The newsletters I send out will be different from the blog—more personal, with news of how the book is coming, and notices of events like readings and workshops.

Please, if you are interested, take a moment to fill out your first name and email. I promise, no more than one newsletter a month!

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

Staying in touch

No related posts.

White with a pinkish hue, spring beauties sport dark pink lines down the center of each petal, which my wildflower book says “guide insects to nectar, like runways.”

Such a lovely simile, “like runways.” We immediately hear the buzz of a bee, or an airplane, roaring in a straight line toward its terminus. I was treated to thousands of similes this past weekend at the annual conference of AWP, the Association for Writers & Writing Programs, held here in Denver. For two whole days I played hooky from work to soak in the poetry flowing from lips of many of my favorite writers. (At AWP even prose writers speak in poetry.)

Keynote speaker Michael Chabon offered the highest ratio of similes, an average of about  three per sentence. Before I gave up taking notes and sat back to revel in his words, I did manage to snatch this gem:

Ideas are the easiest and least interesting part of the [writing] process; as Madge of Palmolive fame used to say, you are soaking in them. The hard part is sticking with the ideas when they begin to lose their luster—sitting on their heads when they try to roll out from under you.

One of my favorite panels was titled “Writing the Mind’s Wild Geography”—one of several sessions to focus on the connection between language and land.

The earth and all the music of language are one. Language is made from the earth as much as the sparrow or sunflower. —Pattiann Rogers

What a wonderful reminder that everything we produce as humans is not, as we tend to think, removed from earth! Words, music, and even the language of skyscrapers are nourished by the same sunshine and soil, produced from a forest as much as is a butterfly.

It is the music of the language that contains gateways to those experiences sometimes called holy, sometimes called terrifyingly holy. We experience the spiritual in the body. I try to stay close to the physical in language. —Pattiann Rogers

Embodying the connection between words, music, and the physical, Joy Harjo wove jazz and words together in a mesmerizing hour that brought tears to most of our eyes.

When we leave this world, we’re going to take only what we learned by heart. —Joy Harjo

This morning I celebrated language of the heart in yet another way—by attending the first-of-the-season meeting of volunteers at the native plant garden at the Ranger’s Cottage at Chautauqua. We deadheaded last year’s wildflowers, raked, pruned, and chatted in the bright sun and brisk April wind.

As I clipped, I thought about Ann Pancake’s words from the “Mind’s Wild Geography” panel:

Our culture desperately needs new myths, new stories, about the natural world. —Ann Pancake

Pancake wrote a killer of a story for Narrative magazine a few years back exploring what mountaintop removal does to a person, to a family, to a life. The larger story she points to—the story that unites coal mining in the Appalachians with gardening in Boulder—is a story we’ve inherited that devalues the biotic communities that are here, wherever “here” happens to be. It is a story teaching that the land can be used, replaced, or even destroyed without consequence. That what is “here” is not good enough to be preserved.

Meanwhile the serviceberry bush just overhead was near to bursting its fresh leaves:

I want to think that cultivating native plants is one tiny contribution toward changing the story. I want people to know about the birthright of the land—that local landscapes are something to study and learn from rather than replace with water-guzzling turf and exotic flowers. I want to think that changing the story is possible—that we can learn to love “here,” that we will learn to love “here” before it’s too late.

A highlight of AWP was sitting at the front to hear Terry Tempest Williams read on the final night of the conference. Her essay—suffused with birds, of course—told of the stroke she had in September and the uncertainty she now lives with on a daily basis. Even though her brain might erupt and debilitate her at any moment (my brain can too, for that matter, or yours), and fear stalked the essay, her words rang also with celebration:

The birds remember what we have forgotten—that the world is meant to be celebrated. —Terry Tempest Williams

The wildflowers say it too. On the trail in Chautauqua after pruning in the garden, I glimpsed the first blooms of the creeping Oregon grape (Mahonia repens) on a bright hillside next to sun-radiating rock:

Mahonia has the last word here. I think it is joy.

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

Words and wildflowers

Related posts:

1. Pasqueflower 2010
2. Write your heart out
3. When you don’t want your sister reading it…

Recently, during some way-too-busy weeks of an overwhelming workload and too many unknowns looming, I slipped away one sunny morning to the Boulder reservoir, hoping to see eagles. Bald eagles begin nesting here in February, and although the reservoir this year was still capped with a solid lid of ice, I hoped perhaps the eagles would perch nearby even if they would not likely find a decent breakfast between its shores.

I parked near the reservoir and began hiking. The lake was blinding white. No dark hulks loomed in the cottonwoods along the shore. I remembered again how much fun it is to bird in winter when the trees have no leaves and the great perching birds may be visible for nearly a mile. Enjoying the bright sun and clear blue sky—we’ve had less than usual of it in recent weeks—I kept walking, periodically scanning the trees with binoculars.

A half mile or so into the hike I saw what might be a dark spot in a faraway cottonwood. Double-checking through the glasses, I saw a dark shape with a white head and a white tail. And yowze! A second one perched in the same tree!

I drew closer. Okay, I had to cross a fence or two and trespass into a muddy cattle pasture, but I ended up about thirty yards away from the tree. I sank down carefully between cow pies.

The sun warmed my back; the sky was open and blue. My cell phone was off; no one could interrupt me here. I sat with the eagles, appreciating.

After some minutes the one on the right lifted off and drifted lazily toward a cottonwood farther away. The other, consenting to my presence, remained in place. We watched—the eagle training sharp eyes on prairie dogs, trespassing human, and faraway cattle, and me gazing back wide-eyed through binoculars. I memorized each detail of riffing feather, golden claw, and blazing eye.

After about twenty minutes this eagle too shifted from foot to foot, flexed its wings, spread them wide, and stepped into air.

I sat for a few more minutes, smiling. Then I got up, stretched, and retraced my steps to the car. I was breathing more deeply. The sky seemed even bluer, the morning more graced.

I have my own collective noun to add to the centuries-old list: a “peace of eagles.”

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

A peace of eagles

Related posts:

1. Scenes from a writing weekend
2. Writing that walloped me
3. 10 reasons to shlep your laundry outdoors to dry

Here is the way our retreat room greeted us on Friday afternoon:

The retreat was held a couple hours south of Boulder, at the Benet Pines Monastery, a community of Benedictine women. On Saturday morning I went for a walk as the sun was beginning to lighten the tips of the trees. Birds were stretching their morning wings, and though I caught glimpses of them, I couldn’t identify any except for the “dee-dee-dee” of the black-capped chickadee.

The ponderosas were peaceful and present. I’d set aside the weekend as the perfect opportunity to sit with the next chapter of the book I’m working on, see if I could find a path through the images.

Chapters don’t arrange themselves when you think they should. I sat. I dabbled in words. I waited. I tensed.

Walking between the retreat room and my quarters, I asked the trees, “What do I do now?”

I heard, “Don’t sweat it.”

So I picked up my camera and went scouting instead. Never can resist a photo of tree bark:

It wasn’t until late in the weekend that a bit of clarity about the chapter began to trickle in, slowly and gently, like the light at the tips of those ponderosas.

I am grateful to our writing teachers, Sandra Dorr and Marilyn Krysl, for their exquisite readings and their enthusiasm for each person’s work; and to Suzi, our yoga teacher, for core-strength exercises fit for a football team and for a warm herbal foot bath and massage that left my feet tingling in minty pleasure.

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

Scenes from a writing weekend

Related posts:

1. From a contemplative weekend
2. Writing that walloped me
3. A peace of eagles

The view out my window is again of winter. The sky today is brighter than this shot makes it look, but other than that the feel of the landscape is the same. Ten-plus months ago we were also in winter, but it was a lot warmer in January than it is today (14 degrees)!

I thought I might feature today a few of my personal favorites from this nearly a year of seasons—a few that haven’t made it to the top ten popular posts in the sidebar. Hope you enjoy.

• March 11: Earth is the new bottom line
• March 19: What your soft animal body loves
• April 10: A spirituality of THIS world
• May 31: A cloudy-day hike at Chautauqua (photos)
• June 21: Brownies to die for
• July 17: On Green Mountain (photos)
• September 29: Aspen gold (photos)
• November 9: We the earth: ecological crisis as spiritual practice

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

100th post: celebration time!

Related posts:

1. 10 reasons to shlep your laundry outdoors to dry

The Nature Blog Network is a marvelous community of nature lovers, writers, scientists, and photographers.

If you’re looking for outstanding blogging about birds, bugs, plants, herps, hiking, oceans, ecosystems, or any other natural topic — or if you blog on those topics yourself — this is the place for you!

If you haven’t yet visited NBN, take a few minutes to browse among the nearly 900 blogs in the network. Be prepared for some fantastic photos of birds, insects, trees, and all the other marvels nature lovers are finding to wonder about and take delight in.

Thank you, Wrenaissance and all the folks at NBN!

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

Welcome, Nature Blog Network!

Related posts:

1. My first blog carnival: what fun!
2. Oodles of birders
3. A peace of eagles

This week the BBC reports that rooks, a cousin of ravens, actually do use stones as tools to reach a treat.

A team of four British scientists set up a situation in which rooks were shown a worm floating just out of reach in a tube of water. Given a pile of stones, Connelly the Rook hopped right to it, dropping stones in the tube one by one until he could reach the worm:

Another rook, Monroe, faced with the same problem, chose the biggest stones first, to do the job with the least amount of work:

Note: My thanks to Boria Sax for posting the story and the BBC link on the H-Net discussion list NILAS, Nature in Legend and Story.

Humans have known for a long, long time that birds of the corvid family—ravens, crows, jays, magpies, and nutcrackers on this continent, also rooks and jackdaws in Europe—are smart. But to appreciate just how closely the concerns of ravens and crows are to those of humans, you might want to read nature writer Craig Childs’s chapter on ravens in his book The Animal Dialogues.

The story opens with Childs hiking in the desert:

When the first raven came it was alone, a piece of blackness laboring across a cold dawn sky. . . . It was a big bird, a sorcerer wearing sleek black robes, its two talons tucked against its body as if each grasped a marble. It altered its path slightly, making a jog around me, wings laid out as it banked twenty feet off the ground. It obviously wondered what I was, and what I was doing here, one eye tagging me as it circled. It was close enough that I saw clearly into that one dark eye, the one that observed me with incredulous focus, as if to say You again.

Following the raven, Childs finds a scene he would have expected only from humans. But, he says,

I am always prepared for the impossible from ravens. . . . Ravens pull up baited fishing lines by stepping on the line, reeling in slack with their beaks, stepping on the line again, and finally pulling in the fish. They poke sticks into bug holes, bend wire to hook meat from between cracks, unzip backpacks, and open ice chests.

From this catalog of innovations, it sounds like the test set up for Connelly and Monroe was a piece of cake.

To find out what the ravens were up to in Childs’s story, you’ll have to read his book. It’s a moving chapter about feelings, rituals, and how much humans long to recapture the kinship we know in our heart of hearts is waiting there to be rediscovered.

For some cool videos and pictures of tool-making crows, see this story from the BBC: “Meet the Brains of the Animal World.”

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

“Necessity is the mother of invention” for clever rooks

Related posts:

1. A peace of eagles
2. Writing that walloped me
3. What we’re doing to the whales

Boy, was I wrong.

The day I met Stanford Addison, I sat with him outside his corral watching the horse inside it try to escape. First she got down on her belly like a cat and tried to crawl under the pole fence. . . . Then she ran around and around, squealing her disapproval of her new surroundings. . . . I didn’t know much about horses, but it struck me as strange that she would make a point of stopping right there in front of Stanford. She tossed and whinnied in what started to look to me like an appeal. Stanford watched until he was certain she was finished. Then he said in a low voice, “I can’t save you.”

A man talking softly to a frightened animal was a good start. That the man was sitting in an electric wheelchair added interest. I read on. The man had been in a car accident at twenty and a quadriplegic for two decades since.

Along with his physical paralysis had come some powerful healing gifts. At first both his disability and these gifts seemed a terrible burden, but he came to understand that he had emerged from a small life into a big one. He had broken, broken through, broken out. His body was changed forever, but so was his heart. This happened in different ways to a lot of people around Stanford. I had no idea that first time I visited him and watched his curious dialogue with the mare, that the same thing would happen to me.

Now I was committed. Hearts breaking open is not the usual fare of in-flight magazines.

The writer, I read, was on assignment for Smithsonian to write a profile of Stanford Addison, a Northern Arapaho horse gentler and community healer from the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. But the morning she met him, she said, her eyes didn’t know where to look.

My gaze skittered to the dirt beneath the wheels [of his chair], to the sky above his head, to anywhere else, and irresistibly back to him. His motionless feet were covered in bright white ankle socks that had clearly never touched the ground. His legs protruded, sticklike, from nylon shorts. Acne scars dotted his shoulders. His arms tapered to long, graceful hands. His face was pockmarked and thin. I had never seen bad luck heaped so hugely upon a human body. I was bristling with discomfort. He wasn’t. He looked at me, his gaze mild, open, alert, and unblinking. It walloped me just the way beauty would. I blushed to the roots of my hair. It felt like he could see every little place in me that had gone hard and rigid.

My pulse, I noticed, was pumping harder than it needed to. Strapped into my plane seat, on my way to Phoenix for the thirtieth time in seven years, I was dumbfounded. In all those trips, I had never read writing like this in an airline rag.

The writing walloped me. It took me to the place where truthful writing takes us, snapping off a brittle corner or two of my heart so a softer center can flow.

The story continued: The writer’s fear of horses, how she tried and failed to get through to one black stallion. How Stanford seemed to reach past her fear to pull out the courage moving behind it. How she emerged from the fear to finally see the horse as he was—a being who was at least as frightened as she, who would respond, as she would, to gentle nudging and support.

[Stanford's] gentleness was so foreign to my system that it took me a while to figure out what it was. And he wasn’t gentle only with me and the stallion. He was gentle with the dogs, the children, and the other spectators. . . .

Stanford gentled us. All of us. He gentled us along.

I didn’t know just how deeply I was moved until we landed in Phoenix. Sitting in an airport restaurant, I found myself noticing, one by one, other travelers. A curly-haired woman with a worried furrow between her eyes. A white middle-aged man at the next table talking business strategy. A young brown-skinned woman sweeping crumbs into a scooper on the floor. Each of them precious beyond words. Each one indispensable to the whole. I saw each one through soft eyes, my heart opening to their struggles and their hopes.

It was a piece of magic brought about by a piece of good writing, and it lasted, like a nimbus slowly fading, for several hours after leaving the plane.

But who was this writer who had worked this magic? I soon found out my good fortune: Lisa Jones lives in my town, she’s the friend of some writer-women friends, and this week she gave a reading at the Boulder Bookstore.

Turns out, the magazine story was excerpted from Lisa’s book, which just came out: Broken: A Love Story, about the four years she spent visiting the reservation and writing Stanford’s story. I bought the book, of course, and am stealing moments outside of grading theses and holding end-of-semester conference calls to enjoy it.

In person, Lisa is just as engaging as on the page. During her reading she talked about Indian-white relations and about how she changed through working on this book.

I went to the reservation to watch Stanford work, but a lot of what I ended up watching was what was going on inside of me. I’ve softened up a lot. I feel a lot more connected to things.

Update June 9: Lisa Jones just posted this video of readings from the book, plus photos from Wind River and Stan singing. Enjoy!

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

Writing that walloped me

Related posts:

1. Scenes from a writing weekend
2. Write your heart out
3. When you don’t want your sister reading it…

Today, in tribute to a person who through his many books has led thousands to live in deeper communion with the more-than-human world, I offer excerpts from his book The Great Work, published in 1999 (all emphasis added).

The Great Work, now as we move into a new millennium, is to carry out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner.

The deepest cause of the present devastation is found in a mode of consciousness that has established a radical discontinuity between the human and other modes of being and the bestowal of all rights on the humans.

In reality, there is a single integral community of the Earth that includes all its component members whether human or other than human. In this community every being has its own role to fulfill, its own dignity, its own inner spontaneity. Every being has its own voice. Every being declares itself to the entire universe. Every being enters into communion with other beings.

Trees have tree rights, insects have insect rights, rivers have river rights, mountains have mountain rights. . . . All rights are limited and relative. So too with humans. We have human rights. We have rights to the nourishment and shelter we need. We have rights to habitat. But we have no rights to deprive other species of their proper habitat. We have no rights to interfere with their migration routes. We have no rights to disturb the basic functioning of the biosystems of the planet.

The difficulty is that with the rise of the modern sciences we began to think of the universe as a collection of objects rather than as a communion of subjects. . . . We no longer hear the voice of the rivers, the mountains, or the sea. The trees and meadows are no longer intimate modes of spirit presence. The world about us has become an “it” rather than a “thou.”

[Science has] moved beyond the mechanistic understanding of a so-called objective world as it was known in the past few centuries of Newtonian physics. We now know that there is subjectivity in all of our knowledge. . . . If formerly we knew by downward reduction processes that considered the particle as the reality and the wholes as derivative, we now recognize that it is even more important that we integrate upward, because we cannot know particles and their power until we see the wholes that they bring into being.

A new basis for the unity of humans with the larger earth community is found in the discoveries of modern science. The more clearly we understand the sciences and their perceptions of the universe, the more clearly we appreciate the intimate presence of each component of the universe with every other component.

It seems best to consider that mind and matter are two dimensions of [a] single reality.

We see quite clearly that what happens to the nonhuman happens to the human. What happens to the outer world happens to the inner world. . . . Without the soaring birds, the great forests, the sounds and coloration of the insects, the free-flowing streams, the flowering fields, the sight of the clouds by day and the stars at night, we become impoverished in all that makes us human.

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

The great work of Thomas Berry

Related posts:

1. String theory for mere mortals
2. Trusting the senses
3. Finding what you don’t expect: a runaway universe

Gravity’s Rainbow shows a beautiful banner image from the Southwest. ‘Course, I’m a sucker for desert scapes and blooming succulents.

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

Hop on the Berry Go Round

Related posts:

1. Oodles of birders
2. My first blog carnival: what fun!