Amelia and I have begun a discipline. I write something about our ancestral search. She reads my offering and makes a response. My words are often stories or research. Hers are poems. Hers change how I see the world. With one generation and nearly 40 years difference in perspective between us, our words – […]
Bear visiting the kitchen window at Birch Lake; bear portrait taken by Greg Hanson (Post-it notes are to remind birds that glass is hard.) Amelia, my adult child, and I are boarding flights June 15th, first to Helsinki and then to Oslo, all with the aim of arriving at a place between those two […]
My St. Paul friend and colleague, Tracy Kugler, has developed an online guide for a practice that I nudge you to explore. In chaotic times, we need places that calm us, that return our feet to the earth and our breathing to the wind. Your local park can be such a place. Tracy’s guide, Start with […]
I’ve learned a great deal about plants from Zoë Schlanger. We were in conversation with a roomful of others at Milkweed Bookstore in June. And now I’m making a pitch for you to read her book – The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. […]
My great-grandparents may never have said they were Swedish. Perhaps they said nothing more than that they came from Värmland County in Sweden and, standing back in silence, let others assume. The others were the ones who told me my grandma was a Swede from Värmland. None of them mentioned that Värmland was the forest […]
Pictured here the immigrant Anderson Family: Bottom row – Lars, Mabel, and Lisa; Top row – Mathew, Levi, and Alma The Mystery Even as children, my siblings and I knew we were mostly Norwegian. (We must have known we were legally Americans, but we never called ourselves that.) Our mother’s father (morfar in Norwegian) came […]
Grace Harnois – by lucky fate my daughter-in-law – hosts a super-cool podcast. Last month she invited me to talk with her about John Gardner’s Grendel because we have both had soft spots for Grendel and his tormented mother more than we have for that hard-hearted hero Mr. Beowulf. Grendel and his mom were likely […]
Some of you may remember from Watershed that one of my brothers was developing a method of using native Minnesota bacteria from swamps and Minnesota iron to remove sulfate from water that has been impacted by closed taconite mines. This process is of greater importance to me now since the lake I wrote about, Birch Lake, […]
