Barbara K. Richardson
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The Quotidian

5/4/2012

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Doctor Who, the adventurous time-traveling British sci-fi hero, uses a phone box to explore the cosmos in his extraterrestrial adventures. The TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space) looks just like a traditional blue British phone box, but the interior is much larger than its exterior—it is in fact a spacecraft with all the bells and lights and whistles. Because this powerful time machine looks like a phone box, it blends with its surroundings.

The quotidian is gateway to the profound.


In the movie American Beauty—which won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Original Screenplay and Best Cinematography in 1999—the most captivating five minutes of the movie involve the lilting flight pattern of a plastic bag caught in an updraft in a dirty alley. That lyrical unplanned (free) movement mesmerizes, whereas all of the actions of all of the characters are deeply bound with suffering.

Release, through a random plastic bag.

You can open an entire world, paying attention to the quotidian. A seemingly everyday item can be the linchpin, the secret door, the portal to understanding. We’ve all watched dust motes; remember when that was the most fascinating thing happening in school?! How about a bike wheel, window glass, a bee sneaking into blossoms, laundry in the breeze, a bird feeder.


Let's visit that bee in blossoms . . . 

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In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, we follow the life of the very independent and deeply misunderstood free-living Janie Crawford: “Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches.”

When Janie thinks of her young years, she remembers exactly when “her conscious life” began.

“It was a spring afternoon in West Florida. Janie had spent most of the day under a blossoming pear tree in the back-yard. She had been spending every minute that she could steal from her chores under that tree for the last three days. That was to say, ever since the first tiny bloom had opened. It had called her to come and gaze on a mystery . . . She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid . . . Oh, to be a pear tree—any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world! She was sixteen. She had glossy leaves and bursting buds and she wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her. Where were the singing bees for her?”

Lordy, what a sumptuous world arose from a bee in a trees-worth of spring blossoms. 

Now let’s visit that laundry . . . 
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. . . someone awakens to laundry on the line outside their window, but this is not mundane laundry because it’s seen through the eyes and the heart of poet Richard Wilbur. Flapping laundry led him to this:

Love Calls Us to the Things of the World

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.

Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,

“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven."

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

"Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.”

                                    —Richard Wilbur, 1956
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And lastly, as a gift to you and all humanity, the birdfeeder . . .  

which hangs just outside Wendell Berry’s study window. Plain language, plain sparrows, plain writing day. But are these birds or are they his poems, or they the spirits of all of humankind?





Window Poems #7

Outside the window
is a roofed wooden tray
he fills with seeds for the birds.
They make a sort of dance
as they descend and light
and fly off at a slant
across the strictly divided
black sash. At first
they came fearfully, worried
by the man's movements
inside the room. They watched
his eyes, and flew
when he looked. Now they expect
no harm from him
and forget he's there.
They come into his vision,
unafraid. He keeps
a certain distance and quietness
in tribute to them.
That they ignore him
he takes in tribute to himself.
But they stay cautious
of each other, half afraid, unwilling
to be too close. They snatch
what they can carry and fly
into the trees. They flirt out
with tail or beak and waste
more sometimes than they eat.
And the man, knowing
the price of seed, wishes
they would take more care.
But they understand only
what is free, and he
can give only as they 
will take. Thus they have
enlightened him. He buys
the seed, to make it free.

                        --Wendell Berry

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The things of this world teach us directly when we close our ears to language and discourse, and open to the spirit of what is.
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Winter Knits

2/25/2012

2 Comments

 
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Nothing makes the chill of winter
(and snow shoveling marathons and 100 mph wind bursts) more satisfying than staying in, knitting in a sunny window for folks you love.

It helps to have babies to knit for,
and upcoming birthdays or baby showers. So here’s what I’ve been
up to for the frigid months of winter.


First up, eggplant for a toddler. I designed this and the following strawberry hat ten years ago when some strange irresistible force insisted I design children’s clothes.
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I have no children. Perhaps this was my hands-on way
of coming to terms with that.

Although many call this hat a plum, I know it is the sturdy
reliable eggplant. With four whopping leaves on top.

Quite suitable for boys.



Luke loves his hat!

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I love this shot his granny took near her garden!

Next up, the strawberry toque.
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This hat is so much fun to knit, as the seed stitch takes a bit more concentration than good old stocking stitch. And once you’re done, you get to fiddle with those tiny leaves.
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You start with a twisted stem, and then knit five of the strands
into individual pointed leaves.

When sewing the leaves down, make sure to let one or two
of the leaf tips curl up (sew leaf to hat three rows in from the
loose tail end).

This lends realism to the berry.


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The toque is the perfect Christmas gift . . .
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and it certainly made Violet happy!

Two things inspired the next knitting romp: a spring delivery date and knowing that my friends had just painted their new nursery room in two smashing tones of lilac purple. Which led me to this adorable sweater on Ravelry.
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If you knit, and haven’t found Ravelry online, prepare to squander an entire afternoon! Their listing
of patterns and yarns is delicious. I fell for this one-piece “Baby Kina” sweater because it truly
flatters a baby’s form.

And look how cute it is in tangerine orange!
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The $5 pattern is from a French company, so if you don’t speak French, ask a high school French student to help you place your order.

Here is my version, with buttons and rayon bamboo yarn purchased from Jo-Ann Fabrics. The yarn
is Caron's SPA "Silky Soft Bamboo Blend" and it's truly silky smooth. Any non-scratchy yarn that gets 22 stitches to the inch will work well for this sweater. The buttons put me over the moon!
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I just finished sewing on the opalescent buttons today, and wrapped it up for delivery.


The new parents also get the “New Crockery Cookbook” and basket of the special ingredients required for crockpot cookery—one gift for the baby, and one for the soon-to-be-sleep-and-food-deprived parents.
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Off to the grocery store for hot sauce, tapioca and Andouille sausage!

P.S. If you buy this cookbook, try pairing the Sweet Potato and Andouille Sausage Stew with orange date bread—ah, more winter goodness!
2 Comments

FruGAL

10/30/2011

12 Comments

 
One way to combat a faltering economy is to indulge in your frugal side. Frugality actually puts you in contact with a realer reality anyway, so it’s good for the spirit as well as your net worth. The more you interact with the world to meet your needs, the better. I don’t mean society or cyberspace or created culture, when I say world.
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Tonight, walking the dog with my sweetie after dinner, we passed a field of blackbirds perched on cattail stalks in a field empty but for one person in a royal blue rain jacket playing a recorder to them and only them.


Every bird in that field, all musicians themselves, sat facing the flutist. (It was dusk, so photos weren't possible.) S/he played for the twenty minutes it took us to circle the field, and played on after we’d departed.

Earlier today, walking the dog with my sweetie after breakfast, we met a frisky pup on a mountain trail who wanted nothing to do with her owner’s brisk goal-oriented workout run. Lily came pouncing off the trail to meet my dog, whose age and temperament yell NOT ME, I’M NOT PLAYING, but lo and behold, right nearby lay a pile of bear poop and Lily snapped her jaws on a firm dark morsel and couldn’t be persuaded to part from it. We called to her owner, “She’s eating poop!” and chased her in the friendliest way, knowing the gastric results of a dog on a scavenged diet, which of course Lily took to mean playing and poop, too? Fantastic! All this fun didn’t cost her a cent.

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This afternoon, I hauled out the crockpot and combined two recipes to use what ingredients I had to make slow-cook red beans and rice. We get to smell this luxurious concoction for five whole hours while it simmers. And eat it tomorrow. Simple as simple. You can’t buy that at Sears.
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I’m knitting a hat for a baby gift for Christmas. I’m writing a novel that may never make a dime. We’re still eating the chocolate frenzy birthday cake we made for my sweetheart’s daughter five days ago. And for her Halloween costume, she needs “hillbilly teeth.” No stores came through, so her father took a black straw we’d saved from dining out one night,* clipped off 1/3”, disappeared into the bathroom and came out with the most convincing hickabilly act I’ve ever seen, broken front tooth and all.


Did you love playing with oddments when you were little? You can do it old, too. Create the world you inhabit rather than buying it at stores. Or buy the parts and pieces and remake your life into a self-made interesting one. Get your hands on life. Play with nothing till it’s something. Play for blackbirds.

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Frugal need not be stingy or austere. And always take photos.
*That black straw serves double duty—it's extra wide, perfect for shooting popcorn kernels at the neighbor's sometimes noisy dog and the brazen squirrels who hog our birdfeeder. We shoot, we miss, the miscreants scatter!
12 Comments

I Dare You

10/7/2011

1 Comment

 
One of the most profound things you can do on this planet at this time, it seems to me, is to lie down on the earth, belly down—and really that in itself is so good--
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lie down and say thank you.

That is it, my challenge. Do it more than once. In different places. Don't put it off. With winter coming, the belly-challenge will be more challenging!

Thank you, Sevier River.
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Dog Dayz

9/29/2011

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What a great way to say ¡Adios, summer!

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At Dog Dayz in Boulder, CO

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At the Scott Carpenter Swimming Pool
during the last two weeks of summer

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Some dogs jump right in

While others take persuading . . .

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It's tough to make a tennis ball do your bidding

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Better a wet stroll on dry land

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And an appreciative kiss from a two-legged

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The dogs call this ENLIGHTENED GOVERNANCE
Thanks, Boulder!

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We'll all be back next year!


Thank you to Michele for the great photographs!
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Dreaming of Songbirds

8/5/2011

2 Comments

 

My former cat Pete, now living on sixty acres of upland valley paradise, seemed always to get it right: play with abandon, climb any trees willing, keep neurotics at bay (oh, what an arsenal of weapons Pete had for keeping clear boundaries), lose toes, lose fights, win dominance in your own pacific home. For all his crusty bossy masculine ways, Pete was a full-on lover.

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When I moved to Boulder and could not take a cat, didn’t the person coming to buy my loveseat scoop him up and say she knew the perfect home, with cows and kids and roadless horizons where he could hunt outdoors all day? Pete adopted me in the country, and to the country he returned.

Now, I live in high-density housing, where you could toss four different neighbors hot dog buns off the back deck if they called for ‘em. We are packed in tight. Rather than stay inside or drive to a park, I looked out all my windows and called up beauty. Wherefore art thou? I asked, from the balcony. I am astonished to report that even in a backyard skinny as two beans laid like an L, beauty came.

First, you trim the lilacs struggling in too much shade. You transplant strawberries and a shade-bound climbing rose against a sunny fence. Cover them with shade-giving cardboard for three weeks until new leaves emerge, and they sparkle. Cut curving bed lines and whack out sod, an hour or two each morning. Hang a bird feeder. Sink a used post to support the new grape vine.

Use the gravel under the deck to start a pathway. Make borders with hand-sized rocks. Move the hummingbird feeder three times, without luck, till you tie on a lucid red ribbon, then watch from the balcony as the lightning birds feed.

When you love your soil, love your views, love your neighbors’ sumac trees’ exotic foliage, dream of eggplants warm with sun, dream of iris, dream of songbirds, you are Pete, who grabs every moment out of doors and shakes it, until all the good falls out.

If you are too young yet to love gardens, grow old.


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Mr. Pete's new family. I imagine he herds them just fine.
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Writing on Water

7/15/2011

4 Comments

 

Here's the deal: reactivity is not freedom.

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We’ve been conditioned to believe freedom comes after winning a battle (NOW I’M FREE), even if it’s a battle for a parking spot on a crowded city street. But the amped-up mindset needed to compete stays after the contest is over, and then where are we?

Amped.

You may call it revved or pumped. Your parents called it “acting out.”

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The trouble is, acting out leads to the belief that we’re getting somewhere, when what we’re usually getting is more stuck. In anger, force, will, self-defense, desire, stress and more desire.


Reacting is goal-oriented. Reacting to the door-to-door solicitor with a growl and a slammed door means you did rid yourself of the intrusion but you also gained a gut-load of anger, and guess which one lasts longer? I speak from many slammed doors.




I have no silver bullet or five-part course on chillin’. I’m hoping to raise a little flag on a slender pole in the midst of the push-pull American feedlot frenzy to say: don’t ruin your health or our society in the name of winning. You do not have to be a heifer behind anybody’s bars.

Freedom feels nice. (Reactivity does not. It’s sort of itchy and hot and snowballing, and the contradictions are part of the whole seductive deal.)

Freedom is subtle, and not so highfalutin. Try casting no blame while holding your place. Retract the claws you want to sink into anything, issues as well as political systems as well as people. Remember your aunt or uncle or friend who had such a level head and an open mind? How you loved being around them? Be them.

Freedom has to start somewhere. We can all lower our psychic cholesterol.

“Instead of allowing ourselves to be led and trapped by our feelings,” Tibetan teacher Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche once said, “we should let them disappear as soon as they form, like letters drawn on water with a finger.”

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Yes.  Water writers of the world unite.

I found this quote in a lovely book called Offerings.

4 Comments

News From the Front

5/2/2011

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Well, the packing and cleaning and long-haul driving are behind me. I now live in Boulder, Colorado. I can’t yet say what I’ll be doing to earn a living. Here’s what I know I’ll be doing every day.
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Boulder isn't so much a city as a network of trails connecting green space. Most of which isn't actually green, it's dry prairie and curling creeks and old tree snags left for roosting.




Five minutes from my home, on foot, I’ll be chatting up my new neighbors:
egrets, foxes, mallards, kestrels, coyotes, prairie dogs...


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Canada geese and white pelicans!
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I love pelicans more than I can say. A flock of five winged by me on yesterday’s walk. Today, my mutt Sal swam where South Boulder Creek bulges into a small lake, and then she swam again aways downstream.
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Being the friendly sort, Sal wanted to meet every prairie dog we passed.







And that was a lotta prairie dogs.

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R-e-s-p-e-c-t, that’s what Boulder city planning means to me. No matter where you live, scruffy undeveloped land and all of its many inhabitants are your neighbors. Isn't that every kid's dream? A playground as big as—well, as big as the "church of the blue dome," to quote my outdoorsy nephew.
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I may just buy an old snowmobile suit, flatten all four tires on the Buick and
cycle everywhere.
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No one knows me here. And green is such a flattering color.

















P.S. What's not to love?!

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Set Down the Case

4/19/2011

1 Comment

 
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If you’ve ever sat through a juried trial, you know one thing: lawyers are not there to get at truth. Lawyers are there to win their case. Extreme bias for combats extreme bias against, hired specialists paint diametrically opposed scenarios, and if you happen to be a juror your head and stomach get tied in knots in the drawn-out dead-boring struggle for the glittering prize—the verdict.

I walked out of my first jury duty knowing I’d added my own bias to the fierce legal biases; once I’d touched the thick metal pins that held the defendant’s knee together after his motorcycle collided with a truck, my impartiality vanished. Suffering warranted remuneration, and this man had suffered.

Was justice served?

I bring trials up because a couple of weeks ago, my dearheart said—after listening to an operatic description of my woes—that my lawyer was talking, not me. (My father was a lawyer so this struck me as hilarious and likely utterly true.) I laughed so hard tears spilled onto my shirt. I had lawyered-up with my grievances against my man and turned a very open world into one pained with operatic Sturm und Drang.

To make my case at the cost of accuracy, openness, fairness, peace. Well, wasn’t that silly? And of course damaging, because lawyering-up meant I had separated myself from anything and everything but loyalty to my own story. Lawyering-up is a big hard elbow pointed at the world.

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If you find yourself trapped in a line of thought that is rigorous, full of thrust and churning out glittering hard-edged conclusions, that is very likely your lawyer speaking. Not you. Good news, eh? You can stop paying your lawyer to spin thoughts into self-serving conclusions. You stop paying the lawyer because it’s a false world, a biased world, an unpleasant world in which to live. And it nearly always harms others, too.

Neuropyschologist Rick Hanson has a fine take on this lawyer-prototype who lives within us. Hanson says, “Watch how a case starts forming in your mind, trying to get its hooks into you. Then see if you can interrupt the process. Literally set down the case, like plopping down a heavy suitcase when you finally get home after a long trip. What a relief!”
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Case dismissed. All those cases...

Set 'em down, take in a big long draught of freedom. You are right back home.


Subscribe to Rick Hanson’s weekly e-newsletter, Just One Thing. The week of 4/14/11 (#59) is called “Who are you prosecuting?”

And a charming site on what to do with old suitcases!

Sturm und Drang: storm and stress
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And This Is Home

3/29/2011

0 Comments

 
Driving a back road to Rocky Mountain National Park last week with dog and boyfriend, gaping at the rural scenes, I saw this devilishly handsome baby with its feet to the clouds

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and I shouted STOP!


Have you ever seen such
surrender to place? Do you have
any doubts a happy family resides
at this farm?



Walking on a beach in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, a decade back, I came across the most striking sand drawing: a pure large circle which became, on closer inspection, a smiling woman with her legs and arms thrown up over her head, split open to the joys of the oncoming tide. She was naked.

I still remember that drawing and smile in wonder.

Who made these crazy sandstone eggs?

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An artist in Lyons, Colorado, smitten with place.

Who knew lilac trees in China have coppery peeling bark?

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The gardener who planted one in Boulder, Colorado.

What does your postal carrier see when approaching your place? A box this grand?!
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Cheryl Crow’s “And This Is Home” sang itself in my head all the way to the Stanley Hotel at the outskirts of Rocky Mountain National Park. Sleet descended. Too early for a tourist’s drive through, and so we turned around. “This Must Be The Place” by the Talking Heads accompanied our U-turn, and the lovely drive on back roads to Boulder. (“Pick me up and turn me 'round…”)

Do a sexy lamp dance. Find your own way home. If you don't love the human race, watch these music videos and you may. Be smitten. With our time and our place.

It's all home.

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    Favorite quotes:

    "Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.” 
    —Willa Cather

    "Nothing is as powerful as beauty in a wicked world."
    ​—Amos Lee
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    Favorite place:

    The middle of nowhere.
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    Curse of the Pogo Stick
    The Maytrees 

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    Finding Stillness in a Noisy World
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    One Woman's Meat: Notes from Escalante

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