Barbara K. Richardson
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Thanks, 2012: The Year's Best

12/12/2012

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Favorites have to stir the heart, and the following really stirred me up this year. Blessed to have enjoyed them, & happy to pass them on!

My favorite carol of the year, perhaps of the decade:
My favorite new TV drama series is old. And completely engrossing. Make sure to watch The Guardian through Episode Eight. Yes, Simon Baker brings a young Paul Newman to mind, but it is the content here that is so winning. Tough shark lawyer meets vulnerable kids as a reluctant public defender. Netflix has the series on Instant Download. My admiration grows with every episode.
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Favorite novel of 2012 is, hands down, The Ordinary Truth by Jana Richman.


Cat Stephens was looking for a hard-headed woman. Truth features four. Ranchers all, with a past that has them snared like barbed wire and
a 300-mile-long pipeline that's about to suck their arid Nevada ranch dry.

Who gets the water—Las Vegas or the Jorgensens?

Be ready to eat dust and ride the rangelands to find out. Richman can really write desert.

And the pipeline is not fiction. See my favorite cause below.
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My favorite new pastime--napping.
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My favorite trees, and this is one tough category for me:
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My apple tree, which produced five blossoms. I was so excited I couldn't hold still!
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Van Gogh's "Poplars at Saint Remy"—at the Denver Art Museum, until January 2.
For a few years now, my favorite TV comedy series has been Modern Family.
With this year's Phils'osophy, the writers reached new heights. I would buy multiple copies of this book to give away, if only someone had published it! Phil for the holidays!
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My favorite non-fiction book, which I am reading slowly to relish every insight: Priscilla Stuckey's Kissed By a Fox.

The writing in Kissed is easily as beautiful as the cover. Stuckey explores our basic connection with nature which we've largely forgotten but which has not forgotten us.

Philosophers, biologists, mystics and economists all join voices with Stuckey to pinpoint and resurrect our profound state of being not just one with nature but being nature itself.

Let the fox kiss you. Let an eagle catch your eye. Let Stuckey's restoration of a creek in Oakland sing along with her recovery from severe sorrow and isolation.

Kissed celebrates the up close and personal power of connection.

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Favorite new chocolate: Whole Foods Dark Chocolate PEAR & ALMOND.
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My favorite cause of 2012: Utah's Goshute Indians claiming their water rights against a proposed Las Vegas pipeline that will decimate their arid homeland. The Goshutes ARE Spring Valley. And Spring Valley needs to keep its water under its own very beautiful dry feet.

If you have any gift-giving ahead in your holiday, the Goshute Legal Fund deserves
to hear from you.
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Favorite quote: almost anything Rumi says, but here's the current zinger.
God's joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box,
from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flowerbed.
As roses, up from ground.
Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,
now a cliff covered with vines,
now a horse being saddled.
It hides within these,
till one day it cracks them open.

Favorite recipe: take one moment, pay attention, repeat and stir, bake until you are tender.

Happy holidays
and a dashing New Year filled with new and old favorites!

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Rest, Convalesce and Practice Napitation

10/26/2012

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Nothing says winter is a-comin' in like a few snowstorms, a new knitting project, and three great essays on the benefits of slowing down. Thanks, New York Times, Jana Richman and Pam Stone. Bears are not the only creatures who thrive on slow rhythms and deep relaxation!

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Meanwhile, Jana Richman—devoted writer and lover of trees—contracted a head cold last week that effectively shut down her entire life and demanded she do nothing but contemplate. 

And convalesce. 

And make like her black walnut tree.

We all drop our leaves now and then. Now's a better time than then, she tells us.

Be still and embrace that restoration.


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Strivers take note! This New York Times article says long life is achieved through sleeping in late, eating food from the dirt nearby, gardening all day, napping, and passing the evenings with friends. The small town lack of privacy might drive me wild on this Greek island. "It's not a 'me' place, it's a 'we' place." And that contributes to happiness and low crime rates. 

Unemployment is at 40%, but all are cared for. All are fed. All fit in. No rushing anywhere. "We simply don't care about clocks here."

An eye-opening study of the absolute value of local foods and daily rest!


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And Pam Stone shows us how.

If you've toyed with meditation and mindful slowing down, but always jumped right back into busy, give the techniques in her blog a try.

So many of my friends have reached the "I'm not invincible" phase. Where do you turn to refresh and recharge? How do you learn new skills when your whole life has been directed at achievement?!

Pam says find time each day to rest in acceptance. Napitation. Anyone can do that!
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Clair Martin's Windfall Applesauce

8/23/2012

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Nothing says fall like fallen apples.

They certainly make great cider, 
but much easier for the interested 
and lazy cook, windfall apples make wonderful homemade applesauce. 

All you need is a forgotten apple tree, 
a few simple ingredients and a little
home time.



My novel's heroine Clair Martin, 19th century maverick and Brigham City, Utah gardener, herewith gives her recipe for the best applesauce you ever tasted. Use windfall apples, or any apples just getting pink cheeks on the reachable branches. Store bought will not do. Go meet a tree.

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Appletastic! And your kitchen will smell divine!

Adapted from Sarah's Applesauce.
applesaucerecipe_hr.jpg
File Size: 1292 kb
File Type: jpg
Download File



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Time Well Spent

3/21/2012

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The first warm days of spring take my mind to the Brigham City graveyard.
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Not only because most of my ancestors are buried there. Graveyards honor old plants just as they do our dead. This astonishing stand of Dwarf Umbrella Trees made me fall instantaneously in love with Dwarf Catalpas. I planted as many as I could in residential landscapes, so that in twenty or thirty years, someone might have the same fascinated pleasure of discovery.
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Here’s what they look like fresh from the nursery.

And this is a more mature specimen. It’s basically a lollipop which never gets taller than 15’. Such enormous leaves on
a very short tree!


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If you’re interested, here’s a fine blog on the giant Catalpa trees (Catalpa bignonioides) that fathered these Dwarf Umbrella Trees (Catalpa bignonioides ‘Nana’).

Contemplating “dwarf” while standing near these trees humbles the mind much as contemplating the graves does. At least for me. Time gives and takes away. Time creates, and reclaims its creations.
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Dwarf Umbrellas are just one of the many many fantastic plants thriving under the care of the Brigham City Cemetery groundskeepers, and the strong granite slopes of the Wasatch Range in Utah.
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Come May, when the hundreds of yards of lilac hedges bloom, I hope to be there with my family, visiting our loved ones.

Who never really leave us. Who dwell in beauty. Like lilac fragrance, and rough bark.





I just learned, reading an account of my great-great grandfather's life, that he was sexton of this cemetery, beginning in 1881. Thomas Meikle Forrest. "The sexton has charge of the city cemetery and provides or supervises the care, maintenance, and beautification of the cemetery, and the digging of graves." This quote comes from my cousin Jean Tyson's account of T. M. Forrest's life. If the Dwarf Umbrella Trees are more than one hundred years old, my own great-great grandfather may have planted them. No wonder I was smitten at first sight!

I know there is a Forrest Street in Brigham City. Perhaps it was named for Thomas Meikle and his love of his namesake: trees.

If you want to feel the earth turn, this video is more time well spent . . .

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Save the Last Dance for Tree

1/19/2012

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_ Hundred-mile-an-hour wind gusts are fairly common in Boulder, Colorado, at least since I moved here. The gusts last night started around dark and walloped our cul-de-sac without mercy until noon today.

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I slept approximately not at all.

The house shook,
the windows howled,
the fireplace flue played
the pan flute all night long.



_ This morning around five thirty I heard a little tap, a dainty scrape outside.
When I walked out my door at eight thirty, I saw this--
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_ being held up by this--
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_ engulfing both cars like this--
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_ as nearly 8,000 pounds of pine tree blocked our driveway.
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_ The arborist from Blue River Tree Care was already on the scene. He called in the largest crane that I have ever seen (and I’ve installed landscapes for 14 years)
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which dropped a daredevil
down into the crown of the tree
who chopped two branches out
with a hand saw, attached the cables

and while we gaped from the upstairs landing window

that two-story pine tree


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_ danced like a baby ballerina up over our heads
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_ and touched down in point, where the crew promptly undressed her.
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_ This miracle surpassed the miraculous activity indoors: my final day polishing
the last draft of my novel Tributary, 19.6 years in the making. Sharing the very last hours on this my magnum opus with the flight of the bumblebee pine tree--
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I may have to take up the pan flute.
And play it hiking in the pines.



(For those of you smitten with pan flute fever . . .
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check out this crazy website!)
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Plunge

7/31/2011

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Hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park yesterday, I sang—heaven help me—“Rocky Mountain High." I pondered a Henry James novella I’d just read, “The Beast in the Jungle.” Because I wore brown-tinted sunglasses, the beetle-kill pines stood out on every slope, and I could not feel anything but implicated in and convinced of our changed planet.

In James’ story, the hero John Marcher misses the event of his lifetime. He feels chosen by an obscure destiny, waiting as if anointed for some beast to leap onto him and render his life profound. May Bartram, the only friend who knows of his obsession, stands beside him for decades, waiting, but Marcher’s self-absorption is so complete he only realizes when flinging himself on May’s grave that he has missed out on her love. That was his unrecognized beast.

The twists and turns of James’ syntax far exceed plot points, and I dismissed “The Beast in the Jungle” as a windy staid study in the human ego; profound—the beast is within not without us—and a dated sleeper written by a man who spent all his time indoors.

But as I hiked the thousand feet up toward Lake Helene, surrounded by vast browning slopes, the power of his novella came at me from an unexpected quarter, haunting my climb. James’ protagonist fit perfectly our environmental dilemma: we cannot really love the earth, though it offers itself, so we use it and simultaneously feel cut off from it, valuing our self-importance more than the opportunity to genuinely live, which makes us unable to stop pillaging, unable to stop missing the point, and we're just about to throw ourselves on its grave in misery and cowardice, like James' hero. Empty, when what is offered us is so full.

I have found no good way to face such a grand-scale environmental demise. Which leaves me in the Jungle with John Marcher.

Whatever you can do to plunge into this love, do it now.
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The Mormon Moment

6/12/2011

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You can't keep a good thing down.
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It's nature's way. This tree, having endured heaven knows what death-dealing impact, sprang to life this spring, as trembly green and fragrant as all its compadres on the creek trail by the peacock farm at Greenbelt Meadows, near my home.

Ah, greenbelt. Ah, meadows. Ah, forming oneself around and with and through the blows dealt in the course of growing up. That is why I love trees: they don't mask their injuries, they capitalize on them, when they can.



My novel Tributary, the one that took twelve years and nearly a hundred drafts to complete, the one based on my Mormon pioneer ancestors, the one that's been sitting in a closet for six years recovering from the blow of non-interest by the publishing world, just sent trembly green and fragrant leaves out to dapple my trail. It has a publisher. Torrey House Press will print Tributary by Christmas.

Which makes me mighty glad.
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Newsweek says this is The Mormon Moment. The Mormon Moment apparently extends to the literary world, as well. Stay tuned, as I'll be updating my website this summer—with photos and excerpts and such from Tributary—in preparation for the holiday launch.
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Take heart. If you live through the heart-stopping difficulties, they can form and strengthen and even liberate you.

Life needs your sap, your dappling of the path, your instincts, your particular expression of this momentary joy.


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The Locking Tree

9/24/2010

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This week, I discovered a painter who loves trees. I am always looking for artists who love trees. Her imagination ravishes trees.
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She painted without schooling.

A fine French director made a movie of her life: Seraphine. It won Yolande Moreau a Best Actress award in France, and won seventeen awards worldwide in 2009. It’s a quiet, unflinching film that gets your hands dirty.
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Divinely dirty. Soil is divine.

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"Where has the tree gone, that locked earth to the sky?" Philip Larkin asks in his poem "Going." The tree is here.
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Seraphine of Senlis and Emily Carr and Georgia O’Keefe. These three followed their inner directives to worship the living earth with paint. How do you worship?



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"Can you understand the light among the trees?" Nick Drake asks in "The Way to Blue." Seraphine Louis did.
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Super-Golden Years

9/12/2010

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My mother just turned 92 years old. Two things strike me about her super-golden years. Her forgetfulness has made her past a happy one. And her new-found love of trees and birds makes my own enthusiasm look modest. 

Last week as we drove home from her hairdo appointment, down a shady tree-lined street, my mother said, “I just can’t understand what would make any two people divorce. Why would they do that?” Sometimes I let her wacky statements go with a nod and a smile. But I’d lived in our household; I could not let that pass without a reality check. I said, “You divorced Dad!” My mother said, mildly, “I never did.” I said, “You kicked him out of the house my freshman year of college. Divorce came later.” She didn’t protest or say a word. She had completely forgotten his indiscretions, her years of isolated grieving.

For her, marriage produced five great children and provided adventure (as an Air Force wife, she lived 19 places in 25 years). She had flown the Utah coop. She’d lived in Japan. She played golf on more courses than Campbell’s has soups. And now she has forgotten the strains and agonies that accompanied that journey. You may not like tapioca but it has a pleasing flavor on my mother’s tongue.


As for trees: my mother used to vacuum her patio Astroturf, cursing the box elder trees that dared to send their seed pods down into her seven square feet of the great outdoors. Her hatred of trees was so pronounced, I often had to excuse myself from the room. I’m a landscape designer. Trees are the answer, in my book. The only thing that kept me sane as a teenager in Davis County, Utah was escaping to the mountains, following deer paths through the scrub oak, jumping off sandy cliffs with tree-root tendrils flying overhead, shooting the tube in old irrigation culverts among tree canopy and dirt ravines.


Now, trees are my mother’s dearest friends.


When we moved her out of her condo into assisted living two years back, I made sure that her window had a view. She loves looking out on the world. And this particular view is a Utah treasure. Mount Olympus defines the skyline, and her parking lot is ringed with maples, pear and apple trees, sycamore, box elder and ailanthus/trees of heaven. I thought she would enjoy watching the comings and goings of the staff and visitors. But my mother stands bewitched by the moods of the wind in those trees. She reports on their bird visitors. She laughs like she has the scoop on intimate friends.


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After her morning exercise class, my mother takes her cane and walks the perimeter of the parking lot. Sometimes twice a day. And when you visit and join her on those walks, she makes sure you stop and notice every tree, the color of their leaves, what they drop, how they’ve been chopped for the power lines to go through, which and how many birds perched in the tops and “had a conversation” before moving on.

These walks are nothing short of miraculous, for me—to hear this old heathen tree-hater stand in awe of her family riches. And that’s what makes me admire and love my mother. She has changed. She allows delight in. She seeks delight where there was anger and boredom and judgment. And if she recreates her past by siding with the joyful and calm and beautiful, well that’s an affliction I hope many of us encounter with age. The world could forget plenty of its grudges. And walking with my mother, it seems our primary job on earth is to remember the overwhelming bounty of its joys.

Thanks to Exploring the World of Trees for the photo of sycamore seed pods.
Go to What Tree Is It? to identify trees you encounter, by leaf shape, fruit or name.


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Sumi Nagashi

9/4/2010

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What a simple tree-buying expedition can reveal! My sweetheart and I drove a bunch of hot dry miles to Copperton, on Friday, to pick out a Japanese Maple to flank our front porch. We hopped into the golf buggy provided by the wholesale nursery, and drove to the J. Maple section. No Home Depot maple mutt for us, we’d decided to treat ourselves to a genuinely lovely tree.

All of the trees on hand looked picked over, stunned and stunted with September heat, all but one grouping. It was a type of Japanese Maple we’d never seen before: Sumi Nagashi. Yes, they were expensive with large root balls in twenty-gallon containers. And beautifully pruned, with just the multi-trunk bodies we’d envisioned for our tree. Some local designer who used them with delight had ordered them in, and then the economy trembled.

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We circled the Sumi specimens, all with outward-arching branches so slender they suggested bamboo. Airy leaves. Promise of great red color in spring. One tree in particular stopped our discouraged rummaging. Any tree that can sit on a wind-swept graveled desert floor when it’s ninety-four degrees in September and look fresh as Betty Grabel—well, our choice was made for us.

At home, I looked up Sumi Nagashi on Google. Lo and behold, the tree gets its name from the delicate art of Japanese paper marbling. Translated literally, Sumi Nagashi means "floating ink." You’ve heard of Sumi-e ink? Well, swirl colored ink in water and lay paper onto the patterns you create, and you have Sumi Nagashi. (I may have left out a few details and centuries of mastery!) The Japanese art of paper marbling is the oldest on the planet. I remember admiring books from Japan with marbled paper when I was a kid. We owned a few. I took one to "show and tell" in third grade. The fascination was strong then as now.



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The naming of our tree after this art bodes well for us next spring! The delicacy we intuited in the young tree we chose won’t just fill a blank space in our garden. It will magnetize energy. Announce and welcome the beauty of the natural world. Which is the world that we all love, know it or not. Honor it or not. Admit it into our deepest knowing or forget our generous birthright.

Trees are a form of love that beggars words. And still we try.


Special thanks to The Garden at honeybrook house cottage for the lovely tree photo!


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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
    ​

    Favorite place:

    The middle of nowhere.
    ​

    Currently reading:

    Curse of the Pogo Stick
    The Maytrees 

    Just finished reading:

    Finding Stillness in a Noisy World
    ​

    Favorite blog:

    One Woman's Meat: Notes from Escalante

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