Confluence

by David Krohne

The Blackfoot River pushes gently against my legs, impatient for the sea. There are only two colors in the world—gold and blue. Cerulean describes the sky but I’ve found no word worthy of the gold of aspen, cottonwood, and tamarack. The passing water whispers and murmurs . . .

The Time Given Us

by Gwen Carlson

What if there is no leaf-littered path
through the woodlands to travel.
What if the skies are smogged, and the
road from home that goes ever on and on
is an interstate, slick and roaring. Should we
still take our old walking sticks and go adventuring?

Wheeze

by Gwen Carlson

The loveliest chicken of my flock
has started to wheeze. 
I study the reason. I sink into 
websites and tutorial videos, peer light down 
into the unexpected openness of a chicken’s 
throat. . .

Murmurations of 2020

by Gwen Carlson

The sky was filled with black crows
the first time we went walking together,
your snug infant warmth
wrapped against my chest.

I hoped you would open your eyes
and look up, take in with blurry new senses
the cawing cloud of dark feathers
above us . . .

4/9 (2020) Maundy Thursday

by Marc Hudson

Wind—ruach—
troubles the mirror
of flowing water . . .

2/24 (2022)

by Marc Hudson

Silent the snow
this morning, like ash
the flakes sift down—

& juncos pecking seed
under last summer’s
sunflowers

this strange cuneiform . . .

We Who Come

by Robert O. Petty

We who come from the earth
Must speak of the earth
Softly, gently, a quiet fierceness
Far away in the mind
A homeland yet lives
Silent before us
And beautiful
Into our eyes and ears
The earth does happen . . .

Grousin’ ’bout Grouse

The Midwest landscape is always changing, and we have long been a part of that. What is our role today?

by Greg Hoch

The pup is snoring under my desk as I write this from our home in east-central Minnesota. A male ruffed grouse is drumming out the window, hoping to attract the springtime attention of any females in the area . . .

4/8 (2019)

by Marc Hudson

fog—a feeling 
of the un-
created—the soccer field floating

goalless—the dark trees beyond
dissolving

the air, though—
soft, a surface of birdsong . . .

Melancholy Days

Dad wasn’t about dressing things up to make them look better, but about portraying the truth of things at their most vulnerable.

by Kelly O’Dell Stanley

In late fall, early winter, I see Dad all around me. Literally. I drive the fifteen minutes from home to the studio, watching the landscape gently undulate around me. But I see it as though it’s a painting. The slashes of sepia and raw umber defining the fence line, from which the bare branches of the trees reach up into the cerulean sky. . .

An Invitation to my Readers

by Marc Hudson

Past the brimming cup plant
& the golden coreopsis,
purple hollyhocks & bee-
balm with their mumbling
bumblebees; past, at last,
white foam of the hydrangeas . . .

Moments of Unimagined Beauty

I lingered, maybe because my subconscious believed there was an image there that I simply hadn’t found yet.

Text and photos by David Krohne

I heard the “whoosh” of the orcas’ blows before I saw them. They cruised near shore in a steel-blue sea, just at dusk, beneath salmon clouds, a moment of unimagined beauty.

To see them on my one evening at the entrance to Prince William Sound was a stroke of luck. Luck that I happened to be there. Luck that thirty years before, they, or their parents, survived one of the worst environmental disasters in history . . .

Infant Burial

We peer into the gaping hole, so small, so deep. My heart like a cloud breaks . . .

by Maria Reynolds-Weir

I hesitate to take my turn shoveling dirt over Elijah Matthew’s shoebox coffin because I am not one of his mother Hannah’s close friends. I know her because we attend sister churches. Other women, not I, have been ministering to her since Elijah’s heart stopped in utero at sixteen weeks gestation . . .

Yellowstone Trilogy, Part Three

An Inordinate Fondness for Bison

Wake up before the bison jams, leave the road, and rediscover wonder in the stories the Yellowstone landscape has to tell. 

Text and photos by David Krohne

When a vicar asked evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane what the study of evolution reveals about the nature of God, Haldane replied, “That he has an inordinate fondness for beetles.” His quip was based on the extraordinary abundance and diversity of beetles, some 400,000 species and 25% of all animals. . .

Yellowstone Trilogy, Part Two

A Map of Yellowstone

A map holds more than geographic data; it reveals how we conceptualize the natural world.

Text and photos by David Krohne

I am in love with maps. And I have a lot of them. They document my history and my dreams . . .

Yellowstone Trilogy, Part One

Flickering Shadows of Bears

One indicator of a life spent in good country is to lose count of the grizzlies you’ve seen.

Text and photos by David Krohne

I pushed out of the head-high willows along the Gallatin River into a sage flat to see the one thing I really don’t want to see in the Yellowstone country: a grizzly coming straight toward me. . . 

“Stroke in Four Acts”

To push through the pain and frustration I was feeling, I decided to do the one thing that I, as an artist, could do.

Text and art by Doug Calisch

Ten months ago I had a stroke. My doctors called it a “shotgun stroke,” meaning that the damage from the hemorrhage was scattered throughout my brain, rather than focused on one specific area. I didn’t lose all of any one of my brain’s functions, but parts, to varying degrees, of many of them . . .

Still Here

“Just about the time I’d get something figured out, I’d get blown out of the water by something else.”

by Steve Charles

Snow was falling in rural Montgomery County a few days before Christmas 2022 and Doug Calisch was back. Back in his art studio for one of the first times since the brain bleed that triggered a hemorrhagic stroke that nearly killed him . . .

The Fixed Stars

What can aging not steal from us? What identity, what essence, prevails?

by David Krohne

Age is a thief. It steals the present tense.

I was a mountaineer. I was an endurance athlete. I was a wilderness traveler. I was an outdoorsman. I was a professor of ecology.

These things, individually and collectively, were my identity. Now, past tense all . . .

My Run-In with “Cancer”

I sat in my room at 4 in the morning re-thinking my life and the way I chose to live it.

Text and art by Myca Garrett

“I had a run-in with cancer.”

Whenever I tell people this I get one of three reactions:

“Oh, no—what kind?”

“I’m so sorry—are you okay now?”

or “Oh my god—when did you find out?”

So then I have to tell them that this run-in with cancer wasn’t really cancer at all, but a different sort of malignancy . . .

Sea Song

I was surprised to hear lines of Dylan Thomas’s poem “Fern Hill” come back to me as I watched my children and grandchildren play on the beaches of Cornwall.  

by Steve Charles

When I studied that poem in Wales years ago, I realized that Thomas was remembering a world, a state of being, to which he could never return. I believed then that was true for me too.

But that changed . . .  

Consolation Prize

There’s something incredibly garish about scenery like this juxtaposed against such depths of sorrow. The light is too bright, the colors too pure. . . 

by Kelly O’Dell Stanley

My freckled skin and I sit in the shelter of the umbrella, but I’ve lathered myself in sunscreen anyway. With my skin, you can never be too careful. Just a couple feet away, the Mediterranean Sea wraps around us, lapping against the rough stone wall encircling our Maltese resort . . .

One Fish

Watch one fish. Don’t be distracted by all the others. Watch one fish.

by David Krohne

More than a million salmon came up the Columbia River this year. That’s far more than in 2021 but far less than the 16 million that entered the river every year before we did our best to destroy both their river and their ocean . . .

Orphaned Daughter

by Gwynn Wills

Duke

We often talk of friendship and the bonds that friends, true friends, share. I can tell you I’ve never seen bonds stronger than those between Duke and his family.

by Tom Runge

A.k.a. Duker. A.k.a. Bubba. Part German Shepherd, part dog, and part wingman.

My son, Jeremy, adopted Duke many years ago. Duke became a close friend, not only to Jeremy but also to his children. They were inseparable. Duke let Carol and I join the family—his heart could hold us all . . .

Ars Poetica

by Marc Hudson

it shimmers there . . .

Discovering Croatia

Wonder is all around us if we have the curiosity to look for it.

by Eric Farber

An Instrument Awakened

“I’ll do what I can to keep my hearing, but if I do lose it all? Then I’ll be the Beethoven of dulcimer makers.” 

by Steve Charles

So I’m alarmed when I begin my visit to his shop on a July afternoon and the luthier invites me into his small, glassed-in office and tells me he’s lost his hearing . . .

Hoop

I looked forward to parking under that hoop, knowing I was home.

by Richard Paige

The original was an eight-foot tall version with a wooden backboard and wood supports. Bill, my older brother, wore that one out by the time I was 11.

One spring day, Dad asked our neighbor, Tiny, and me to help him set up a new one. It was a steel 10-footer, coated in Rust-Oleum royal blue. I was excited . . .

“Your World for a Moment”
Photos by David Krohne

“When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for a moment.”

Georgia O’Keefe said that, and she walked the talk. Her paintings of flowers were worlds our eyes and imaginations could walk into and breathe in. So carefully and lovingly observed.

Ecologist, writer and photographer David Krohne would cringe and protest at having any of his photographs considered art, but for now, I’ll just say that if O’Keefe’s paintings give us new worlds, Dave’s photographs give me a new way to see our own . . .

Grace Notes
Why do we love birdsong?

by David Krohne

On March 21, the sun crosses the celestial equator and, on that day, the calendar says spring begins. The white-throated sparrow in the fir outside my window disagrees. . .

3/25  (2018)

by Marc Hudson

Yellow-beaked, iridescent,
starlings
hammer at
suet
           hungry
from habit. . .

“Trying Something New”

“Flatbed Collage #3”
Introduction by Steve Charles

Doug Calisch is a sculptor, photographer, and furniture designer/maker, but he’s also a teacher. And during my 20-plus years working at the college where he taught, I learned more from him about storytelling than from anyone else . . .

by Marc Hudson

Pearl Ravine: water
hastening     its
glittering sound  &  light
as of a sabbath

this moment’s
atonement—
“for peace comes dropping
slow. . . .”

A Forty Here and There

There’s something magical happening at Kankakee Sands in northwest Indiana

by David Krohne

I’ve turned south onto US 63 from I-74.

I’m on the way to visit some old friends.

I left the westernmost American beech and the big woods on the bluff above the Wabash River. Smith Cemetery, where my friends live, is in sight of the gallery forests along the Wabash but is a world apart—the beginning of a long westward reach of tallgrass prairie. . .

Equinox
3/20/22

by Marc Hudson

Now the firstlings of spring—
lenten roses, then
crocus & jonquil
burst from the earth.
Cowbirds
laying eggs in others’
nests. How many young
displaced will perish?
No accountant in nature
for that. But we
who are more evolved
can reckon the number of dead
in Mariupol & Kyev . . .

Turn Turn Turn

A Verdant Meditation on Time and Space

by David Krohne

The trail to Luna’s Run hugs the bank, just a foot or so above the river. Elk created the path, coming down from the ridge line above to drink. It parallels the river for a few hundred yards, then swings back upslope into the black timber. Fishermen use it, but not many. The run, one of the best on the St. Joe, is almost invisible from the road and most “road anglers” have no idea it’s there…

For Hank

My Dearest Child, Unborn

by Kyle Nickel

Someday, I hope you wrestle a black snake that is longer than you are tall and the piss scent of its oil stays with you all afternoon and until you are old . . .

Stop and Watch the Train

by Christina Egbert

When I used to think about the kind of mom I’d be,
I never pictured moments like these . . .

A Best Friend, A Soaring Vision

by Steve Charles

I love listening, imagining, writing, and I know a lot of that came from my grandfather, the family storyteller. 

Yet as I’ve grown older I realize how much our friends shape who we become, and that a lot of my inspiration and courage to be a little different came from my best friend, Rob Huntington . .  .

Crazy Leg

by Steve Charles

I‘m about 1/2 hour into Peter Mulvey’s first set, my first in-person concert since BCE (Before the Covid Era), when I realize what I’ve missed most about live music in small places. . .

The Landscape of Despair

Where and how do we find hope in the face of a deteriorating environment?

by David Krohne

A collage of images from the summer of 2021 haunts me. . .

Faith

by Steve Charles

“Why are women drawn
to the spiritual?”
Our gay priest asks
at the Wednesday Night
Bible Study. . .