Last summer, when I visited a museum and saw Vincent Van Gogh’s painting Women Crossing the Fields for the first time in person, I felt a tug of recognition. It wasn’t just that I had previously seen reproductions of this work, but I felt I had seen it in life itself. It took me a […]
My favorite daily “indulgence” is not really very extravagant; I call it my faux chai tea, which is actually spiced-up green with skimmed milk to provide the latte. It’s pretty healthy and not much of a luxury, except in the sense that it is rich with memory and meaning. It feels to me as though I’m […]
In the week preceding Easter, journeys with friends reminded me of the joys of childhood’s egg hunts. On these adult expeditions, we searched for–and found–secret glories which we could have easily missed. My friend Betty and I delighted in finding the cross vine pictured below and the happy turtles pictured above at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in […]
The Chinese new year just began, and according to the reports I read, this is the year of the wooden horse, which reminded me again of Tony Boy, the gift my parents made for me when I was a child and which I wrote about in my last post. Yesterday that was still on my […]
I’ve been quiet lately–since about Thanksgiving, actually, and have been wondering why I don’t seem to have a writing voice. It happens to writers far more prolific and skilled than I, so I haven’t worried much about it, thinking the shorter days had brought a time of gathering, of rumination. So yesterday I was a […]
i thank You God for most this amazing day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes –E. E. Cummings Nothing in nature represents “yes” to me more than trees, and I often repeat these lines of poetry from […]
In legend, returning from the mountaintop can be a letdown, but, for me, settling back into home in these Texas hills after traveling in the mountains of Colorado feels comfortable, like replacing regular street shoes with cuddly slippers. There are just as many wonders close to home as there are far afield. One of my […]
A century ago, John Muir asserted that “going to the mountain is going home” and that “wildness is necessity” for “tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people.” And doesn’t that last phrase describe us all even more now than then? When I was growing up in the Texas hill country, the words most often repeated at graveside funeral […]
Poking around Routt County, Colorado (shown above) last week, my husband and I ran across this chalked message on the sidewalk of the beautiful public trail along the Yampa River: It reads, “What if the hokey pokey really is what it’s all about?” When I read it, I laughed aloud. And maybe that is an important […]
I hear this opening phrase often: “Life is too short . . .” The blank is usually filled in with phrases such as “to fold fitted sheets” or “to drink cheap beer.” I know–in theory, at least, if not always in practice–that it really is too short to spend it obsessing over things that don’t […]
Studies in Color and Composition
Radical Retirement
A Glimpse into My Life & Passions
Joann Pensabene
Where observation and imagination meet nature in poetry.
pursuing a life of purpose
Writing our way to awareness
Living life outside the lines
A Story Circle Network blog for and by women
A Diary of Love, Literature, and Growing Up in Wartime America
Practicing Wonder 