Loving life and the community of species that makes it possible

I began my career as a field ecologist studying sagebrush, grizzly bears, and wildfires, before falling in love with the stories revealed in the data. My writing on the relationships at the heart of life on Earth has appeared in magazines and newspapers from Audubon and Popular Mechanics to High Country News and the Los Angeles Times, and has been heard on public radio and the Martha Stewart Living Radio Network. I’m a columnist for Zone 4 and Colorado Central magazines.

Barry Lopez called my memoir Walking Nature Home "lovely, brave, inspiring."

My twelve books, including the memoir Walking Nature Home, explore the nature of life itself and where we humans fit in the grand dance of species that makes this numinous blue planet a nurturing home. My work has won national and regional awards including ForeWord Book of the Year, the Colorado Book Award and the Colorado Author’s League Award (twice). Reviewers have called my writing “graceful and moving,” “magic!,” and “rich in the wisdom of one come face-to-face with the fragility, beauty and poetics of everyday life…”

I’ve taught workshops on writing about nature and life at schools and writing festivals from the University of California-Riverside and Miami University of Ohio to Wofford College in South Carolina. Audiences as diverse as the International Xeriscape Conference, Collegiate Peaks Forum, Monte Vista Crane Festival, and the Walking Words Writing Festival have called my talks “inspiring” and “insightful.”

I coach individual writers, review manuscripts for university presses, and contribute to Audubon Magazine’s The Perch, Native Plants & Wildlife Gardening, and Story Circle Network’s HerStories.

I’m a Quaker, a step-mother, a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a mentor and a friend. I belong to an informal network of writers and artists who speak for the land, and to Story Circle Network, Women Writing the West, and Colorado Author’s League.

Wildflowers bloom on my formerly industrial site where the sun powers my house

I’m a passionate gardener who grows a bountiful organic kitchen garden, and also enjoys restoration landscaping, reviving blighted landscapes by reweaving native plant communities. My designs have been featured in the Rocky Mountain News, Zone 4, and on national and regional garden tours.

I live in a “terraphilic” house that my late husband, sculptor Richard Cabe, helped design and build. It’s a cozy and welcoming space heated by the sun–the sun generates its electricity, too–that sits a reclaimed industrial parcel in a high-desert valley with a spectacular view of the tallest stretch of the Rocky Mountains.

Follow my “love every moment” project, a daily haiku and photo on Facebook and Twitter!