Then as I thought about Hopkins’ words and kept looking around me, I understood what he meant. Gerald Manley Hopkins meant that speckled things or dappled things and striped things or brinded things are all around you, and they are beautiful in their own way.

[Read more →]

My own mountain is called Pusch Ridge but that is such a prosaic name for a huge everest that looks like a gigantic dinosaur. He is so much more than that, he of the hidden dragons.

[Read more →]

The main thing you notice about sequoia is that they are tall. You look up and they are tall as far as your eyes can see. They also have gigantic widths. People use to drive their cars through certain open tree trunks in the Sequoia National Forest before the park rangers became more ecologically-minded.

[Read more →]

valley flows the crystal River of Mercy peacefully quiet, reflecting lilies and trees and the onlooking rocks,things frail and fleeting and types of endurance meeting here and blending in countless forms as if into this one mountain mansion Nature had gathered her choicest treasures, to draw her lovers in close and confiding communion with her.

[Read more →]

The Grand Canyon seems like a gigantic statement for even Nature to make all in one mighty stone work. Wildness so Godful, cosmic, primeval, bestows a new sense of earth’s beauty and size…

[Read more →]

by Jane St. Clair Death Valley has this bad-ass reputation. The Hottest. The Driest. The Lowest spot in North America. It’s got Hells Gate and Furnace Creek. As you drive toward Death Valley, signs warn you — “Extreme Heat”  … “No gasoline for miles” … “You don’t want to go there” … “Are you crazy? […]

[Read more →]

I love the way butterflies slit themselves up into little black lines and then flash! –Open up those beautiful wide wings! One poet compared their wings to parasols opening,

[Read more →]

If I could offer you just one word to describe the way desert spring comes to the Sonora, the word would be “soft.” Spring walks into the desert on soft feet so quietly that you cannot hear her footsteps approaching. Sometimes she touches you as a soft warmth that brushes against your face like the memory of a lover’s caress. Desert spring enters soft here the Sonora, as soft as clouds scudding by in a nonthreatening sky.

[Read more →]

The moon during the lunar eclipse went fast-forward – 28 days of moon phases within a few hours. Then, of course, the eerily beautiful bright red moon glowed at the climax like an angry red planet. Something so beautiful could not last so once the red moon appeared, she undid herself by phasing out backwards.

[Read more →]

Trees are just there. Trees are just happy all day long – not wanting or striving or doing, just being, and constantly changing, alive and wonderful.The poet Wallace Stevens wrote, “Let be be the finale of seem.” He might have been writing about ice cream, but he might as well have been writing about trees.

[Read more →]