Even though it is winter, even though January has a rep for being bleak and stark in Chicago, there’s still beauty to be experienced. Go out and grab you some organic PEACE!
I wrote this Sunday morning at Thatcher. Communing in nature has become one of my spiritual practices :
Koan #7
Frozen River
Silence in the glen
Winter stillness
The [...]
Read my latest feature article, “Promise on the Prairie”, at Sierra Magazine online. I cover Chicago Boys and Girls Club teens from La Villita (South Lawndale) and a prairie restoration workday they did in 18F degree weather — that’s right, below freezing. Who says there’s no action in the prairie in wintertime? Enjoy!
-MGB
It is the long season of ripening. Time to harvest solitude in the bare branches of the trees. Sing wind! The squirrels are plump, making slow scrambles up the maple trees. I walked with my new friend, B., this morning through our town. We spoke of technology and nature while our dogs sniffed poetry in [...]
It’s after Labor Day and it really feels like the end of summer here in Chicago — without it ever having felt like a real Chicago summer at all. Here’s what I mean: When I moved here from the Bay Area over ten years ago, it was August. The days were cook-an-egg-on-the-pavement hot, steaming, sticky [...]
One of the things I love about being on assignment and covering conservation in Chicago is that I get to learn more about the prairies, savannas, riverways, and the conservationists working to save and restore them. These are often humble, tenacious people. They can be thorny, usually full of humor, ready to lobby local politicians, [...]
Home, prairie-muck dried
onto the seams of my field pants,
hiking boots splattered with mud,
hair in pleasant disarray.
The scent of freedom
still clings to me.
Just an hour before,
by watch-time,
by two-legged time,
by analog hands or digital face,
I stood in a place
14,000 years in-the-making,
a glacier’s passing,
strewn with dolomite and limestone
crumbling, soft-edged rocks,
and the whimsy of a universe
where lands stretch, wrinkle,
move [...]
Mabuhay.
It’s been a long, good week, very productive — and I’m here again parked in the rain at a bend in the Des Plaines River. The ice on the riverbend is a soft, translucent white. The thawed parts of the riverbend are a flat brown tinged with green, gray on the surface. The bare-limbed trees [...]
65,000 gallons on land.
“The oil spill has been contained,”
an official-sounding man from Caterpillar
chirped brightly on NPR’s morning newscast.
No more wildlife will be affected –
beyond the ones already touched.
6,000 gallons of oil
sludged into the Des Plaines River.
How many blue gills?
How many herons?
How many egrets?
How many frogs?
How many salamanders and newts?
How many beavers, raccoons, button bushes?
No need [...]
Flat white Great Lakes sky,
Distant frozen fog,
Yet warm enough
for hammers
to sound on rooftops.
Men work in hooded sweatshirts,
jeans, thin tennis shoes
upon brick bungalows
that kept us warm
in the bleak months.
But the trees
stand haggard,
bare-limbed and stoic.
Maple and oak and Kentucky buckeyes -
indistinguishable to my eyes.
All stand equally stripped,
naked, vulnerable
in the diminishing chill.
Oh, how they stretch
their feathery twig tips
towards [...]
Perched securely on a branch
above my car,
the Cooper’s hawk
munched on young pigeon.
Starlings scattered,
downy feathers
drifted like summertime snow
upon my head.