myself that to pose such a question is not to demand an answer. I remind myself that, often, the work is to inhabit the question, not to construct a solution. And, also, we have to invite the questions in to inhabit us. Somehow, within the uneasy home of a question, there is both possibility and acceptance—gifts that are not always to be found in the sturdy, unmoving walls of answers.

And perhaps it’s a weak comparison to make, but I keep thinking of Aspen’s trouble sleeping several weeks ago and how, as parents, we intuitively know—even in the moments when we are struggling or falling short—to strive for acceptance, to ground ourselves in love, and then to act from this place of loving acceptance as we continue to put forth effort.

That long, sleepless night, after my daughter and I looked together at the snow, and after one more hour of being awake after that, as the snow continued to fall, I carried Aspen back to bed and we both found our way to sleep. When we woke up, the world had been transformed.

I know it’s not this easy or simple. But I wonder if this experience can offer a small way of pointing to one sort of bodily practice of inhabiting this time, and each of our changing places, and each of our painfully vast questions:

I accept, I accept.

I love, I love.

In loving acceptance, I will, where and how and as I can, bring my body to the work of healing the body of the Earth.

Upcoming Teaching & Workshops

Writing at the Edge (Virtual):

In this time of ongoing ecological transformation, how do we write about our home places? Over three sessions, we'll explore three transitional ecosystems: salt marshes, the fluctuating border between forests and grasslands, and places where human development meets "wilderness." Each offers us a glimpse of what is possible at the edge and invites us to peer at what is held within fluid boundaries. What can be learned from the beings who inhabit these edge-landscapes?

April 11th, 18th, & 25th from 7:00-8:30pm EST​

To register, or for more information, click here.

Writing at the Edge (In-Person):

A three-part writing workshop exploring ecology of salt marshes, the legacy and work of Rachel Carson, and how to weave edge-places into our writing in a time of uncertainty. Held at several locations within the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge between Scarborough and Wells, Maine.

Sunday April 28th, Sunday May 5th, and Sunday May 12th from 12:00-1:30pm EST

To register, or for more information, click here.

Great Mother & New Father Conference:

I'm excited to announce that, alongside some incredible writers, musicians, artists, and storytellers, I'll be teaching at the Great Mother and New Father Conference this year, on the theme of "Wayfinding, Unlikely Teachers and Steering into Mystery."

For more information, visit: greatmotherconference.org.

It’s always the middle of the night when the pathways find you. Your husband on one side of the bed and, these days, your three-year-old between you, sprawled out in her easy sleep. She always has her list of nightly demands: her own pillow with the forest animal pillowcase, socks or no socks depending on her mood, and, most importantly, not ever sleeping in her own bed, ever again. These days, you and your husband take turns losing sleep, depending on which of you she kicks through half the night. But neither of you can find it in yourselves to move her back to her room. 

The pathways that come in the dark are not necessarily dreams, though there is the recurring dream recently, always set in your old neighborhood in the town where you grew up, and, for some reason, always featuring you coming in or out of Midway Market, the little neighborhood grocery built of brick. The dreams always have that particular feeling of childhood: how, as a child, you don’t consider that the place where you are growing up entailed someone making a choice about where to live, it simply was, and you accept it wholly and simply for what it was.

The pathways come in the liminal space of half-asleep, half-awake, when your mind is both malleable and vulnerable; when there are not the day’s routines, rituals, and needs-to-be-met, all of which keep your thoughts in order. The books to read aloud, the alphabet to sing (again), the park to walk to and from, and then the carving out of your own time, always precious, always limited, and therefore either highly focused, spent in writing or answering emails, or sinfully (deliciously) squandered in television and chocolate. 

In the dark, in the silence, without the barriers of an itemized life, the pathways unfurl in strange, looping shapes. Not quite questions, but more like possibilities, guided by an unfettered imagination. Sometimes this imagining is terrifying. Sometimes the pathways lead to dark places. These you try and fail to redirect, unable to gain full control over your mind. Instead, you lie there, pressed under the weight of your own mortality, and worse, your daughter’s.

More often, the pathways are neither good nor bad. Sometimes when you wake up from the dream of visiting Midway Market, they bring you on a long consideration of what your life would be if you still lived in that town, that neighborhood. Even though you haven’t been back there in years, the dreams are so vivid. You realize just how much you remember—how the exquisite details of your childhood have stayed with you. How your successive heights as a child are still marked in sharpie—Chelsea, 1993—on one of the market’s walls, alongside the noted heights of the other neighborhood children. And how easy it would be to return there after all these years and fold back into that place.

Most often the pathways are like this: other ways you could have gone or could go now. What would be different? What would be the same? What would you be?

And you always realize, too, rousing yourself at last into full consciousness, looking over at your daughter, deep in her own dreams, that these pathways are, perhaps, your mind’s small and gentle way of allowing you to miss those other lives that will not, now, be yours. You have chosen, and will choose again and again and again, to go this way, to sleep next to this beautiful child, to be her mother. 

More than two decades ago, I was walking home from high school, probably daydreaming about crossing paths with Henry, a lanky boy with curly hair who played the violin beautifully and was the concertmaster in our small freshman orchestra. He lived just a few blocks away from me in our modest, suburban Oklahoma neighborhood. He always walked a few paces ahead, both of us heading home alone, in silence. These walks had become a little game for me. I was too shy to speak to any boy, especially any I had a crush on, so I would walk and imagine the conversations I’d have with Henry, were we ever to speak. I’d often carry a book with me, sometimes attempting to walk and read at the same time, paradoxically trying to ensure that he wouldn’t talk to me, while also of course desperately hoping that he would, perhaps by asking me what I was reading. Never mind that reading while walking caused me to stumble over curbs and cracks in the concrete. It was a 14-year-old’s logic.

But on this day, Henry was not in view and something else had captured my attention: a column of smoke climbing violently into the air a few blocks away.

I wonder if my house is on fire, I thought. But no, that couldn’t be. The thought of anyone’s house burning, much less my own, struck me as so unlikely and unbelievable that I returned to my book.

But the smell of the smoke became acrid and pungent—real—as I neared its source. It towered against the quiet blue of the warm autumn sky, billowing like a supernatural thing howling upward from the Earth, a force of physics all its own. I felt the truth of it settle into my stomach: someone’s house was burning. My own home came into view, intact, and I let out my breath. I passed it by, kept walking.

As I neared the end of the street, there it was: a house in the process of being ruthlessly consumed.

And then I saw James—another violinist who sat near the back of his section, a quiet boy who I hardly ever noticed, a boy who must have also walked home the same way as me, day after day. He was standing across the street, watching the fire. And it was clear from the look on his face that this was his home.

I don’t remember the sirens that must have been blaring, or the sounds of the fire, or the other people who must have been gathered around. I just remember James:

His backpack was abandoned at his feet, crumpled in the grass, an object that had been rendered suddenly childish and obsolete, whose owner had all at once become something entirely other than a schoolboy who played in the freshman orchestra. He stared straight ahead, unmoving, watching his world disappear. His hands were in his pockets, his shoulders were slouched, his mouth closed.

The things I knew about James began to drift to the surface of my memory: he had a younger brother and sister. His family was not a wealthy one. I had the vague recollection that his parents had struggled for this house, the way my mom had for ours. And thus I understood that it was not just a house, a home, that was burning, but also a monument to what had likely been his family’s steep uphill climb into something like the blessed relief of stability.

Tears ran down James’s cheeks. He was the first of his family to have arrived home that afternoon. He was silent. He was alone. And his silence and his loneliness felt impenetrable, unreachable. The word alone suddenly became a verb, a force, and I felt as though I was stumbling backward.

I came to stand next to him and placed a hand on his shoulder and could find no words to say. We stood there, side by side, and watched the flames.

I can’t remember what happened next. Maybe his parents came home at last, maybe a fireman led him away, maybe I eventually simply turned and walked home.

Not long after the fire, James’s family—having been unable to financially recover—moved to another state to live with relatives. I never saw him again.

“On fire” is a phrase used often these days to describe the state of the world. It’s a phrase that resonates with me this morning, as I’m writing these words: another clear, warm autumn day—more than two decades later, and in a different state. Here in Maine, and elsewhere in the world, literal and metaphorical columns of smoke are rising into the air.

I’ve been carrying the memory of that housefire over the last few days, turning it over in my mind. As war escalates in the Mideast and continues in Ukraine. As Lewiston, a city just a handful of miles north of where I live with my family, endures the world-shattering aftermath of a mass shooting. I keep seeing James standing there in front of his burning house.

And the question this memory has for me right now is: How do we bear witness to another’s unbearable grief and trauma?

James’s silence that day has been with me all these years. Indeed, in that moment he was no longer a schoolboy, nor a violinist, I’m not sure he was even James. Rather, he was a person who had temporarily been stripped of any identity other than something utterly tender and essential: a deeply vulnerable human being.

My 14-year-old self did not know what to do about his grief and did not know how to find the vulnerability within myself to meet his. My 36-year-old self is still learning what to do in response to the fact that relief, stability, and safety are not guarantees.

What I hope for is this: that those of us who are bearing witness to the deep, world-shattering losses of others in this time—within our human societies and within the living world—take it upon ourselves to do the work of reaching, again and again, for our own visceral, vulnerable humanity. I hope that we cling to it. And that we bring it with us as we respond. Whether we are protesting, speaking out against ongoing and unspeakable violence, donating time and resources, or listening and being present—I hope that we uphold this unwavering humanity that recognizes the dignity and worth in others.

I am angry and scared. And even as the waves of fear and anger come, I hope that we can find the courage to draw upon those best and highest parts of ourselves: our compassion, our empathy, our enduring capacity for love, and then make those parts of ourselves unyielding. I hope that we continue to challenge ourselves to recognize thou—not it, not other, not them—in the midst of so much that is on fire.

I’ll leave you with the words of several others that have given me ways to wrestle with what it is to be present and vulnerable and human:

From Anna Badkhen, in her book of essays, Bright Unbearable Reality:

“The great Toni Morrison said about belonging and dispossession and the notion of home: ‘We are dreaming all wrong.’ In this book I examine some of our broken synapses. Maybe we can never make them whole entirely, but we can try to acknowledge and repair them, even if the sutures show, the scars of our efforts to dream differently.”

An excerpt from “I Have Wanted Clarity in Light of My Lack of Light,” in Ada Limón’s collection The Hurting Kind:

Once, I was brave, but I have grown so weary of danger. / I am soundlessness amid the constant sounds of war.

And—because he’s a bit of a fixture in our house at the moment—Fred Rogers:

“When I say it’s you I like, I’m talking about that part of you that knows that life is far more than anything you can ever see or hear or touch. That deep part of you that allows you to stand for those things without which humankind cannot survive.”

Share

Subscribe now

A note of gratitude to one of my new paid subscribers: Thank you so much for your generous subscription! I tried to email you, but the message bounced back. If you are the person whose email beings with “arcs” please reach out to me at chelseascudder@gmail.com, if you’d like! I send all paid subscribers an original poem on a postcard and I’d love to send one to you! Thank you!!!

Enjoy!

My Mother’s Hands

A northern cardinal is the first

to announce spring,

a balm for the silence

that winter fastened to the trees.

Next, my two-year-old daughter

finds a maple seed

still wrapped in its brown coat, worn and thin,

and a green shoot is growing.

She asks to plant it.

“This seed’s perfect,” she says,

admiring her work.

Looking at her, I have to agree.

Now, maple seeds are growing

everywhere in the garden beds.

I pluck these tree-children out

from the parts of the yard I curate

into a garden

though I’m not entirely sure

I have the right to do so.

But then...this is the wonder

of spring, isn’t it?

For a few sweet months,

there will be an abundance,

a too-muchness,

a time when pulling a maple seed

does not feel like a diminishment

but an opening.

Abundance is in my daughter,

too, as her mind expands

to meet the world that

is also sprouting within her,

words and dreams and songs,

and so many moments that will

fall away like so many maple seeds:

failing to take root in her young memory.

But those moments live,

vibrant and perfect,

even in their brevity.

I see them light up her eyes.

I mean to say that spring is here

and all of us are made

of all that did and did not take root in us.

We are abundance.

We are openings.

After weeding the garden,

my hands, covered in dark soil,

become my mother’s hands.

The hands of a woman who labored in gardens.

Isn’t that strange? That I did not know

I had my mother’s hands until this earth

curved inside my fingernails

and this soil found the cracks in my skin?

And isn’t it a blessing

what we inherit and what we pass on

and how, even in this fleeting existence,

we are not deterred from reaching for sunlight?

For the bulk of his career, more than twenty years, my father was Nantucket Island’s sole Audubon employee. As Sanctuary Director, he lived year-round on seventy acres of conserved Audubon land, in Audubon housing, surrounded by pitch pine forest, meadow, and a scrub oak savannah that ran along Hummock Pond, in the center of the island. It was a place called Lost Farm.

For two of those summers, while in college at the University of Oklahoma, I worked on Nantucket as a shorebird intern, monitoring nesting populations of piping plovers and least terns along Squam and Quidnet beaches and around Sesachacha Pond. My ensemble those summers—hat, sunglasses, binoculars, Rite-in-the-rain notebook, and stack of Coastal Waterbird Program log-sheets—was reminiscent of my elementary school wish to become Harriet the Spy, and was not so different from the magnifying glass, spiral notebook, and mirror-equipped sunglasses I then had carefully organized in my faux-leather fanny pack, longing to stumble upon a mystery. 

As Shorebird Intern, I learned to identify tracks in the sand: plover, tern, seagull, crow, sandpiper, feral cat, rat. My job was to know where the tern and plover nests were so that I could put up fencing and signs, eventually count and record the number of eggs in each nest, and then know how many eggs hatched, how many chicks fledged. All of this would join data being collected across the state, ultimately across the country, as conservation groups worked to bolster declining populations of shorebirds.

While the least terns nested in large and noisy colonies that were all too easy to spot, even for a novice like me, the piping plovers nested only in quiet, solitary pairs.

Piping plovers are camouflaged little birds, the size of a crumpled tissue. They have a black ring around their necks and are otherwise the color of shifting sand: gray, white, and beige, with an orange beak dipped in black ink. They move over the sand in quick, silent steps and less often fly in those weeks of feeding and nesting, their wings then forming a neatly drawn, stretched-out “M” across a tiny pocket of sky.

They’ve adapted to hide their nests in plain sight: digging shallow holes—“scrapes”—in the open sand, often at the edge of a dune. Here they sit quietly upon speckled eggs, females and males taking turns incubating for 4 weeks.

Egg-loving predators abound. On Nantucket, an island 25 miles out to sea and thus still uninhabited by the likes of racoons and skunks, the list of threats nonetheless remains daunting: crows (who, I was told, were smart enough to follow my footprints, were I to walk too close to a plover nest, and thereby claim their treasure), seagulls, feral cats, rats.

But the plovers bet on their ability to be silent and still, patient and invisible.

Silence and stillness, patience and invisibility became my tools, too, in figuring out where their nests were. Early in the season, I would hear the single-note piping call, or spot a plover feeding along the tide line, and then lay belly down on the sand a dozen yards away, binoculars to my eyes, watching where she went. Eventually, she might climb up onto dry sand, pause, being to scrape. Maybe this scrape would be the one in which she chose to lay her eggs. But whether this would happen that day, or the next week, I did not know. I could only sit and watch.

It was the first time I paid close attention, for any extended period of time, to a bird. 

I would follow the tracks of their winding feet. Scan the beach, dune to tide line. When I couldn’t see them, I’d often hear them overhead. Pipe. A single blow on whistle. Over the early weeks of the nesting season, I observed as home became pinpointed into a divot in the sand, a few inches in diameter. Hardly distinguishable from the shape of the world around it, and yet set apart, the chosen place for new life.

The first plover nest was claimed by the sea in a high spring tide that pulled the ocean all the way to the slopes of the dunes. The pair nested again, this time further up into the grass. 

Piping plovers are in the order Charadriiformes which arose during the Cretaceous Era, around 90 million years ago.

Unlike songbird vocalizations—which are learned by every new generation of bird, passed from adult to child—shorebird vocalizations are innate. A piping plover chick will grow into an adult that pipes the same single note at the same frequency, without having been taught. This means that there is little geographic variation in calls, across the range of the species. Nor is there much variation across vast spans of time.

In an article published by the American Ornithological Society, entitled “Antiquity of Shorebird Acoustic Displays,”1 the authors write that the songs of some shorebirds, including the genus Charadrius, which includes the piping plover, “may be extremely ancient.” It’s even possible, they conclude, that “sounds similar to those of extant shorebirds contributed to the biological soundscape >65 million years ago” and that “despite the demise of the dinosaurs, a part of their acoustic environment may live on in their…bird relatives.”

Isn’t that wonderful? That hearing a piping plover today carries the possibility of hearing a sound that reached the ears of dinosaurs? A sound that has endured for millennia and millennia, carried across the eons in the vessel of speckled eggs, laid on the sand.

What can be heard in such a sound?

“It is our misfortune,” writes Rachel Carson in The Sense of Wonder,2 “that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.” Wonder, she writes, is “an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”

First of all, I love the idea of wonder as a sense in itself. One that can be paired with our other bodily senses.

Second, I didn’t know back then that the calls of plovers might have provided an aural link between me and an ancient biological soundscape. But that’s part of the beauty of wonder: that it layers and deepens with both experience and knowledge. Just as a shorebird call can be a tether between landscapes millions of years apart, wonder can be a tether between ourselves and the living world, a means of care and attention, a way of becoming invested in the fate of another.

Such that, within a single note piped by a single bird, multiple worlds might unfold. Worlds we care to protect.

Today, the world of the piping plover is a precarious one. The bird is listed as either threatened or endangered across its range. Once relentlessly hunted for their feathers, today the threats to their endurance as a species include shoreline development, predators whose populations boom alongside human presence, beach traffic (cars, feet, pets), and climate change.

The plover eggs that summer hatched into four fuzzy cotton balls with toothpick legs. Plover chicks are precocial, meaning they can walk within minutes of hatching, and forage for their own food on their first day of life. So it was.

This was a critical time. If the chicks survived their first five weeks—the time it would take for them to make their first flights—I would breathe a sigh of relief and log them as “fledged.” If they made it to this point, their chances of living to adulthood would increase dramatically.

But a few days into their fragile lives, I arrived to tire tracks on the beach. Two thick lines bisecting bird habitat. I walked along them, dreading what I might find.

And there was one chick, unmoving and pressed into the sand, the tread of a Jeep running on and on beyond it, unseeing. I still remember being surprised that it took months before I could think of that chick without tears welling in my eyes.

“We are increasingly disconnected from sensory, storied relationship to life’s community,” writes David George Haskell in his book Sounds Wild and Broken.3 “This rupture is part of the sensory crisis. We become estranged from both the beauty and brokenness of much of the living world. This destroys the necessary sensory foundation for human ethics. The crises in which we live, then, are not just ‘environmental,’ of the environs, but perceptual. When the most powerful species on Earth ceases to listen to the voices of others, calamity ensues. The vitality of the world depends, in part, on whether we turn our ears back to the living Earth.”

Reading those lines, I think of a plover chick lying still in the pattern of a car’s tread. I think of what else we—I—tread upon, in all the ways I still don’t know how to listen.

There are piping plovers nesting here in Maine. Their numbers are rising. One day at Higgins beach this summer, I heard that single note call. A piping plover came down to land just a few feet from where Aspen, Andy, and I were sitting. Later, when Aspen took off to run up the beach, a large group of plovers (I counted 14 of them, far more than I’ve ever seen at once), seemed to gather and congregate around her, as if taking her in as one of their own (though I expect this was a mother’s wishful projection).

Nonetheless, as Aspen ran, the birds ran with—not away from—her, forming a V, with this little girl amidst them and the little gray-white feathered bodies arranging themselves in an arrow ahead of her, one that she happily obliged, needing no other direction than to follow the birds.

My husband, Andy, recently wrote a children’s book about the piping plover, with art by Bruce Hutchison. You can hear the audio version here:

Paired with an original song by Marc W. Pinansky (!) which you can listen to here:

If you’d like a copy of your own, email Andy at: thepennprogram@gmail.com

Fall Writing Workshops

This fall, I’m pleased to offer two writing workshops, one in-person and one virtual. If you’re interested in either or both, please email me at chelseascudder@gmail.com to register & reserve your place!

I. Sense-Making & Sensory Worlds (online):

In three sessions, through the incredible sensory worlds of three species—barn owls, hemlock trees, and North Atlantic right whales—we’ll consider how to expand our sensory experiences of the living world, and how to write about those experiences.

From sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing—to wonder, awe, intuition, and wildness—we’ll write, read, and imagine together!

When:

October 12, 7:00-8:30pm EST (Zoom)

October 19, 7:00-8:30pm EST (Zoom)

October 26, 7:00-8:30pm EST (Zoom)

Cost:

Sliding scale, $25-$75

To register: visit my website

II. Writing at the Edge (in-person):

In this time of great change, when we all live at the edge of certainty, at the edge of guarantee, how do we write about the places where we live from within transformation and change?

Saltmarshes—tidal ecosystems at the border of land and sea—offer us a glimpse of what is possible at the edge and invite us to peer at what is held within fluid boundaries. Together, we’ll explore Scarborough Marsh, meeting the tides and the marsh grasses to ask: What can be learned from the beings who inhabit the edge—who do not resist the ebb and flow of water, but exist as part of it, who live because of it?

From the boundary between joy and sorrow, hope and fear, love and grief, this three-part nature writing workshop explores how nature writing can help us navigate vulnerable edges.

At the end of three sessions, we’ll each work to produce a personal nature writing essay.

Where:

Scarborough Marsh, Scarborough, ME

When:

Spring 2024 (please register on my website or email me to stay up-to-date!)

Cost:

Sliding scale, $75-$150

News & Updates

I’m excited to share a new piece out in Emergence Magazine, in collaboration with photographer Russel Albert Daniels:

Speaking Wind-Words (emergencemagazine.org)

On the wind-sculpted dunes of Nebraska’s Sandhills, I consider the collision of prophecies that occurred over the Great Plains in the nineteenth century, forever altering the landscape; and how places shape—and are shaped by—human language and intent.

For years after we could read on our own, our dad continued to read aloud to my brother and I before bed. The books I remember most clearly: The Dark is Rising series; The Ear, The Eye and the Arm; The Hobbit; and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which we read at least twice. 

The last time my father read Tolkien’s words and worlds to us aloud was the year we moved with him to Nantucket. I was eleven, my brother nine, and in the waning evenings of autumn we three sat together in the light cast out from the bronze floor lamp, the words and the voice who spoke them comfortingly familiar in a way that our new home was not. Our living room was small and, fitted with bunk beds, doubled as Nathan’s and my bedroom. Dad sat in the reclining chair, Nathan and I sat on the floor or the bottom bunk. 

I spent a lot of time reading silently and alone, too, but when I attempted to read Tolkien’s books, my young mind stumbled over many of the words, which pulled me out of the fantasy and into the mental acrobats of deciphering symbols on the page. Sometimes this was an enjoyable challenge. But I preferred, any day, hearing the story through the vessel of my father. Delivered orally, it was as though Tolkien’s world arrived directly into my imagination and I could float along the story like a leaf in a river. My mind was free to inhabit and explore and I lingered in my favorite scenes as Dad read on. I ducked again through Bilbo’s round door. Kept bobbing with the dwarves in their barrels. Climbed once more into Treebeard’s branching crown. Grew drowsy with Frodo and Sam in the foothills of Mordor. Apart from the barren land of Mordor, the entire series took place in my mind in an unending forest, not so different from Tolkien’s intention perhaps, but lacking any sophisticated topography of valleys and mountains. I was content imagining a world of ubiquitous, uniform trees. 

In addition to reading us books, Dad required that we spend the daylight hours primarily outside. If there was not a hurricane or a blizzard, we biked to our destinations. We learned to identify edible mushrooms and trim the trails around the house. We carried jugs of water to his research plots, mowed meadows, and often, simply, played. 

I can remember the subtle feeling, though I couldn’t have articulated it then, that being outdoors in the daylight and reading in the evening didn’t feel entirely like separate experiences. I brought the stories with me out into the world, not by play-acting specific characters or scenes, but by a continued experience of the land as the place where stories could happen. We played a lot of specific games in the pitch pine forest that grew around our new house: capture the flag, fort-building, hide and seek. But, mostly, I remember simply carrying around an undefined but certain sense of possibility when outdoors, like there was a myth or two draped in the trees with the lichen or scurrying away just out of the corner of my eye. 

After dinner, I brought the land back inside with me as I listened to my father read. Tolkien’s forests took on more subtlety and clarity as I increasingly came to have my own experiential vocabulary of the woods, even without the words to express it.

The place where the books and the land met was through my imagination.

As children, it’s easy to flow wordlessly between imaginative landscapes and physical ones. These terrains might be separate one moment, seamlessly merged the next. Just as Aspen, at eleven months old, said “Hi!” to all of the beings around our house, at two-and-a-half years old, the conversations continue. Her world remains deeply animate; primed for story. At any moment, anything might speak to her and she will unhesitatingly speak back. Just the other day, she met one of her favorite storybook characters of late, Old Rock, at a community garden in New Hampshire. We were admiring some of the boulders placed throughout the little landscape, and there he was. “Hi, Old Rock!” she said, without blinking an eye that was there. “How you doin?”

I’m curious how our imaginations meet the landscape and how the landscape finds its way into our imaginations. And what potential lies in those encounters.

Recently, Aspen and I were in the backyard, seeing what was to be seen in the middle of March. We noticed that one of last year’s red maple seeds—which had lain dormant on the ground for months and had been recently revealed again as the last of the snow melted—had a little green shoot growing out of it.

I explained to her that this seed could grow to become a tree. At first, she gave me a questioning look, as if waiting for me to say, “Haha, no, not really!” (I can understand her initial disbelief…that an entire tree could come from something that I was holding in the palm of my hand). But then I saw her face change as she not only accepted this astonishing fact, but…as she looked at this seed and then imagined a tree. I could almost see it grow right there in her mind.

And that imaginative act suddenly seemed as miraculous to me as the potential for a tiny seed to grow into an enormous, long-lived forest being. Here was a child who could look at something small, brown, brittle, and wing-shaped, lying still in her mother’s hand, and conjure a tree in her mind.

And this is what we need, isn’t it?

I’ve been working on a definition of ecological mothering and I keep coming back to two things as I do: forests and books. Which, I think, has been my way of working around to an understanding that practices of ecological mothering are necessarily both communal and imaginative.

This is what I’ve been writing about in my book for the last few weeks. I had known this chapter was going to be about trees, but I’d had no idea it was really going to be about imagination. That’s some of the joy of writing, though. And I’ve been returning to some of my favorite fantasy stories as I work through this chapter. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series and my beat-up old copy of The Hobbit. In the meantime, the maple seeds are sprouting everywhere, flowers are beginning to bloom, soft rain is falling. I’m working to re-find those seamless moments where imagination and land are one.

News

Speaking of trees, if you’re in the Portland, Maine area, I hope you’ll come to Back Cove Books on May 12th at 7pm! I’ll be joining Katie Holten on her national book tour for her—already bestselling—The Language of Trees (which I’m honored to have an essay in!).

More info here!

Reading / Listening

The Dark is Rising was adapted into a 12-part BBC radio drama! (No surprise, Robert Macfarlane had a lot to do with it.)

Ursula K Le Guin’s Earthsea series. One of those collections to be read on repeat every few years.

Essential Labor by Angela Garbes which explores “mothering as social change,” and so much more.

I don’t do it justice, of course, but I recorded it. Here’s a snippet:

There is some deep-rooted archetypal comfort in hearing birds at sunrise, don’t you think? It has me wondering what it is about our winged neighbors that has captured human curiosity and imagination for so many millennia. Perhaps it is because birds are creatures both ascendant and bound to creation. Perhaps this is what we, too, long to be.

Birds have found their way into our myths and symbols since time immemorial. Ancient Egyptians painted vultures on their ceilings, wings outspread, as maternal emblems of protection. Doves and pigeons were associated with various goddesses in ancient Mesopotamia. In a 3rd century fresco in the Catacombs of Saint Priscilla in Rome, a phoenix sits in its nest, engulfed in blood-red flames, a symbol of resurrection. In some versions of Inuit creation stories, Raven is responsible for bringing light to the world.

In The Conference of the Birds, an epic Sufi poem composed in 12th century Persia, Farid ud-Din Attar gives us an allegory of the mystical journey to God, in the form of a pilgrimage undertaken by a multitude of birds. The hoopoe calls the world’s birds together and invites them to travel with him to meet their true king, the Simorgh. At first, the feathered cohort is enthusiastic and eager to set out, but one by one, they begin to make excuses.

The nightingale prefers to love and worship the blooming rose instead. The finch lacks courage. The partridge is greedy. The heron cannot leave his devotion to his own misery. The mythical homa, whose shadow bestows kingship upon the person who it crosses, is too proud. The list goes on.

I can see myself in all of the birds and their excuses (that’s the point of course). I haven’t had enough sleep. Maybe when I’m done breastfeeding. I’d rather just relax. Haven’t I done enough today? One of the tensions of motherhood for me is that it has been both the ultimate excuse and the ultimate wakeup call in what is at stake in the choice to reach (or not) for a deeper truth, a deeper relationship with the living world. My steps have faltered. Doubts and disinterests find their way in. I withdraw.

But I have long been pulled back out of myself by birds. Not always for their spiritual symbolism, more often just for themselves. In my book this month, I’m writing about barn owls and piping plovers, crows and arctic terns: some of the birds whose lives have intersected my own.

Last fall, I visited a different marsh, this one in my home state of Maine. I trudged through a third of a mile of muck before realizing the trail dead-ended at an ugly culvert beneath a busy road, the water below a swirl of brown and gray. I was disappointed and annoyed and walked back to the trailhead, where I sat down on a cold concrete bench.

At that time, my daughter was in a phase of asking us to read the same single page in a book, again and again. Some of these lines would play in my head for hours or days. But that Quimney up the chimney no I don’t like him at all. It was hard not to get impatient on the tenth or fifteenth reading of such a line. But, at some point, usually when I’d long memorized the words on the page, I would eventually look over at Aspen. And I would see how intently she was looking, connecting the words again and again with the picture. Taking her time. Not in a hurry. Her eyes traced across the two-page spread, her brow furrowed. A model of careful attention. 

I tried to adopt this mindset at the marsh. I sat on that cold bench, and even when I grew restless, I sat there still. I let my eyes trace what was spread before me, again and again. And then I started to see. 

The marsh was alive with birds! Swooping and diving, hiding in shrubs, gliding low, hopping on branches, chittering and chattering. Heron, egret, sparrow, crow. How had I not noticed?

Thousands of birds set out on the hoopoe’s journey, facing trials and perils along the way. They must relinquish everything to continue moving forward: fear, pride, doubt, Ego, attachment to all they thought they knew. In the end, only thirty birds reach the gates of the Simorgh.

And Simorgh, it turns out, is a play on words in Persian: Si means ‘thirty’; morgh means ‘birds.’

And so, the birds arrive at last to meet themselves, or rather, the Divine that has been at their center all along, the division between human and God burned away on the mystical journey.

It is a common theme in folklore and myth that, upon death, the soul departs the body in the form of a bird. This would imply that the bird has been there along. There’s a certain mysticism to that notion, too. I enjoy the sense that we are, at our core, part bird. Indeed, in many bird myths, birds take on the qualities and abilities of people; or people take on the qualities and abilities of birds. Myths blur the human-bird boundary. As Joseph Campbell famously said: “A myth is something that has never happened, but is happening all the time.”

So, what is happening now? In part, the human-bird boundary is blurred in new, troubling ways: habitat loss, pesticide use, increasingly off-kilter migration cycles, plummeting populations of insects. We and birds coinhabit a different kind of hybrid world.

How do we learn to live well within this story?

In the closing lines of When Women Were Birds, Terry Tempest Williams writes: “Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.”

This is perhaps what we ought to strive for: Re-becoming these creatures who are both bound to creation and ascendant, creatures who are singing, singing, singing.

Reading / Watching

Saint Omer, by Alice Diop. A deeply painful, beautiful, haunting film. (You can read the NYT review here.)

Sounds Wild and Broken by David Haskell. One of those books I keep returning to, especially as I’ve been working to understand how birds experience sound!

The Sense of Wonder by Rachel Carson. I didn’t know until reading this that Carson adopted her grandnephew, following the death of his mother. This gentle book is about introducing children to the earth’s marvels. “I believe children can be helped to hear the many voices about them. Take time to listen and talk about the voices of the earth and what they mean.”

What remains at the surface when this North Atlantic right whale swims below: her recently born calf, turning and splashing.

His lungs new and growing, the calf must breathe much more frequently than his mother and so he rises and dips just ahead of and above her. (The sound of the breath of the calf is akin to that of distant surf crashing against rocks. I put the back of my tongue to the roof of my mouth and make a sound like kchsshhhhh. The mother’s breath is fuller, deeper. It carries the shape of a resonant chamber; wind turning round the dripping walls of a blue-black cave. I put my tongue in that same position but emit a louder, lower, slowly whispered ckuuuuu.) A right whale and her new calf are rarely more than a body length away from each other, so even when I can’t see her, the presence of the child reveals the approximate location of the mother. 

The mother in me can’t help but acknowledge the mother in this whale. I see how she stays within a body length of her calf and I think of my daughter hugging my thigh. The whale nurses her child and I think of how I will later pump milk in my hotel room to keep the supply flowing for when I again hold my daughter to my breast.

I’ve been cautioned time and again against anthropomorphizing. But I’ve grown tired of such concerns. Of course—I will never intimately know the world of this whale. She and I diverged from our common placental mammalian ancestor tens of million of years ago. There is an interior and exterior distance between us that cannot be overcome. (Though how fun to imagine her sensory, watery universe!)

Reaching across the species divide is destined to be fraught, but this does not mean it is fruitless. Especially in light of the fact that—whatever the biological distance between my world and the world of this whale—we have become deeply entangled.

I have always been afraid of open water. But it is not this fear that finds me as I struggle to find my balance on this small, rocking boat and repeatedly imagine myself being pitched into the sea.

What I am afraid of is how seeing this whale, even for this brief moment, has opened a portal into care. I’m afraid of recognizing my desire not to step into that care and, therefore, not to be vulnerable. Because, ultimately, I am afraid of how quickly that uncrossable distance of mystery collapses in on itself when right whale calves are struck by ships. 

Empathy and imagination are among our greatest gifts as human beings. When applied with curiosity and care, they might help illuminate an aspect of the lived experience of another species, and they might clarify the beauty of mystery within which another species resides.

Still, there is an understandable hesitancy to allow personal emotion to distort scientific understanding. And there is an understandable hesitancy to allow empathy to leave us vulnerable to pain, lack of control, and the unknown.

I have never in my life been more vulnerable than in these last two years as a mother. It seems that a universal truth of parenting is that it situates you very uncomfortably at the knife’s edge of ineffable love and unimaginable loss.

So when I see this whale calf, there is a part of me that wants to play my already over-extended vulnerability close to the chest. For, in just a moment, he and his mother will swim away into that wide ocean where there are large, fast-moving vessels and tens of thousands of miles of rope from fishing gear, both of which have led to so much unbearable loss for his species.

What I mean to say is: It is easy to become paralyzed when we stand at the threshold of possible grief, and are asked to enter.

But we have forged so many tethers of harm between ourselves and the beings with whom we inhabit this planet. And so forging connections of care and compassion will, in part, require us—again and again—to make generous offerings of our vulnerability.

In the words of the poet David Whyte:

“One of the great theological questions is around incarnation, which simply means being here in your body — not anywhere else, just here with life’s fierce need to change you, and the fact that the more you’re here and the more you’re alive, the more you realize you’re a mortal human being…Will you actually have the conversation, given that is so? Will you become a full citizen of vulnerability, loss, and disappearance, which you have no choice about?”

Especially in Western culture, our separation from the living world has kept us from being full, ecological citizens of the places we inhabit. We are shielded from feeling the weight of the loss we are inflicting. I, too, often want to turn away from the difficulty of that conversation. But we have largely lost sight of our nonhuman neighbors. And in the case of the North Atlantic right whale, the very real and near possibility of extinction is one consequence of such invisibility.

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes: “The mending we need will require reweaving the relationship between humans and our more-than-human kin.”

Each of us carries threads that can be applied to that work of reweaving. One of those threads for me right now is motherhood. (I would love to know what those threads are for you.)

There is no need to keep such threads wrapped tightly to ourselves just because they will fail in overcoming the distance of mystery and just because they will open us to loss. Reaching across divides and into the unknown can be a radical act of compassion—both for other beings and for ourselves.

Bloodlines—and, I like to think, milk-lines—are among what tie us to our own kin. How can we keep extending, unspooling, those threads of kinship beyond ourselves?

This ocean-bound, nursing mother does not know of my existence. But my existence—our existence—affects her, affects her calf. And so she is one of many who calls on us to step through that threshold and to do that work of vulnerable reaching.

To learn more about right whales and recovery efforts: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/species/north-atlantic-right-whale

Book News

I just completed my first book research trip. Coastal Georgia was a land of eroding forest boneyards, bottlenose dolphins, and expansive wetlands. Exploring grief, entanglement, loss, and hope—Chapter Four of REBIRTH is now in the works.

Huge thanks to the Georgia Department of Natural Resources for making this trip possible.

Reading / Listening / Watching:

The Last of the Right Whales, directed by Nadine Pequeneza

The Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler

Changes in the Land, William Cronon

Half-Baked Stories About my Dead Mom. The latest episode of This American Life, in which Etgar Keret speaks about finally being able to write about his mother.

“For animism—the instinctive experience of reciprocity or exchange between the perceiver and the perceived—lies at the heart of all human perception.” — David Abram, “Magic and the Machine”

All of our children—even here in 21st century North America—come into this world as little animists: they encounter a world that is alive and speaking. My two-year-old daughter says “hi” to chipmunks, trees, and ducks. She plays hide and seek with the moon. She allows white pine needles to tickle her cheeks.

This is neither new nor radical. But many of us, myself included, have forgotten how to hear, and heed, the wider world around us.

This newsletter revolves around the topics I think most about these days:

• what it means to mother in a time of climate breakdown / “mother” as a noun, a verb, an orientation, a practice

• nonhuman mothers

• sacred places / axis mundi and place-based practices of care and attention

• the ecological underpinnings of faith traditions

• joy, grief, and grounded hope

THE RIGHT WHALE & THE MOON:

notes on hope

“Mama, get me the moon.”

Outside around the fire, we’re pretending to fill our coat pockets with stars. The days have grown short, so by 5:00 pm Aspen is reaching up to pluck distant lights from the sky. The same motion she used to pick July raspberries.

The frank expectation of her request is what moves me: no sense that she’s asked the impossible. She asks, rather, with the same tone of “more noodles” over dinner. Her father and I exchange a smile.

I reach up and cup my palm around the crescent moon, thinking I would love nothing more than to bring the impossible down to my child’s waiting hand.

I’m thinking, too, about one of my own requests of late, one I haven’t uttered aloud, but repeat again and again to myself. It’s a request that sends me reaching for something that, at moments, seems as impossibly distant as winter stars:

“God, save the right whales.”

I’ve been researching North Atlantic right whales for a chapter in my book. It is a painful learning. With fewer than 350 individuals left, right whales are nearing extinction. More are dying than are being birthed into the world as the population undergoes what is called an “Unusual Mortality Event” or UME.

The passiveness of that phrase is unsettling; the acronym feels almost cruel. For these beings are dying at our hands, and our hands alone. Ship strikes. Entanglements in fishing gear. It’s an active undoing.

Critically, the population continues to lose its females of reproductive age—whales that could go on to have another dozen or more calves in their long lives. In other words: The right whales are losing their mothers.

I’ve been speaking to some of the scientists who have spent decades working to save these animals, searching for them, documenting them, physically disentangling them from hundreds of feet of rope, testing ropeless fishing gear that won’t wrap itself through a right whale’s baleen, prohibiting her from feeding herself. These are people who might find a whale they have known for thirty years who has been literally torn apart by a ship’s motor, and then find it in themselves to be back on the ocean the next day, pulled over the wide water by the knowledge that there are more whales out there, that there is still more to be done.

They are pulled, too, I think, by love.

All of them tell me they have hope for this species.

Hope can seem such a frivolous word. Light as a feather, never touching the ground. But this hope on behalf of whales is not passive. It is, I think, a lifeline. A way of continuing to move through darkness.

Hope in the face of unimaginable loss can be a beacon that calls to the best in ourselves and the best in others. It can enable us to decenter ourselves in service to other forms of life.

No, hope alone will not save the right whales. But it might help us envision and then bring about a future in which they are present. For it is we who must do the work.

And what is the work of active hoping? I think it must, in part, span times and tenses. It at once points our attention to the future, while being rooted in understanding—and reckoning with—the past. And its doing—its embodiment; the answer to the call of that active hope—must always be in the present tense. For here are the whales, swimming and feeding and nursing, now.

Now, they are still here. 

This sort of love-grounded-active-hope is not so different from motherhood in this time of ecological crisis.

For here, too, is my daughter. I hope for her a healed world. And so I must do my part in the healing. Here she is, now: listening, seeing, touching, learning language in a world both burning and beautiful.  

And in writing this I realize I have to look closer at my prayer: “God, save the right whales.” And also at another prayer that sits and glows at the very center of my heart, a place I sometimes hardly dare look for how tender and vulnerable it is: “God, watch over my daughter.”

I have to look closer at these supplications because these phrases can carry their own troubling passivity. It is not always quite enough to pray.

One night this December, I imagined a world where I could reach up and pull the moon into my daughter’s hand.

Every night, night after night after night, I lay in bed and imagine a world where my daughter thrives on a thriving Earth. In this world, I imagine a right whale giving birth to a calf, nursing him for one turn around the sun, teaching him the old migration routes, and eventually ushering him forth to his own long life in the vast sea.

One of these worlds is not impossible.

My debut book, REBIRTH: Mothering Through Ecological Collapse, will be published by Broadleaf Books in 2024!

In an era of ecological breakdown and rising climate anxiety, when the future is increasingly uncertain, what does it mean to become a mother? How can we love, nurture, and hope through collapse?​

REBIRTH sets out to locate a language, orientation, and spiritual practice of mothering in a time of widespread environmental breakdown—braiding together stories from the forests, skies, and seas of the eastern United States with my own experience as a new mother in a time of urgent ecological crisis. I don’t pretend to know what the future holds. But I believe that, more than anything, it will need mothers (human and whale and tern and sugar maple).

This winter, I’m heading down to Georgia to see the right whale’s calving grounds. I’ll update again then!

Learn more about the book here.  

Recent Writings

“Coming into Being: Reflections on Mothering in the Apocalypse” for Emergence Magazine

Tidbits of Reading & Listening

On Being: “What We Nurture” // A conversation between Krista Tippett and Jewish-Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist Sylvia Boorstein. Motherhood, wise action, self-care, and some great jokes.

W.S. Merwin, “For a Coming Extinction”

Emergency by Daisy Hildyard. // A stunning novel about the interconnectedness of all life on Earth, set in the English countryside.

A friend recently introduced me to the music of Abel Selaocoe // Harmonies and layered melodies between voice and cello unlike anything I’ve heard.

“The Inward Migration in Apocalyptic Times” by Alexis Wright // One of my favorite Emergence essays

Moby Dick by Herman Melville // (…only took me three years to finish it…a bit long)