Sometimes I turn her around so she can look out the window.

I sat along the Gila River with a writing student, a scientist who studies virulent diseases, and she gave me a dire warning. At least she did it in a beautiful place. It's in my post today for The Last Word on Nothing.

Workshopping in the Gila in southern NM last week, that’s me on the left trying to pull words out of the air.

Who even dreams?

Sweet spot, getting the work done.

For those near to us, that’s the North Rim of the Grand Canyon you’re breathing right now. From 250 miles away, it smells like trees on fire.

The way to the lonely mountain.

Mountain shrines at night teeming with unseen spirits the place is alive.

Bashō in my hand Along Oigawa River Fishing for words

Look into my eye.

Last shed of sunlight an hour from home.

A month after running the Grand, one of the writing students on our trip, an artist, obviously, put her pencil work in the mail. You remember these rock angles? And the way the water goes calm for a mile or two before the next roar rises? This is what I love about human art. It takes you there.

Holed up at the library in Steamboat for a couple days writing, I had a conversation through a window this morning with a fledgeling crow while one of the parents cawed and cawed from a nearby branch, telling the kid to stay away from those damn writers.

In the numerous seasons of the year there’s this one, the late end of spring, past the cross-quarter of Beltane, more like summer but still like spring when the wild irises bloom. It’s one of my favorite fractional seasons, blink and you’ll miss it.

Taking the slow road home.

Today is the official publication date for my book on the night sky and if you’ve got a hankering for a hard, wild journey into the stars while firmly attached to the Earth, I urge you toward your nearest independent bookstore or Torrey House Press (avoiding Amazon for obvious reasons).

I’ve got a kid graduating high school today and the feels are significant. Yesterday we hiked to a sunset ridge and for at least twenty minutes, remaining unseen, we watched a lanky black bear and its cub amble along a ditch below us.

For the last week I’ve been holed up with my ma working while she got out her easel and oils and painted. “Progress?” I asked. “I put pencil to paper, yes,” she said. To the mothers lost, the mothers found, and mine touching her canvas with a brush on a sunny spring afternoon, happy Mother’s Day.

At the foot of a sagebrush, good morning. (spotted towhee)

Gates of Unaweep Canyon the rain.

Out of New York City, past the end of the Long Island Rail Road, the coast feels celestial with bright, polished marbles.

Hello, Atlantic Ocean.

Midnight foray in Manhattan: I got a first hardbound copy of my next book this evening from my publishers/editors (Torrey House Press) who also happen to be traveling to New York City. I’m hoping it might end up in yours, and also under curious circumstances.

A line of text in some ancient, geologic tongue…what does it say?

Word from deep in the Grand Canyon. Sound on.

Southward bound across the Navajo Nation, putting on the river tomorrow into the Grand Canyon with Amy Irvine. We’re teaching writing, tumbling words downstream till they all turn to sand.

Some people have skeletons in their closet, I’ve got skulls.

Ten below this morning, watching a heard of more than 500 elk cross the basin through a dazzling ice fog and here comes the sun!

First of the season.

From the other room I hear my love say, “You keep bringing in branches and sticks.” I feel in my hair and beard as a precautionary measure.

Resistance is elemental.

Every time or two I go out looking, I find sign of mountain lions. Yesterday brought good tracks and plenty of scat, the freshest I’ll describe as oak barrel stank. Yesterday also brought the first bear tracks I’ve seen this season adding a tingle to the air. The wild things are moving out there.

The Earth is a window on the sky.

When I went to find my kid this afternoon I came upon this animal curled up sleeping in a juniper nest, and yeah I can be proud of grades or upcoming high school graduation, but mostly it’s this.

The dark is getting smaller, the light bigger. Best be careful or the stars will go out. This is the subject of a new book of mine, “The Wild Dark: Finding the Night Sky in the Age of Light,” with Torrey House Press. Booklist gave it a starred review, calling it “enchanting, mournful, yet hopeful.”

Ligneous rock.

Morning in a draw, I-70 humming in the distance, fine people of the world racing this way and that.

In other, finer news today, meltwater trickling under ice in the high desert, sound on to hear the commentary.

A couple years ago when I was in Lithuania, the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag was flying all over the country. Ukraine is the firewall for the Baltic nations, so you can see why the flags were up: solidarity. Pic from last week at a protest in Utah: Ukraine should be showing up everywhere.

Standing at the gates of Zion.

Timekeeper, elk and snow.

We are experiencing what is called an extinction event. This is a foundational shaking that haphazardly pulls pillars of support. It impacts all living things regardless of color or creed. Red state, blue state, doesn’t matter. Fight it by flourishing and by being involved.

Gulf of Mexico on this sunny afternoon. The name first appeared on maps 475 years ago. In a country as freshly minted as ours, it’s a name that has lasted, carrying the imagination into the cup of the Yucatán, an arc of deep tropics that holds history in its hand.

A day that became hard to tell up from down, southern Florida.

This morning’s sunrise, Sea of Cortez, not a building, boat, or trail of a plane in sight. Just for a moment, tabula rasa. What would you do with a first breath?

It remembers an older sea.

Then there comes a day when you’re just about sick of yourself and you crawl out of your too tight skin hoping that this time you’ll be a raven or a sea turtle and you realize, again, this is exactly the animal you are.

Shovel like it means something.

Some days you’re looking for the way and it’s just a wild mess.

While walking through desert canyons, I took a rest in shade beneath a gallery of ancient images painted on the rock. In my boulder shade, I looked down and saw this woven coil, I'm guessing a thousand years old if not more. It remains where it was found.