Category Archives: Planet Earth

Maine Sightings: Barbara in Bar Harbor

Spring in downeast Maine is slow to arrive. Arctic currents swirl in the Atlantic and frequent rains dampen visitors’ spirits. In spite of the warnings in the guidebooks, my daughter and I took a chance and booked our stay in Bar Harbor for early June. Some restaurants, such as the highly recommended Burnt Tree in Otter Creek, don’t even open their doors till mid-June. But it was the best time for our schedules, so off we went!

Boot sighting at LL Bean

Stephanie photographing a field of lupine on Bar Island

Stephanie among flowers on Bar Island

We got lucky. The weather was kind to us and the people even kinder.

We stayed at Acacia Inn, fed well every morning by Anna and Ralph, and wandered from there to the water’s edge. When it was low tide, we walked from the town of Bar Harbor to Bar Island, both named for the sand bar that appears and then disappears between them every day. Beyond the spruce forest on the island, we came upon a field bursting with spiky lupine flowers, as if Miss Rumphius of children’s book fame had been there spreading seeds.

We purchased our $25 pass for Acadia National Park at Hulls Cove Visitor Center, good for seven days. A group of Corvette drivers had made it their destination for the day and departed as we arrived, engines purring. Perhaps they were acknowledging, as we were, the centennial of the National Park Service, 1916- 2016.

Hulls Cove Visitor Center, Acadia National Park

Acadia National Park entrance sighting

From Hulls Cove, Stephanie and I went straight to the highest point on Mount Desert Island, Cadillac Mountain. We parked our rented Ford Focus and hiked to the bare, rounded peak of pink stone, a type of granite named for the mountain. At 1,530 feet, we could see for miles in all directions and noticed Bar Harbor and Bar Island to the northeast. Clouds shrouded the Porcupine Islands beyond.

Bar Harbor sighting from Cadillac Mountain

Bar Island sighting from Cadillac Mountain

At Jordan Pond, two Mi’kmaq men wove ash strips into baskets and a lone beaver wove sticks and branches into a home. Stephanie and I both tried our hand at the former but left the beaver to his own business.

Mi'kmaq basket artist sighted at a Cultural Connections program

Mi’kmaq artist sighting at a Cultural Connections program

Beaver sighting at Acadia National Park

For five days we explored the sights, sounds, and smells of this eastern national park, driving on the Park Loop Road and hiking on the (vehicle-free) carriage roads and trails. The Ocean Path took us from Otter Cliffs to the pounding waves of Thunder Hole and, eventually, to Sand Beach. Though the water was a chilly 48 degrees, we waded in the surf and let the coarse sand buff our feet. Our longest hike was the Triad Trail, taking the better part of a day and rewarding us with the woodsy scent, peace and quiet that come from wilderness, far from the popular paths.

Trail terminus sighted, whew!

Returning to Bangor for our flight home, we went to a Ringo Starr and His All-Starr Band concert at the Cross Center. Ringo wore a red and black plaid shirt like the Paul Bunyan standing outside the building. Even my favorite Beatle was part of the Maine mystique as he drummed us out of our reveries of nature, back to our cities of Chicago and New York.

Ringo sighting in the Cross Center in Bangor

Paul Bunyan sighting at the Cross Center in Bangor

Lupine sighting on Bar Island

TREE BOOKS FOR KIDS & OTHERS

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Some of my favorite characters are trees. With Earth Day (April 22) and Arbor Day (April 29) coming up, I’m thinking of arboreal authors and their tales of trees and people who live in them, from Tarzan to the Swiss Family Robinson. Trees have played important roles, if only in the background, of many terrific books.

As much as I loved Mary in The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, I never became much of a gardener. I loved Sam Gribley’s home in a tree far better. Mary cultivated the titular overgrown garden at an old Yorkshire mansion and made it her refuge, sharing it with the invalid, Colin. Sam, on the other hand, ran away from his family’s New York City apartment and lived in the woods of upstate New York with a falcon in My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. That’s the life for me, I thought when I read it in fifth grade at about the same age as the woodsy character, Sam. I was a tree-climbing girl though not as experienced at living off the land as Jean Craighead was. She grew up in a family of naturalists and her first pet was a turkey vulture. She gave her main character many chances to use survival skills, from harvesting wild foods to hollowing out a tree with fire to make a home.

In a tragic, true tale, a young woman named Sara sought out her favorite tree, known as the Senator, and built a small fire there one January night in 2012. Sadly for her and the world, the fire spread and she accidentally burned down the 3500-year-old bald cypress, the largest tree east of the Mississippi. Writer Julia Shipley asked Sara if she’d been inspired by My Side of the Mountain when she got in the habit of visiting the Senator and sitting inside it. “No,” Sara said, “But do you know The Giving Tree? That’s one of my favorite books and that’s how I look at what happened.”

Sara had been addicted to meth for eight years and getting in trouble for incinerating a national treasure forced her to get sober. “Basically the tree saved my life,” she said.

Shel Silverstein’s book, The Giving Tree, is for all ages, showing how a tree can nurture and support us throughout our lives. Silverstein’s simple drawings convey a human lack of reciprocity that could be shameful yet is somehow touching. The trees give so much to us and now and then we pause and notice and appreciate it.

A 1942 book called Tree in the Trail charmed me in my youth with its Native American version of reciprocity with a cottonwood tree and how such a tree could “witness” 224 years of history. But reading it now I cringe at the stereotypes of Indians, Spaniards and others depicted by Holling Clancy Holling.

A better source for Native American stories about trees is Keepers of Life: Discovering Plants Through Native American Stories and Earth Activities for Children by Michael J. Caduto and Joseph Bruchac. They write, “Living in balance, in many Native North American cultures, means to live within and honor the circles of life. A circle of giving and receiving becomes part of our relationship with the natural world when we take only what is necessary to survive and return the remains of plants and animals to the earth with gratitude.”

A Seneca thanksgiving for trees is included in the book, ending with “Let us put together our thoughts that we will always be grateful” for the medicine, firewood, and other gifts of trees.

Haudenosaunee Tree of Peace illustrated by John Kahionhes Fadden

As for picture books, The Happiness Tree: Celebrating the Gifts of Trees We Treasure by Andrea Albin Gosling and illustrated by Lisa Burnett Bossi is lovely in every way and suggests values we can learn from the trees. For instance, a White Pine stands for courage. The last page recommends, “Plant a Happiness Tree on Arbor Day.”

Another good one for Arbor Day is Janice Udry’s A Tree Is Nice. Marc Simont’s illustrations show the many things children like to do among trees. My favorite is, “We can sit on a limb and think about things.” The book won a Caldecott award.

I’ll end with a quote from a 2015 novel for young adults, Trampoline, by Robert Gipe. An edgy book about a strip-mined town, the main character fights for her life in a devastated landscape. Yet she finds renewal in her Kentucky hills: “The trees and the roll of the earth held me up like the ridge holds the cloud from passing so it can pour down rain. The vines and the rabbits and the squirrels and the orange lizards out on the rocks after a storm–all those things I’d forget when people dragged me down–I needed them close and always.”

Who lives in this tree?

Big cedar tree in Freeland, Washington

Shrink-Wrapped World: the Anthropocene

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“If all the plastic in the last few decades was clingfilm, there would be enough to put a layer around the whole Earth,” said paleobiologist Jan Zalasiewicz, quoted in Economic Times. “We now make almost a billion tons of the stuff every three years.”

Not only have we “shrink-wrapped” the Earth in plastic, we’ve paved and entombed huge portions of it in cement. More than half of all concrete ever made was produced in the last twenty years. Our construction and convenience products are taking over the world, with only 25% of ice-free land left in its natural state. Rates of wildlife extinction are rising.

British geologist Colin Waters, co-author of a Science article on the subject, says, “What this paper does is to say the changes are as big as those that happened at the end of the last ice age. This is a big deal.”

Scientists are discussing whether we are in a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, defined by human activity. Just as the Holocene Epoch can be seen in Earth’s sediment as the end of the last ice age, humans have, in a very short time, created sufficient significant markers to call for the naming of a new epoch. Some say it started with the Industrial Revolution while others mark its beginning with the presence of isotopes, measurable all over the planet, from nuclear weapons testing after WWII. Plastics and concrete are other lasting markers.

Arizona

Remember looking at layers of sediment in geology class or while visiting someplace like the Grand Canyon? It’s awesome to realize we are looking back in time at evidence of events long past. Future generations, if there are any thousands of years from now, will be able to look back at what we left behind and measure time as well. What will they think of the choices we made?

Geological Periods

Basic information about the Anthropocene proposal and terminology are here.

Update 2022

Deep Earth: Some Cool Stuff and Some Hellabad Stuff

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An Aboriginal Arunta man sits near Uluru (Ayers Rock) in Australia.

When push comes to shove, and it’s predicted that it will within the next fifty years, the earth’s wrestling match at the Cascadia subduction zone is bound to wreak havoc along the Pacific coast of the United States. Kathryn Shulz wrote an article in the New Yorker called “The Really Big One” that lays out a scenario of earthquakes and tsunamis as one planetary plate gives way to another. That sobering prediction sent me in search of some better news about the dirt under my feet.

Fossil at Burpee Museum of Natural History

Probably the coolest things the layers of the earth can cough up are fossils. Last week I saw a bunch of magnificent fossilized bones (and casts of bones) at the Burpee Museum in Rockford, IL. Some of the critters swam around here during the Cretaceous Period when shallow seas covered this land. Their shells and bones helped form our limestone and other sedimentary rocks. I especially enjoyed the fossils of little turtles and one huge guy, as you can see below.

This sea turtle fossil is the size of a Smart Car.

A couple days after visiting the museum, I went to Cave of the Mounds in Blue Mounds, WI, and saw some more fossils, including a six-foot long shell in the ceiling of the cave. That’s another cool thing about deep earth: caves.

Caves are literally cool. It was 90 degrees outside on July 30, yet the cave was 50 degrees, as it is all year round. That’s how our geothermal heating and cooling at our cabin works. We have pipes going 150 feet straight down, till they hit rock, and we make use of that temperature difference to control the comfort of our home.

Cave of the Mounds, Wisconsin

This particular cave was discovered August 4, 1939, while blasting the hillside for limestone. Because the cavern was enclosed before that discovery, there are no bats, blind fish, or albino spiders in there, like in some other caves. The only life forms are the tiny spring tail insects that seep in with the rain. I saw specks of their nymphs in a pool of clear water.

With all the stalactites and stalagmites growing toward each other in that cave, you can see how the earth is always changing, both on the surface where we walk around and deep inside where we rarely notice Mother Earth’s activities until they erupt to the surface. No wonder many people consider Gaia, our planet Earth, to be alive.

As that big turtle, archelon ischyros, found out, changes happen. Let’s prepare for the bad ones and appreciate the others. May you stay safe through it all.

The elder by the Uluru cave might tell us something like this.

Stalactite with calcite crystals, Cave of the Mounds

Would We Maybe Miss Mosquitoes?

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It’s a buggy time of year and I’m feeling swarmed and itchy. Mosquitoes are in the family Culicadae and a common genus around here is Anopheles. In Greek, ano means “not” and ophelos means “profit.” By that term, mosquitoes are defined as “useless.”

The persistent critters seemed worse than useless to me when I was a kid trying to sleep and, no matter how many I swatted, there was always one last mosquito in my room humming the lullaby of the damned. I’d wake up with more itchy bumps the next morning.

Those bloodsuckers (ectoparasites) are the female mosquitoes. They need the blood to produce eggs. The male sticks to sipping nectar and then swarms with the other guys at dusk until a female enters their midst to mate, an aerial bar scene. A couple weeks later, they die.

I like to think that all the species in nature have their purposes and that we would miss them if they became extinct. Bugs and other pests probably inspired humans to create shelter and clothing, so maybe architects, builders, and the garment industry should feel beholden to them. Also, without female mosquitoes, there would have been no Jurassic Park! Their little bodies embedded in amber were the vessels for the DNA of long-extinct dinosaurs, brought back to life, or so the story goes.

I set out to look for arguments on behalf of mosquitoes and couldn’t find a single convincing one. Instead I found some widespread consensus that mosquitoes would not be missed if they were eliminated from the earth. According to experts, their ecological niche would be filled in no time. Certain animals that have evolved to eat the insects and their larvae, such as the mosquitofish, would miss them for a while until they found other prey. Animals that I thought depended on a diet of mosquitoes, like bats, would not be all that affected. When scientists examined the contents of bat bellies, they found mostly moths and only 2% mosquitoes in there.

A million people die each year from malaria carried by mosquitoes, and that is just one of many deadly diseases they spread. In the Midwest, we worry about getting West Nile virus. Will we ever wipe out disease-carrying mosquitoes or will they wipe us out first? We can tell them to buzz off and zap them with insecticide and, within a few generations, within less than a year, their species can develop resistance to it.

The Culcidae tribe has been around for at least 79 million years and it looks like they’ll be buzzing around our ears for a few zillion more.

Adopted by Dogs

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“Where you goin’?” our dog, Cassie, seems to be asking as she watches through the screen.

Cassie keeps an eye on me from the porch.

Cassie keeps an eye on us from the porch.

Turns out canines have been tracking our whereabouts for tens of thousands of years. DNA studies indicate that dogs, Canis familiaris, branched off from wolves at least 30,000 years ago.

My fuzzy photo of a wolf in Ely, Minnesota

We humans thought we domesticated dogs, or at least that’s what I was taught in school. But research in the last few years indicates that dogs domesticated us, or, at the very least, it was a mutual process. Our ancestors didn’t simply choose the boldest and cuddliest wolves to train; the wolves chose us for their own purposes as well. Brian Hare, author of The Genius of Dogs, asserts that we did not adopt wolves and turn them into dogs; it is more likely that “wolves adopted us.”

It must have been the most patient and tolerant wolves that were willing to approach our campfires. Hare says, it was “survival of the friendliest.” (Isn’t that a refreshing alternative to “survival of the meanest” scenarios played out in media, business, and politics? Maybe we can learn from our dogs in this regard.) Those are the canines that evolved into our furry friends today.

I don’t know about you, but I never use my dog as a reserve food supply or to hunt or to keep warm at night, all of which our ancestors did. We’re companions. The two vestigial functions of dogs that I share with my ancestors is as an alarm system and occasional cleaning and sanitation service. Those pesky food spills on the kitchen floor disappear in seconds!

Dogs benefit from their association with humans by having secure homes, reliable food supplies, and someone to pick off their burrs and ticks. Canis familiaris has also managed to avoid being hunted to extinction as we’ve done to Canis lupus. In fact, dogs flourish in so many forms and places, their overall success as a species seems guaranteed. In spite of too many cases of animal abuse which need to be addressed, our pets are getting quite a lot for what they gave up in the wild.

White German Shepherd relaxing in a warm house on a cold day

Our white German Shepherd relaxes in our warm house on a cold day.

Part of the family

However we arrived at this extraordinary friendship between people and dogs, I’m hoping our evolution on both sides is moving us toward a more perfect union of harmony and interdependence. If we can’t make peace for the sake of our fellow humans, maybe we can do it for our four-legged friends. After all, we have thumbs. They’re counting on us.

See the American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for information about protecting animals. For more on dogs’ wild relatives, see the International Wolf Center site.

With Modern Agriculture, Green Giant Not So Jolly

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In southern Minnesota, the Jolly Green Giant soars more than fifty-five feet above Interstate 90. Though modeled after the Green Giant brand “mascot,” he was erected by the Blue Earth community and stands for the prominence of crop production in the area. Many farmers here make a good living from the soil, but often at a cost to the health of the environment and themselves that is not so jolly.

Green Giant

Through hail and thunderstorm, I drive over the flat plains of my home state. In Martin County, I talk with a resident who says, “This is the biggest ag’ county in the state, maybe the whole country.” Evidence of agriculture is all around us in vast brown fields. It’s April and the bare dirt awaits cultivation of corn and soybeans.

Average farm size around here is 443 acres. The chemicals and machinery of modern agriculture mean bigger farms with fewer workers required. The population of the 730 square mile county is just over 20,000 and has been decreasing.

Cancer, however, is on the rise. The county lies west of Rochester, home of the famous Mayo Clinic. “At Mayo Clinic,” the local guy says, “they see cancer and they say, oh, yeah, you’re from Martin County.” Farmers here tend to make liberal use of insecticides, pesticides, and all those “cides” that can also lead to subtle, slow, unintended homicide and suicide. They seem to be killing themselves and their neighbors with poisons.

Do such toxins remain in frozen peas and corn we buy at the grocery store? That concern is one reason I buy organic when I can.

According to Scorecard that keeps track of pollution by area, Martin County is known as one of the worst counties in the United States for “air releases of suspected carcinogens,” along with endocrine toxicants and immunotoxicants. In other words, substances designed to disrupt hormonal and immune systems in pests can affect us, too.

While people on huge combines and tractors profit off the land, they repay Mother Nature by altering just about every inch of her. How do people earn an income while protecting an ecological system? Is recovery possible? Martin County is forever changed and will probably never be the prairie land it once was. The bison and other factors that helped create the prairies are too long gone for that. Poet Wendell Berry writes, As the machines come and the people go/ the old names rise, chattering, and depart. We humans have the knowledge and ability to live well with the land. Berry says, do not tell it to a machine to save it. Reach back to other times and reach out to other cultures, beyond the corporate giants to people themselves. The land teaches us, if we watch and listen. If we take time.

Landscapes are slow to change, but we humans can change today by treating environments as our communities rather than our commodities. In A Sand County Almanac (1949), Aldo Leopold wrote that our land ethic depends on our attitude: “man the conqueror versus man the biotic citizen; science the sharpener of his sword versus science the searchlight on his universe; land the slave and servant versus land the collective organism.” There is no separation between our health and the health of the soil, air, and water upon which we depend.

Let me end on a hopeful note for Earth Day (and Week). The Martin County resident tells me he’s raising bees now. He thought about the needs of the bees and started growing native plants for them to visit and pollinate. One conscious, sensible, loving step leads to another, and that is jolly good.

Midwest farm

Here’s the Kingsmen’s goofy song about the Green Giant, ho ho ho.

March Snow

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Let me write about snow before it melts away with the coming of spring.

Sled on a snowy day in Huntley, Illinois

I like snow! I’m not a golfer but I spent a good part of of my childhood at the Northfield Golf Club because it had the nearest sledding hill. My friend, Amy, and I would drag our sleds or snow saucers over to the golf course hill, just east of Prairie Street in Northfield, Minnesota. Covered in boots, snowpants, parkas, mittens, and ski masks, we immediately hit the slope as if it was our job to smooth the entire hill into a cohesive, slippery mass. We carefully walked up the same part of the hill each time so as to preserve the best runs. Other children came and went, but we were the most devoted sledders, often staying till after dark.

The owners of the golf course put up with us, even when we tromped into the club house to use the restroom. I remember coming out of a stall with my ski mask on as a startled woman said, “Oh, honey, the little boy’s room is across the hall.” I must have looked more like an ice-encrusted abominable snowman than a little girl!

Even as an adult, I am always on the lookout for a good hill. When our children were little, we had a slope behind our house that we enjoyed in winter. It was nothing, though, compared to what one Minnesota family did in their backyard! They engineered their own snow slide as if it was a winter water park. I understand why people in D.C. recently defied the ban on sledding on Capitol Hill. It’s a hill and it has snow. What else is it for?

Some of us like the cold, white stuff we get for a few months of the year. Here’s Robert Frost’s appreciation of snowflakes raining on his head:

DUST OF SNOW

The way a crow

Shook down on me

The dust of snow

From a hemlock tree

Has given me heart

A change of mood

And saved some part

Of a day I had rued.

Winter walk

Yes, the fresh, sparkly snow can shine through our shadows of glumness. When I start dwelling on the blooper reel of my life, ruing, to use Frost’s word, all my dumb mistakes, I need to reboot. Snow does that. It offers a clean slate and a shot at redemption, as Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919) wrote in these stanzas of her poem, March Snow:

When winter dies, low at the sweet spring’s feet

Let him be mantled in a clean, white sheet.

Let the old life be covered by the new:

The old past life so full of sad mistakes,

Let it be wholly hidden from the view

By deeds as white and silent as snow-flakes.

Ere this earth life melts in the eternal Spring

Let the white mantle of repentance fling

Soft drapery about it, fold on fold,

Even as the new snow covers up the old.

The end of winter used to be considered the start of the new year in some cultures. Hibernation is over. New life begins! It makes sense. As for me, until the snow is all gone, I’m going to get out there and enjoy it.

Good skiing weather

Napa Crush: Joys of Northern California

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Cabernet Grapes in Napa

I’m on the left coast of America and I love this fertile place beyond reason. Like the wine we sampled on our Schramsberg tour, Napa Valley contains joy that effervesces through my system, carried on the tiniest bubbles known to humans.

I lick the juice of sweet persimmon off my fingers so I can type this without sticking to the keys. Kaki, as my mother-in-law called them, hang from trees, round and shining like Christmas ornaments. I plucked one and brought it with me to our daughter’s cottage, cut the fruit into bright orange wedges and sucked the flesh right off the skin.

Persimmon at Larkmead Vineyard

The vineyards stretch luxuriously here, the way cornfields do back home. This cottage, in fact, is in a vineyard. In October its Cabernet grapes were crushed into nectar of the gods. Now we can pick the stray blue-black orbs left behind and crush our own. My daughter’s boyfriend brings me a Mason jar of the stuff to swig and it is divine. I’m going out on a limb here saying this, but who needs the fermentation? It’s mighty fine as is. Alex will make it into “cranbernet,” his version of cranberry sauce, for our dinner. I swipe the ink of grapes off my lips and continue typing. But I am at a loss for a way to turn black and white characters into the burst of life and warmth that is California.

The smells alone undo me. Eucalyptus trees, yes. We smelled them when we went to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Then there was the straw scent of o-cha, green tea, in our cups as we sat in the Japanese Garden. But the year-round floral fragrances are what take me back to my family’s stay in Berkeley when I was four. Imprinted on me, coming from frozen Minnesota, were the flowers and fruit we could enjoy year round. Surrounding our clapboard house were fields of flowers where I wandered and looked for snails while my sisters went to school.

The California closet of my brain seems to hold potpourri from our family’s sabbatical year. Activated by each return trip, scent memories from my limbic storehouse make me goofy with delight as soon as I sniff the air. My mood is mellowed and my expectations are primed for more sensual delights to come. I feel woozy while I’m there and, upon departure, am struck by a longing the Germans might call sehnsucht and the Portuguese saudade, “the love that remains.” For the Japanese, this feeling is natsukashii, a good memory infused with melancholy, a nostalgia that is futokoro, felt in the heart.

We harvest Emily’s rosemary, marjoram and sage, to be rubbed with butter under the turkey’s skin, and carrots and peppers for my wild rice dish. Sweet potatoes are turned into latkes. I hear a buck bawling in the forest for a mate as we set the picnic table for our holiday dinner. Alex’s father serves curried persimmon soup and our outdoor Thanksgiving feast begins.

Whether in wine country or not, this state intoxicates me. My experiences of California tend to have all the elements of a memorable date: wine, succulent food, heart-stirring beauty, perfumed breezes, and scanty clothing. I feel in love and yet not committed. I will have a passionate affair, prone to quakes and upheavals, and then, honestly, I want to go back to the sturdy middle of the continent with its parkas, Sorel boots, and the smell of corn stalks plowed into the loam. Because it’s home.

(This piece is also available in the frisky and thoughtful online magazine, REALIZE.)

Golden Gate Bridge, San Fransisco

Awesome Life: Take Time to Savor

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Yes, you can get high on nature. And, doctor’s orders, you should, for your own happiness, let it blow your mind. The humbling emotion of awe can transform your life and revise your view of the world. About 75% of the time, the feeling is elicited by nature, according to Sierra magazine. It is an energized pleasure that seems almost on the brink of fear, touching infinity or at least something beyond ourselves.

What triggers awe? Flowers? For some people, yes. Clouds are ordinary yet can be seen as awesome, particularly at dawn and dusk.

As Scott Russell Sanders wrote in A Brief History of Awe (2006), witnessing a thunderstorm on his porch as a child first provoked the feeling in him. Sanders is a soulful environmental writer, sensitive to both brutality and beauty. He is as much a conscientious affirmer of life as he is a deeply conscientious objector to war. His memoir is a beautiful study of love for the world and its beings. His Earth Works essays continue in that vein.

Being awestruck is a good thing as researchers at Stanford confirmed and as described in this video. I remember walking with my husband for twenty miles through a misty fern forest and emerging onto a rocky beach of a New Zealand fjord. The view of mountains and sparkly water was spectacular. Taking the experience clear over the top were the yellow-browed penguins nearby, hopping from rock to rock. That was a big kind of awesomeness to be in an extraordinary place I’d never seen before with creatures that charmed the socks off us. But I also like the everyday experiences that fill me with a sense of the sacred. Seeing a pair of crows, common as they are, in a tree can be awesome, too. Crows and ravens are as intelligent as human toddlers and I view them as protectors, listening for their warning calls.

Pair of crows in a white pine tree.

Being grateful also has some benefits and is certainly enhanced by allowing ourselves to be awed and moved, as suggested here. Take time to smell the roses, a baby’s head, and your dog’s paws that smell like popcorn. Notice and acknowledge those who enhance your life.

While standing on the vast shore of Lake Superior, I take in the whole vista of sky, sand, and November breeze, and soak it in.

Lake Superior beach, November 2014

Then I turn my attention to the small miracles of agates and other stones along the beach. Whether or not I reach the worshipful level of awe, I take time to savor. And in savoring, I believe, is the salvation of the world.

Pebbles on the shore

Evening clouds

OF THE EARTH by Barbara Terao

"Our origins are of the earth. And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity." Rachel Carson

Category Archives: Planet Earth

Maine Sightings: Barbara in Bar Harbor

TREE BOOKS FOR KIDS & OTHERS

Shrink-Wrapped World: the Anthropocene

Deep Earth: Some Cool Stuff and Some Hellabad Stuff

Would We Maybe Miss Mosquitoes?

Adopted by Dogs

With Modern Agriculture, Green Giant Not So Jolly

March Snow

Napa Crush: Joys of Northern California

Awesome Life: Take Time to Savor

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