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 […]
Category Archives: landscape
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 […]
I stood at the French door in my bedroom looking out at a spring storm early last week, the sky greenish gray, the rumble of thunder booming. I was hoping for rain–here in the Texas hill country we’re in extreme drought–but we received, instead, only rather scary wind. I watched our cedar elms thrash large […]
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’m a sucker for a story about renewal. In her New York Times best-selling memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed takes us along on a monumental journey, both physical and metaphorical. At age 26, she is trying to find her way. Her father left when she was six; […]
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 […]
. . . We can sit still, keep silent, let the phoebe, the sycamore, the river, the stone call themselves by whatever they call themselves, their own sounds, their own silence, and thus may know for a moment the nearness of the world, its vastness . . . –Wendell Berry, from his poem “Words” […]
Last week a friend phoned and asked, “Do you have any time left?” At least, that’s how I heard it at first. And thought–Gee, I hope so. Then I chuckled to myself when I realized what she actually said and meant was, “Do you have any thyme left?” Her own patch had faded, and, a […]
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 […]