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My mother called the year’s first flowers snow queens. They seem unconcerned about what we name them or whether I see them. They offer their tiny purple to the world, noticed or not. Their silent presence alerts me to look for the first evidence of green buds on deciduous trees, waiting to uncurl leaves still forming. The forest ground becomes softer and warmer in March, though not in a reliable way. Another freeze could… READ MORE

I wake to a scintillating frozen dawn along the Oregon coast. I see ice crystals out my window, as first light accumulates. I have professional reasons for coastal travel, yet I also have a deeper responsibility than work: simply to notice and cherish the day.

I marvel at how much beauty we can experience just by rising a little earlier, or staying a little later, or filling in beauty in the cracks of a… READ MORE

Charles Dickens sent me a letter recently. Not directly or personally, of course. He’s been gone  longer than I’ve been alive. Yet I marvel at how his words have crossed centuries. Some just ended up in my house, nearly two hundred years after he published them in 1838 and 1839.

I’ll never truly trace how Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby ended up in my hands. It’s an edition published… READ MORE