Chewing the Cud

  • The Dark of Being Them

    6:15 in the morning and it is winter dark.  The calendar say autumn, but autumn left the landscape weeks ago.  Was it summer “outside,” work would have commenced an hour ago. Visioning of lighted mornings is lost in this dark of near solstice.  Dark thinking replaces visioning on these unlighted mornings.  Thoughts of vindictiveness, “I…

  • Heavens Cry

    We have become people who can live without the wild.  We will watch The Reverant and imagine and talk about the wild 1800’s.  We will ride a ski lift, look across vast lands of wild and imagine being wild as we ski alongside hundreds on the downslope.  We day hike in refuges and National Parks…

  • Daybreak

    Dawn.  Sage and I finish feeding cattle.  We turn our attention to loading hay for tomorrows morning feeding—she keeps guard from atop the trucks toolbox while I load bales.  The cold morning holds little of what will come in the winter months ahead, just the same the cold is doing well holding forth a frosty…

  • Learners Permit

    “She’s getting her Learners Permit.”  Everyone who’s been in church during Prayers for Joy and Concerns knows the next comment, “Both a joy and concern.”  Prior knowledge didn’t matter, folks laughed.  Ever since that first day a teenage-adult got their hands on a car the community’s had a nervous laugh. We were thirty-two with two…

  • Setting the Plow Toward Justice

    A settling comes with Autumn.  As if restlessness is married to frosty mornings and the folding and browning of leaves in the garden.  This moment is one of settling up.  One cannot let too many frosts go by without picking the last of summers produce.  Both the over-ripe and the green recipes come out.  Salsas…