A couple weeks ago I snapped a nice photo of a purple crocus. I grow them in pots on the windowsill and enjoy blooms in winter. The sun was shining strongly and outside the finch birds were twittering in that way they have when spring is not too far off. It began to seem as if the season might shift a little early.

But then it all changed, as weather is wont to do. Cold air from the Rockies seeped westward, pulled by the warmth of the Pacific Ocean. When moist air hit the cold air, snow fell. And fell and fell. Dry powdery fine snow fell for days and nights. I love snowstorms because the world goes quiet and still. People have to slow down. Our perception of what’s important shifts to the basics. Shelter, warmth, food, water, companionship.

I’ve been shoveling snow, keeping my chickens fed and watered, playing with watercolors in the studio, hanging out with the cats. I’ve sown a few seeds indoors, which really is an act of faith when it’s 15 degrees outside. I’m keeping the bird feeder full of sunflower seeds, and the finch birds are still tweedling along. A group of eight varied thrushes have eaten all the berries from my viburnum hedge.

Valentine’s Day means that the vernal equinox is five weeks away. It may look and feel like winter, but the lengthening days and brighter light mean otherwise. We are tipping toward spring.

What is Government for?

I’ve been thinking about this a great deal as I follow the news about the government shutdown. As a federal employee, I am incensed by the callous disregard for my individual livelihood, for the missions that I and my fellow public servants dedicate our working hours to, and the general disruption of many aspects of life. As a citizen, I am angered but not surprised as I watch the ongoing power struggle in the other Washington. On the surface, the intransigence is over one issue, but the undercurrent is all about who controls the direction of the country; whose version of reality wins.

What popped into my head as I pondered government was an image I first encountered in art history class. The Allegory of Good and Bad Government was painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in 1338 and 1339. The frescoes were placed in the council hall of the Republic of Siena, to remind elected officials of the consequences of their decisions. Good Government is symbolized by Justice and Wisdom (who receive their authority from God), and the virtues are personified as Peace, Fortitude, Prudence, Magnanimity, and Temperance. Under these figures, the city is filled with commerce, smoothly-flowing traffic, people working at trades, and happy dancers. The fresco of Bad Government shows the figure of Justice tied up and surrounded by Cruelty, Deceit, Fraud, Fury, Division, War, Avarice, Pride, and Vainglory. Not to mention the horned and fanged figure of Tyranny. The city is in ruins, the streets are empty.

Medieval art often was a substitute for literacy. The images spelled things out in black and white. The difference between good and evil was clear—no one needed a long explanation about choosing between God and the Devil.

Fast forward to the end of the 17^th century and the Enlightenment. After decades of religious wars, the thinkers of Europe turned toward a secular point of view. The rise of science led to God in his heaven taking a step back. Once he set creation in motion as if it were some sort of clockwork, he didn’t intervene. It was up to man and his thinking brain to take charge of his own destiny. Kings no longer ruled by divine right. Men consented to be governed, and demanded a voice in making the rules.

The American experiment in democracy was the first government to incorporate ideas from the Age of Reason. Our Declaration of Independence and Constitution are filled with the language of 18^th century philosophy. The Preamble of the Constitution states that the purpose of the federal government is to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

Well. How hard can that be?

Pretty hard, it turns out. The truths held to be self-evident in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence are not that self-evident at all, since they apparently do not apply to women and persons of color and others who are different from the dominant class. My Rights and the Pursuit of Happiness might infringe upon your Rights and Pursuit of Happiness.  Our system is full of flaws and inherent conflicts. The Founding Fathers of our nation had a lot of faith in mens’ ability to reason and overcome human nature—all those nasty things like Pride, Avarice, Cruelty, etc. depicted in Lorenzetti’s frescoes.

The purpose of government is to create a structure in which we might live together more or less harmoniously, decide how our economy is to be run, provide infrastructure and other aspects of the common good, including defending ourselves from hostile invaders. Our system was set up to be participatory, with citizens serving on school boards and city councils on up through county, state and federal offices. A country as large and diverse as ours necessarily has developed a bureaucracy to implement legislation that has been passed by our representatives. The people employed by these bureaucracies are us—the city worker who reads your water meter, the firefighter who responds to your 911 call, the inspector who ensures that you are not sold tainted meat, the forest ranger who answers your questions when you are out hiking. These are members of our community and fellow citizens who provide a service for the common welfare of us all.

To some people, the Government (they mean the federal government) is a shadowy monolith, a boogeyman that conspires to take away their rights and freedoms. I work for the government, and I have first-hand knowledge that many agencies lack the leadership and vision to pull off such a conspiracy. There are laws and processes to ensure that citizens have a say in decisions made by federal agencies. And it is the job of Congress to provide oversight and demand accountability. Government is not monolithic—there are many points of view and approaches within agencies. Many government employees are mission-driven and service-oriented. We care about something larger than our own self-interest.

What I fear are idealogues who so despise the notion of government that they are willing to dismantle it. These are the people who reduce funding so that agencies begin to crumble from within, and then point out the failure of government to carry out its mission. They give conflicting messages and directives so that work is paralyzed, and again point at failure. They play favorites with some agencies and give them more money than they need. They hand out lucrative contracts to their buddies. They exploit public resources for personal gain. I could go on.

As a federal employee I am held to certain standards of ethics and conduct. I cannot even appear to misuse my position. It baffles me that those in positions of power are allowed to do so.

American democracy is still an experiment, a work in progress. It feels gangrenous right now. We can let it die or we can go through the painful process of debriding the rotting flesh and let the healing begin. We can turn away from the deceitful manipulators of information who want to fill us with fear. We can reject the marketplace that has turned us into consumers instead of citizens. We can overcome apathy and participate in social structures meant to contribute to the common good. We can seek out opportunities to give public comment. We can find common ground with neighbors who may hold different opinions. We can demand equity and justice. We can insist upon fair elections (wouldn’t it be great to have shorter campaigns?).  We can plan and prepare for the future by talking about how we want our country to look and behave. We don’t have to agree, but we could improve our civic discourse.

Our rights come with responsibilities. Because we are busy with our lives, too often we hand over our duties as citizens to elected officials and the government bureaucracy. Whatever’s wrong, we want the government to just fix it so we can get on with whatever we’re doing.

Now the government is broken, and the world feels a bit out of kilter. We humans need some kind of certainty to feel safe. There is no certainty about how this conflict will be resolved, or when. It’s tempting boil it down to a simple dichotomy of Good and Bad Government, good and evil, but that doesn’t describe the whole picture. We are no longer living in the Age of Reason, but our form of governing ourselves depends on some kind of rationality and ability to compromise.

I hope we return to it sooner rather than later.

In writing this post, I had help from Wikipedia and http://www.http://ushistory.org

The National Weather Service forecast was for “wintry mix”, which means there are some interesting things going on in the atmosphere. Plain old rain and snow are straightforward forms of precipitation, forming in the clouds and falling through air at temperatures that do not alter their form on the way down. When frozen precipitation falls through warmer air and hits cold air near the surface, it turns into sleet–which is rain that refreezes before hitting the ground; or freezing rain–which is rain that freezes to the cold surface of whatever it lands on.

It has been cold here–at least below freezing. So when a warm front slid over the mountains, freezing rain fell, coating every surface in ice. I went out into the garden to examine silvered twigs, dripping leaves and red viburnum berries encased in a frozen shell. This is a rare event here, and feels slightly ominous. My imagination ranges out to the forest where ice may build up on trees until some limbs reach a breaking point. If a wind follows, some top-heavy trees will snap and fall. Roads and trails will be scattered with tree remains, stuck and buried in snow. I think also of animals, especially deer and elk on their winter range. A thick crust on top of the snow will make it hard for them to dig down to forage below. After winters like this, it is not uncommon to find remains after snowmelt, stripped down to skin and bones.

Winter can be hard, which may be perceived as cruel and merciless. In flippant moments, I used to say that winter weeds out the wimps. But it also finds the stupid and unlucky. Wild creatures try to survive. Humans have a choice to travel in challenging conditions, but may find themselves in a survival situation whether they wanted to or not.

I respect winter. I imagine trying to make a living outside during the cold dark months and am beyond grateful for my little house and its comforts. I choose the days I go out, and don’t mind turning back if conditions turn for the worse. It is Day 13 of the government shutdown. I am furloughed but Cabin Fever has not set in yet. Freezing rain is an excellent reason to stay home and cook soup.

By the way, the folks at the National Weather Service deserve recognition for accomplishing their mission with reliability and professionalism. Listen to The Coming Storm by Michael Lewis https://www.amazon.com/The-Coming-Storm/dp/B07FHLQ2DD to learn how this agency is under threat under the current administration.

Be careful out there.

What you can’t see in this photo is the feathery blobs of snow that were falling when I stepped out the back door to snap this photo of my neighbor’s pine trees. They fell…lazily? Certainly they were not hurtling down from the clouds, shoved by a cold wind. No. They were light, drifting down as if gravity didn’t matter very much. There’s no wind. The temperature is just below freezing so the snow on the ground is wet and heavy, perfect for packing into snowballs or snowmen. But in the air, this snow is unhurried, fluffy, and fresh.

I always marvel at the first real snowfall of winter, how it changes the light coming into the house, how it adds a frosty filigree to the trees and covers up the shambles that is my autumn garden.

A quick online search answers my question about the many Eskimo words for snow. The anthropologist Franz Boas reported in 1911 that Inuit speakers have dozens, maybe hundreds of words for snow. This sparked debate but it is now known that all the Arctic peoples (Yupik, Sami, and others) have many words to describe snow and ice based on attention to conditions. Their language reflects a close relationship with their environment that we English speakers do not have. We only have “snow”. It could be argued that we have a few more: graupel (which is actually German) describes soft pellets that form when supercooled water droplets form on snowflakes so that they take on the consistency of styrofoam; corn snow which is the coarse grainy stuff that forms in the snowpack when there is repeated warming and refreezing; powder, which is dry and fine and light. But rather than many words for the snow itself, we have adjectives such as wet, heavy, fluffy, dry.

Being from the Pacific Northwest, I’ve had the thought that I’d like to compile a list of words for rain: drizzle, downpour, cloudburst, virga…maybe someday. English feels like a blunt instrument sometimes, but that’s no reason to give up.

In the meantime, as I’ve been writing this, the snow has slackened. A few flakes continue to drift down and I’m watching clumps fall from tree boughs while slabs slide from metal roofs. Perhaps the air is warming. Perhaps the snow will turn to rain. I’ve had my daily dose of magic, sitting in my warm house while the first significant snow fell. Inside of me lives a little kid who will always marvel at falling snow, even when there is also an adult who will be tired of it in a couple months. I may tell myself that I don’t like winter, but it’s not true. That little kid refuses to give up on me.

It’s also that little kid who won’t let me give up on writing. I stopped the blog for awhile, a couple years really. I was doing Other Things and wouldn’t make the time, except for daily journaling. But writing for readers? What is there to say? Sometimes a fallow period is required. I call it creative composting–taking the scraps of life and letting them cook and ferment together. Live, observe, reflect. When it’s time, the words and images will come. I always worry during a fallow period. I should be trying harder, I should be doing more, what if the words are gone for good? Worry doesn’t help. It’s just noise. The difficulty is in sitting down, making the commitment. The ideas themselves are transient. Words are transient. They come like snowflakes and melt if conditions aren’t right. I don’t believe they are meant to stay. As soon as they land, they begin to transform and bind with other snowflakes to create an entire snowpack. The snowpack is always in transition too and eventually transforms into water which cycles back through the atmosphere. It may be the same with stories, narratives, descriptions, metaphors and similes. they come together as thoughts, then words, then stories and transform as soon as they land on the eye or ear. As a kid, I learned to read quickly and loved stories. I was always making up stories and drawing pictures. Even now, reading is one of my great delights and I respond to supple language and well-constructed sentences. My imagination needs the exercise.

So I circle back to writing. This blog has value to me as a writer and thinker, and I hope that the latest drought is ending. No promises, but I want to see if I can get myself in the writing chair more often.

The snow has stopped. I hear ravens in the trees and tires rolling through the slush.

It has been nearly two months since I issued the Wonder Challenge to myself. I can report moderate progress. The observing muscles are flexing as I spend more time outdoors. Sometimes I feel a little squirt of delight when I realize I have heard the first hermit thrush of the year or nearly stepped on the first calypso orchid blooming under a cedar tree. These moments are recorded in the journal I keep, writing every morning without fail.

But as far as pulling out the camera to snap a photo or post on the blog, I haven’t been so disciplined. Instead I let the moment pass and go back to my task. Or, I go out to work in the garden. An online friend recently observed that her garden is greedy for time, and I agree. So is mine. All of a sudden it’s time to get seeds in the soil if I am to have vegetables and flowers. And the weeds flourish in the benign weather. I am perpetually behind, from the perspective of having a completely tended and kempt garden. It will never be so…there is only one of me, and I continually balance priorities against distractions. I accept the imperfection of the garden, and of myself.

This photo is from a couple weeks ago, when John and I went out to inspect a campground for trees that pose a hazard to campers. We moved steadily, but were always aware of the noise of melting snow rushing downriver. He marveled at the power of water, and I paused to take a look. How the color of the water reflects the sky! How the shape of Cone Mountain is so familiar, how I immediately recall of the trail that passes below it. The years that we have both lived and worked in this landscape make up a significant portion of our lives, yet the woods and rivers and mountains continue to surprise, delight, and frighten us. We belong to this place. To pull up roots and go somewhere else is almost unthinkable but at times we both long to go.

Back to work. As we moved from tree to tree, we noticed insects emerging from pock marks in the sandy soil. When we stopped to look, I thought they were bees with their striped and slightly furry bodies. But they couldn’t be. They only had two wings, so must be flies that mimic bees. Never saw that before.

It occurs to me that there are at least two kinds of wonder. One is the surprise at witnessing something you’ve never experienced before—which I hope continues to happen for me. But the second kind of wonder is for the familiar, what we know that still has the power to bring joy and curiosity. It’s a wonder to be friends with someone for over 25 years, to have walked miles together, to have been distant then greet each other after an absence. And to still wish the best for them, to watch them struggle and learn and grow and know they are doing the same for you. How is it that people connect—to each other or a place—and maintain the connection? We humans need this, but it remains a mystery. If it was easy, that mystery would have been solved. I wonder about it, but am content for the mystery to remain.

So wonder is alive and well. The challenge is to write and post more, to transform wonder into images and words that may be shared. May this be of benefit—to me, and to readers.

I’ve been spring cleaning.

My usual pattern is to start waking up sometime in late February. What seemed like a warm cozy shelter in December now feels stagnant, stale, cluttered and claustrophobic. Outside is still cold, gray, and snowy. It would be a perfect time to take a vacation but I never do. Instead I put my head down and trudge through my work routine until winter is officially over. As I store my winter clothing and gear, I cast a critical eye over things and clear away what no longer serves. It can feel quite ruthless but also liberating. On a rainy April afternoon I was sorting through a box of papers in the studio and came across this old sketchbook with a drawing of a Nashville warbler. I looked out the window and saw that the pussywillow catkins were in this exact state of flowering. I wondered…had I seen or heard the warblers this year? They are transient, moving through town rapidly on their way to their breeding habitat higher in the mountains. It’s possible they had come through and I didn’t notice. They are insectivores and the pussywillows are clouded with bugs when they bloom.

But this year has been different. A warm spell in mid-February brought the catkins out early. They held static while winter returned for a few weeks and then just recently progressed to the pollen stage. Then it was warm enough for the bees to emerge from the hive and the air was filled with their gentle buzzing. But I never heard or saw the warblers.

No one can say what “normal” weather is any more. Neotropical migrants like warblers must figure out the timing of their journey. If it’s too cold when they’re on the move, their food won’t have emerged and they won’t have the energy to stay warm. Maybe this year the birds are holed up somewhere south of here waiting for the right conditions.

Finding the sketchbook and thinking about warblers was one direction of wondering. The other direction of wondering was the date of the drawing. In 2011 it was not uncommon for me to pick up a sketchbook and record a moment in the garden. In 2018 I never do. What has changed? I have always been burdened with an overdeveloped sense of responsibility and northern European Protestant work ethic. Work before play. And try as I might to change my mind, art is play. So the paycheck must be earned and the laundry must be done before I go play. All work and no play make Debra a dull girl, which is what I have become. Even before I found the sketchbook, I was aware of wanting to reconnect with wonder and joy. Writing and drawing and walking are all part of that.

As I make my way through clutter and untidiness in my house, I am also spring cleaning my mind. As much as I have resisted, I have what I call the “digital attention span”. In order to engage with the human world around me, I use many of the tools that everyone else uses. It is so handy to text and email, so handy to pay my bills online. And so seductive to look things up without opening a physical dictionary or encyclopedia or map, to listen to an audiobook or read on the screen or snap a photo with the iPad. Without knowing how it happened, I find myself spending more and more of my time looking at a screen (including right now). The digital attention span speeds me up, makes me impatient, keeps me from using all my senses and my hands. It is numbing and exhausting to disconnect myself from the tangible world, and all the more disconcerting to try to reconnect.

Yet the world is right here. Physical things exist. The earth turns on its axis just as it did yesterday and will tomorrow. Spring is advancing. The white-crowned sparrows’ call is more insistent every day. The buds on the deciduous trees are a little more swollen each day. The Nashville warblers are out there somewhere, I hope. This is what I want to be attending to in spite of my knowledge of the warming planet, human hubris, folly, and cruelty. Where my attention goes, so goes my life. The necessity of a good spring cleaning is more apparent. Time to sort my thoughts about work and play, about what matters and how to spend the time I have left. Someone once told me that it’s best to live life without regrets, but it’s too late for that. The question now is to decide whether I will let them add to the clutter.

I think not. Going forward, I will draw more.

Overthinking…it’s what I do. 🙂

Sustainability and Resilience:

I like these two words very much but I fear they are on the verge of being overused. When words are repeated too many times they become meaningless. Consider what has happened to “friend” and “like”. Or “happiness” or “freedom”. Say “friendfriendfriend” over and over and it becomes just noise. It stops meaning a familiar person with whom one shares an affinity, holds in regard and even affection, a companion along life’s path. Or worse, it becomes a buzzword and is loaded with one agenda or another.

It’s too bad such things can happen to words. Language has its limitations.

So I want to consider sustainability and resilience before they fall off the cliff of overuse.

What I like about sustainability is the long-term implications. Sustain has a Latin root, meaning to hold up from under. To sustain is to keep from sinking or failing, to uphold and support. I picture a solid foundation—whether it is constructed with stone or sound concepts. Perhaps a well-built bridge, sturdily attached to both sides of a chasm and designed to bear a load. Or a bridge from one idea to another, explained in such a way that a listener can follow the reasoning. We hear about sustainable economies, sustainable energy, sustainable landscapes, even sustainable trails. But nobody ever gets into the details of what sustainability means and what it might look like. Too often sustainability implies a dream of steady funding for whatever we hope will persist into the future–an economy that doesn’t go up and down on whims, or an endless free energy supply, or a trail that holds up without maintenance. But without a solid foundation, sustainability is just wishful thinking.

I’ve been thinking about sustainable trails because that’s my day job. I’ve done some reading of my agency’s glossy propaganda and even attended a webinar. There are a lot of words and cheerful thoughts that leave me scratching my head in bafflement. Sustainability is a nice idea if you are building a trail system from scratch. You can design it for the kind of use it will get, avoid the sensitive soils, plants and animals, and construct it so that it will require minimal maintenance by unskilled volunteers. In other words, you can design a trail based on a solid foundation. On the other hand, you can try to retrofit an existing trail system that was built for entirely different kinds of uses than it receives today, that was never meant for the volume of use it gets, that responds to human and natural agents of change in the environment, all in a time when the legislative body is unwilling to invest in an amenity that many members of the public value. Sustainability becomes much more challenging in the absence of a foundation. For example, I have come to wonder if bridges across backcountry streams are unsustainable. Trail bridges have a lifespan of 30 or 40 years. They can decay or be washed away or the ground holding them up can be undercut by the stream. In the 1970s, timbers and even entire bridges were flown into the wilderness by helicopter. As those bridges fail, no one (or at least me and the people I hang out with) imagines that money will be spent in such a way again in our lifetimes.

Which brings me to resilience. Resilience also has a Latin root, meaning to leap back. A thing regains its original shape after being stretched or compressed. Elastic comes to mind. Or a tethered balloon that returns to its place after being bounced and bobbed around. We hear about resilient landscapes, perhaps forests that quickly return to health and productivity after a disturbance such as fire. And resilient employees, who keep chugging along in a chaotic and rapidly-changing workplace. Resilience is the ability to recoil undamaged and unchanged after pressure or shock. I wonder what makes a thing resilient? It doesn’t seem to be a permanent state. My experience of elastic indicates that it works as designed for awhile, but after so much stretching it eventually wears out and your pants fall down. A tethered balloon bounces back until it has been hit so many times that it deflates or pops. So I expect that resilience is dependent on the repetition of pressure and shock as well as the forces involved. And entropy, that state of increasing disorder in the absence of infusions of energy. In other words, stuff wears out unless you work at keeping it going.

So a thoughtful reflection on sustainability and resilience leads me to the conclusion that these words have important meanings and shouldn’t be lightly tossed around. Both words indicate to me that some effort is required to truly be sustainable and resilient. There must be a firm foundation supporting that which we want to keep from collapsing. And resilience must be tended or it will wear out. Where will we put our attention and energies?

I’ll be watching for these words to go over the edge. And be sad to see them go.

Today is the vernal equinox and my 58th birthday.

I have spent the past few days trying to get my head around being 58 and it’s discombobulating. I suppose I had vague expectations about what it would be like. When I was 25, I anticipated that my pigtails would have turned white by now. But they have not. My hair has lost its red-gold brightness, and is a few shades darker and duller. Curly white hairs are liberally threaded through, and there are silvery streaks at my temples and hairline. When I was 40, I figured I would end up leathery-faced with interesting lines from many seasons of fieldwork. But thirty-five years of consistent moisturizer and sunscreen use have saved me from complete leatheriness. There are fine lines around my eyes, the flesh of my cheeks and jawline have sagged, my mouth has thinned, but there are still freckles. I recognize me as me. There are other symptoms of wear and tear that modern medicine has been able to repair–that floppy ankle that had rolled too many times, cataract surgery which made it possible for me to do close work without glasses, a thumb tendon that is just now healing from a minor fix. Being post-menopausal means I’m no longer lean and muscular, but there is still strength and stamina under a comfortable layer of fat. At least that’s what they tell me when I go to the gym. I am “highly functional” for my age.

Nope, what’s weird about being 58 is putting a number on how I feel. I’ve been throwing away mailings from AARP for years, because I don’t see myself and my concerns reflected in their magazine and website. I can’t afford to retire. It’s strange to think that I qualify for the senior discount at places that offer senior discounts. Me, a senior? How can that be?

But there’s evidence–I have decades of memories of being an adult. Decades of perspective on the living that I’ve made and the work that I’ve done. I’ve learned some hard lessons, integrated some hard experiences. I’ve watched other people’s children grow from infants to adulthood. Most people seem younger than me now. I’ve been in Ramekin Cottage for thirteen years. Henry the big gray cat is twelve and a half. I’ve been divorced for almost as long as I was married and have no regrets at all.

What the hell did I expect? Maybe that’s the thing–I was so busy living that I forgot to have specific expectations of being an “old” person. Perhaps age is relative.

What I do know is that today is the first day of spring. It has been a beautiful warm sunny day. There are just a few scraps of snow lingering in the shady part of my garden. Crocuses are blooming. As I poke around in the flowerbeds, I see all sorts of shoots and sprouts including some beloved old friends. Winter is over and it’s time to clear the fog from my brain. Overcome the inertia that has settled upon me. Thinking about being 58 helped me to realize that I’ve stopped doing a lot of things that stimulate my mind, give me joy, help me feel connected to myself and the way I want to live. I stopped writing this blog. I stopped drawing and I rarely paint. I let my job suck my soul dry, and I stopped going to the woods on my own time because it reminded me of being at work and having to face masses of people as a uniformed ranger. I have been hiding in plain sight.

I don’t like how I feel. Sour, resentful, fat and sloppy. Where is my zest for life? What happened to my sense of wonder? What happened to gratitude? Is this how I want to spend the rest of whatever time I’ve got?

The answer is a resounding NO. I have decided: this blog will be revived as a way to document a renewed quest for wonder in every day life. There will be more small expeditions with sketchbook and camera in hand. There will be more noticing and less numbness. There will be observation and reflection on the human condition, as in “I wonder why…”

Today was a tiny start. It was a perfect day for sorting the beehive–rotate the brood boxes, scrape the burr comb off frames, clean out the honey super, add the queen excluder. I saw that many of the foragers were packing pollen back to the hive. Wonder where they’re finding that? It’s a good sign, since pollen provides the protein the queen needs to lay eggs and increase the colony. I had big plans for a hike, but by the time I finished with the bees it was too late to go to the place I had in mind. So I grabbed a small sketchbook and drove to a place where I knew I would find a few spring wildflowers. I left all digital devices in the truck and walked up the hill, stopping to look at the shiny yellow petals of sagebrush buttercups and the whiskered faces of sagebrush violets. Meadowlarks sang, my first hearing of their clear notes this year. When I saw the elk on the skyline I stopped and went to ground. We were all taking advantage of the mild day to soak up some sunshine on a south-facing slope. I idled for awhile, peering at small leaves emerging from the soil and the rounded stones left by the glacier that created this ridge. Wondered if the ticks are out and felt slightly crawly under my clothes. The sound of the interstate washed over me and I separated myself from the irritation I feel at the fossil-fueled busyness and noise of life in the 21st century. If I looked up, I could see the light blinking on top of a nearby cell tower and the spinning white blades of wind turbines. If the elk could exist with all that human junk, I reckoned I could too. On the way down I stopped to sketch one violet flower, really giving it my full attention and falling into the familiarity of making marks on paper. It was fine. I can do this.

This is the start of the “Wonder Challenge”, which will last one year. I will post on the blog at least once a week to document what I discover. I don’t know how this will turn out. But I have to try.

Happy Spring!