Crossing Nebraska

A couple of months ago I once again hiked the trail that, earlier in the spring, had inspired me to compose that very ominous post: When Faith in the Earth Betrays Us . This time, though, it was an entirely different experience. The air was calm. The leaves were full, and various luscious shades of green. Sure enough, ample evidence remained of the circumstances that had prompted me to write that earlier post. Numerous fallen trees and limbs still blocked the trail. But there was also much more abundant evidence that life would not be subdued. Life, it seemed during this hike, was indomitable. In fact, life was so indomitable, it seemed that the entire forest was literally breathing as one. Yes, literally! It started softly at first, almost inaudibly. The rhythmic rising and falling of sound became just barely perceptible only to disappear again amongst the chatter of birds and the rustling of leaves. When it returned it was a little bit louder, and distinctly like the s...

Nestled here at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, the air around my hometown is often laden with moisture rising up to become part of the clouds that form over the region and then rain back down again. This summer has been an especially wet one here, and when it hasn’t actually been raining, or storming, there have been beautiful billowing cumulus clouds streaming past overhead like I haven’t noticed in a long, long time. They’ve actually reminded me of very pleasant times during my childhood when I’d lay back on the cool grass, alone or with a friend, holding to my nose a wild onion freshly plucked from the earth while watching clouds slowly form and change and slip away against a backdrop of brilliant blue – pulling me with them deeper and deeper into the joyous reverie of watchfulness without separation.   Unfortunately, even as I’m reminded of this joyous childhood reverie – and slip into some adult approximation of it from time to time in the here a...

Sweltering summer afternoons such as these inevitably remind me of my childhood – the still air, the unrelenting sun, and the silence only intermittently punctuated by the ratcheting sound of a grasshopper in mid hop, or the unanswered call of a field sparrow, or the sticking sound that automobile tires make as they accelerate down an almost melting asphalt road. “How about we go fossil hunting?” I’d pose the question over the phone to my childhood friend, Charlie, or he to me. “What time?” was the usual response, neither of us needing much in the way of convincing when it came to such suggestions. “After lunch. One o’clock. Under the railroad trestle.” And so we’d meet in the shade of the old wooden bridge and ride our bicycles along the dusty trail to where the new highway cut through the layers of a limestone undergirded hillside. Once there, we’d make our way slowly, almost wordlessly along the fractured strata, carefully overturning the loose rock, becoming more ...