nature – Susan J Tweit

Field Trips: Seeing Home Through New Eyes

Posted on June 6, 2018 | by Susan Tweit | Leave a Comment

For the past three weeks I've been crazy-busy even by my standards: Not only is my house renovation project going full-tilt-boogie, I'm working on a new book (more in another blog post) plus a feature article for Wildflower Magazine, and I've been caretaking TAC, a retreat center outside town.

The latter involves two trips a day to the center to feed two cats in two different residences, check on two guest houses, water gardens, and tend a few guests, plus help prepare for an event. The older cat puked in the house a few times, the traps caught mice, we got two inches of rain in about ten days, so for a while there was water everywhere; and a boiler pump in the main house failed during Memorial Day weekend. I raced out to the center at ten one night to shut off both the pump and the boiler. Never a dull moment…

So when my friend Tom came to town to visit from North Carolina, I jumped at the chance to use what spare time I had to take a few field trips and show him a part of the world he'd never seen.

One afternoon we drove down the South Fork Road, a paved and then gravel road that dead-ends where the South Fork of the Shoshone River issues from the mountains of the Washakie Wilderness. That valley, wide at its northern end near town, narrows to a gap in the Absaroka Range that has drawn me ever since I remember. I lived at the Forest Service work station near the end of the road one late summer and fall, a momentous period when I began to understand who I am and what I bring to this world.

In the background rises Carter Mountain, a long and high ridge that bounds the South Fork Valley on the northeast; those flowers in the foreground are Rocky Mountain iris (Iris missouriensis).

A few years later, when I was figuring out my then-new relationship with Richard and Molly, I set out from the trailhead at the end of the South Fork road, and walked solo through the mountains, emerging six days and 80 footsore miles later, my pack and spirits considerably lighter.

On that afternoon field trip with Tom, we stopped to admire the spring-green valley and its wildflowers (including the Rocky Mountain iris in the photo above), and scattered pronghorn grazing on sagebrush and new green grasses. We also counted several hundred cow elk in the hay pastures along the river.

Upper South Fork: I have walked and ridden over this valley and these mountains, inhaling their scents, cataloging their plants, and memorizing the shapes of rock and leaf and wing and hoof.

Seeing the valley through Tom's eyes on that leisurely field trip reminded me of what a magical place South Fork is. The high mesas, still snow-spotted , the deep canyons incised between them, the tall and twisting sagebrush along the river, the wildflowers… Some places etch themselves in memory, and no matter how long passes between visits, still welcome you back with a kind of cell-deep familiarity. South Fork is that place for me, the heart of the country I call home, a landscape as much a part of me as I am a part of it.

Another afternoon, we explored McCullough Peaks, the shale badlands east of town that are wild as the high mesas around South Fork, but on a smaller scale.

McCullough Peaks in spring-green finery

We saw one of the herd of feral horses who run free there, plus more pronghorn; plump sage-grouse hens, horned larks, lark sparrows, and other grassland birds; dozens of kinds of wildflowers, and by Tom's count, at least four rainbows (I didn't count: I was driving). We also braved some fierce mud, but we and Red slithered back to the pavement just fine at the end of the drive, exhilarated by our immersion in the nearby wild.

Indian paintbrush (Castilleja angustifolia var. dubia) and big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) in McCullough Peaks

On Monday, I took a whole day off and drove Tom on a big circuit of some of the most dramatic landscapes my home territory offers outside Yellowstone (which he had toured on his own the previous two days). We headed north to Red Lodge, Montana, and then followed US Highway 212 south up Rock Creek and over the Beartooth Plateau, the largest contiguous alpine plateau in North America.

The Beartooth Highway, an All-American Scenic Highway, switch-backing up the wall of Rock Creek to reach the plateau top.

Tom marveled at the switch-backing road as we ascended the near-vertical wall above Rock Creek, and then goggled at the sweeping views from up top, the dramatic glacier-carved geology, the crazy skiers hurtling down snow-filled chutes, the drifts walling the road in places (at 10,000 to 11,000 feet, winter lingers on the top of the plateau ), and the miniature tundra wildflowers, some just an inch or two high, dotting the wind-blown expanses.

Spring comes slowly to the alpine tundra at nearly 11,000 feet elevation near Beartooth Pass on the plateau.

Looking south from the Beartooth Plateau at the peaks North Absaroka Wilderness.

We followed Highway 212 off the south edge of the plateau into the North Absaroka Range east of Yellowstone, took a detour to tiny Cooke City for huckleberry ice cream bars and a stroll among the historic buildings. After that break, we turned back east and followed the Clarks Fork of the Yellowstone River downstream toward its dramatic canyon, passing Sunlight Basin, a long valley that cuts into the heard of the North Absarokas. We turned aside at Antelope Mountain to take a Jeep road as close as we could get to the edge of the canyon. (That's Red near Antelope Mountain in the photo at the top of the post.)

After crossing Sunlight Creek, we took the switchbacks up and over Dead Indian Pass, and back to the Bighorn Basin. The name of the pass between mountains and plains most likely honors Chief Joseph and his band of Nez Perce Indians, who fooled the US Army by descending from that ridge into the near-impassable Clarks Fork Canyon in their attempt to escape to Canada in 1877. (The Army caught them a month later, and "escorted" the 700 Nez Perce and their 2,000 horses to captivity at the Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho, a story that hurts my heart.)

The view from the top of Dead Indian Hill toward the plains of the Bighorn Basin, where the Army waited for the Nez Perce.

By the time we got home Monday evening, I was worn out from that long but glorious field trip. And Tom was hooked on the beauty of northwest Wyoming.

Looking at the photos I shot on our various field trips, I am struck by two things: First, how fortunate I am to to be able to spend time in this extraordinary country. And second, how much these wild mountains, valleys, and sagebrush basins shaped who I am, how I live, and my vocation of writing and healing this world.

Especially South Fork, the valley which opens wide its arms and welcomes me like a lover, suffusing my cells with that unmistakable combination of comfort and sheer joy that says simply, "home."

The South Fork Road, arrowing my heart home…

The Balm of Bobcats and Wildflowers

Posted on May 28, 2017 | by Susan Tweit | Leave a Comment

In times when the human world seems to have gone crazy, I head outside for the balm of nature nearby. I always return inspired and energized, humbled, and remembering (again) that life, the capital L kind, the web of interacting species which make this planet a vibrant sphere, is an astonishingly creative and tenacious community.

Tuesday, a baby Bobcat lured me outside. Not the feline kind with four paws and a deadly pounce, the diesel kind with tracks and a bucket. (That's a selfie of me grinning as I operate the machine.)

Knowing I had yard-healing to do, my contractor had put us on the waiting list at the rental center for the MT55, a walk-behind mini-bulldozer. On Tuesday morning, Jeff got the call that the machine was ours for the afternoon. I asked if I could play.

"Sure," he said. He showed me the throttle (a lever with a range between a turtle symbol and a jackrabbit symbol!), forward and reverse, how to steer the tracks, and how to use the bucket.

And then he set me loose. So there I was in my sandals, skirt, and nice sweater (I know, I know, but I was dressed for a meeting and I was very careful), moving and dumping fill, smoothing it with the bottom of the bucket, and running the baby dozer back and forth to tamp things down.

And grinning like a maniac, because using that baby Bobcat to mend the utility-trench scar in my backyard surely is fun. (Who knew?)

When Jeff came back, I had to go to my meeting. By the time I returned, he was at work scalping turf from the front yard for my lawn replacement project, carving out the paths and patio I had outlined with fluorescent green spray paint.

I grabbed a shovel and tidied edges, cut roots, and cleaned up stray bits of turf.

By the end of the evening, the two paths and the patio were ready for gravel, and the robin mama who insisted on building a nest over the side door to the garage had figured out that the newly scraped soil made perfect worm-foraging territory.

(She was completely unafraid of the noisy mini-dozer.)

Today I led the second wildflower walk I've offered in a week. A snowy winter and wet spring have made this one of the best bloom years in decades for the high desert, and I want share this ephemeral miracle–its beauty and its balm–with as many others as I can.

Wyoming big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata ssp. wyomingensis) dotted with sulphur yellow western wallflower (Erysium sp.) and prairie Junegrass

Including you. Here's a quick tour of what's blooming in my "nearby wild":

Bessey's locoweed (Oxytropis besseyi)

Fuzzytongue penstemon (Penstemon erianthus)–you've got to love that common name, which alludes to the furry stamen that leads bumblebees inside the flower

a fleabane (Erigeron sp.) I haven't identified yet

An annual lupine (Lupinus sp) that's only about three inches tall!

Scarlet guara or lizardtail (Guara coccinea)

And the adult bald eagle we unintentionally disturbed from her perch in a cottonwood tree on the canyon rim. Look for the white spot of bald eagle tail in front of the cliff mid-photo.

The wonder of nature–spring wildflowers, bald eagles, and all–is in just that flourishing of diverse forms of life, growing and blooming, hunting and eating, mating and dying, each in their own unique way. Spending time outside reminds us that even at our worst (and global climate change certainly falls in that column), we are not everything.

Life continues despite us. Not unchanged, but determined and creative, impelled by the need to thrive. In every corner and pocket and place.

That determined flourishing as exemplified by the myriad kinds of wildflowers blooming among the sagebrush this spring gives me great hope. Hope in the active sense, the sense of encouragement to redouble my work of spreading love in the world, of healing this battered planet and my species in the doing.

For me, that's the balm of bobcats and wildflowers, bald eagles and the miracle we call life.

scarlet globemallow (Sphaeralcea coccinea), also called cowboy's delight

Wildflowers: Hope for Hard Times

Posted on April 17, 2017 | by Susan Tweit | Leave a Comment

My word for this year is gratitude, chosen to remind myself to notice and appreciate the good in the world even in–especially in–the tough times. For me, one of the best ways to prompt myself to be grateful for this life and my place in it is to get outside, preferably out of town into wilder landscapes nearby.

Which is why after several weeks of difficult news personally and in the larger world, I went for a run yesterday afternoon instead of writing this blog post.

It worked: I started to smile when I spotted the first Easter daisies (the common name honors the season when this ground-hugging member of the Composite family blooms) flowering on the sagebrush-dotted bench between town and the Shoshone River, along with two kinds of desert-parsley, and abundant cushions of the unbeautifully named but quite lovely spiny phlox.

Easter daisy, Townsendia exscapa, is in the photo at the top of the post; below is spiny phlox, Phlox hoodii. Notice the native bee pollinating the starry white phlox flowers on the left side of the photo.

This afternoon, a new friend and neighbor, Jane, took me on a hike up in the Shoshone River Canyon, ten minutes from town, where she had seen even more wildflowers than I saw on my Easter-afternoon run. I don’t normally play hooky on a work-day, but my intuition said loudly, “Just go!”

And what a wonderful ramble it was: We began near the Shoshone River, rushing cold and cloudy with spring runoff, and climbed up through layers of rounded glacial cobbles, soft tan shales, cliff-forming ivory and gray limestone, and then followed a draw up through more shale layers toward a distant cliffs of limestone stained pinkish-red by iron leaching from the rocks.

The wind sweeping down the canyon was chill, the sun warm, the sky blue with fingers of cloud appearing frm the west. I could feel my spirits rise just being outside.

We saw wildflowers right away, clinging to the steep walls of in the canyon, including the blue-purple Penstemon nitidus (waxleaf penstemon) in the photo above.

As we turned up the draw and away from the road, the real show began. Two kinds of desert parsley hugged the ground, one sulfur yellow (leafy wild parsley, Musineon divaricatum in the photo below), the other creamy with purple accents (salt and pepper, or Lomatium dissectum).

And then Jane spotted the first stunning carmine flowers of desert paintbrush (Castilleja angustifolia var. dubia). First just one stalk, and then clumps of stalks, and soon we saw neon-bright paintbrush stems everywhere in the grassland around us, including growing right through the wind-sheered form of a Wyoming big sagebrush in the photo below.

Can you tell by its brilliant red color and tube-shaped floral bracts that desert paintbrush is a hummingbird-pollinated plant? Even from high overhead, that flash of red would be hard to miss, especially for hovering migrants needing a fuel stop.

Then I spotted a magenta dot on the grassy hillside above the draw, and another and another. Shooting stars! (Dodecatheon pulchellum in the language of science, and one of my all-time favorite wildflowers.)

I tried to shoot an individual shooting star with its dark “beak” of anthers and back-swept pink petals, but it wouldn’t hold still in the wind.

Just up the drainage a ways, I spotted another favorite wildflower, Nuttall’s violet (Viola nuttallii), host plant for one of the classic sagebrush-grassland butterflies, Coronis Fritillary (Speyeria coronis).

We wandered uphill, finding more wildflowers, looking at rocks, and just enjoying being outside. Jane found some limestone with mussel shell fossils, and her Golden Retriever found a toothsome chunk of deer pelt to carry and chew.

We were discussing whether to follow a game trail farther up the drainage toward the cliffs in the distance when I looked up the canyon.

“Those clouds fingering over the ridge from the West look serious,” I said, pointing. Jane agreed that it was probably time to turn back.

A rainwater-pitted limestone boulder growing four kinds of lichen (one is silver-gray, one blaze orange, one flagger-yellow, and the smallest is black).

We didn’t hurry, taking our time to admire more wildflowers, rocks, and a trio of mountain bluebirds that appeared on a juniper snag below us, one sky-blue male and two gray females. By the time we reached the dirt road, the wind was blowing hard down the canyon, the warm sun had gone behind clouds growing from the West, and the temperature had dropped at least ten degrees.

When we hit the paved road in the canyon bottom just below the river, we were glad to turn out backs to the wind, and to the fat drops of cold rain beginning to fall. In the time it took us to walk the last quarter-mile to the car, the wind began to gust so hard we were bent over, the rain changed to a full-out deluge mixed with hail, and the rapids in the river below threw off a fine mist of cold spray.

Once in the shelter of her car, we laughed about being soaked on our backs and dry on front–the contrast between windward and lee sides very evident.

Ten minutes later, I was in my own cozy house, shivering just a little from being half-soaked, and still smiling. Even the tick I found when I changed into dry clothes didn’t dent my joy.

And now, as I look over my wildflower photos to share them with you, I am still smiling, still grateful to be part of this wondrous world.

Taking time to nurture our spirits is always important, especially when the news is grim and life full of rocky spots.

So please give yourself the gift of doing whatever makes you smile, and makes your heart sing. It’ll do us all good.

What Home Feels Like

Posted on March 27, 2017 | by Susan Tweit | Leave a Comment

Back when Molly was in middle school and high school, we lived in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in the Chihuahuan Desert just 35 miles north of the US-Mexico border. (There we are in the photo above in grove of native Mexican elder trees in our backyard. My hair was still red and long then, Richard hadn't started shaving his head, and Molly had a cat named Hypoteneuse.)

Late-spring and early summer temperatures in Las Cruces can easily soar into the triple digits. Whenever I would turn woozy and white in the heat, Richard would tease me: "You're my favorite Norteña."

The literal meaning of Norteña is a female from the North, which I am (I was born in northern Illinois at 42 degrees N latitude). In the Spanglish spoken in the border region, Norteña could also be a mild insult, meaning a foreigner, someone who doesn't belong.

Which was true as well, though in the seven years we spent in Las Cruces, I tried to belong: I studied the history, natural history, and culture of our desert region. I wrote four books about the desert, including my favorite, Barren, Wild and Worthless, my first excursion into what I didn't know then was memoir; plus dozens of articles, and hundreds of weekly radio commentaries. I led nature walks, worked on restoration projects, and co-founded a book festival about the border region with my friend and co-honcha Denise Chávez, novelist and visionary extraordinaire.

Still, I never quite acculturated to life at 32.32 degrees North. My body didn't love the heat; my immune system didn't love the wind-blown clouds of pollen from the non-native species, including the mulberry trees planted throughout town for welcome shade. My diurnal rhythms were confused when summer days weren't long and winter days were.

When we moved north to Salida, Colorado, Richard's childhood home, in what he considered "that cold state way up north" (at 38.5 degrees N), I was relieved. Salida had, I thought, the best of the Southwest and enough of the Rockies to feel like home. And it did, while he was alive.

After he died though, I grew more and more restless. I missed… something. I traveled more, trying to figure out what I was looking for. It wasn't until I spent two weeks volunteering on an ecological restoration project in Yellowstone National Park (digging out invasive weeds), that I realized what should have been obvious.

Grubbing houndstongue, an invasive perennial, from around the base of big sagebrush in northern Yellowstone.

I was homesick.

This Norteña missed summer evenings so long it feels like it will never get dark, until night suddenly swallows the twilight, and short winter days. The sweetly turpentine-like smell of sagebrush after warm rains. The sound of robins cheer-ee-o-ing at dawn in early spring.

The pell-mell rush as the days lengthen, and then suddenly the grass is green and all the birds sing a nearly operatic daily chorus. Until summer and they go silent in the exhausting work of feeding voracious young, when wildflowers bloom one after the other after the other in bee-mad meadows. And elk calves honk for their mothers.

Silvery lupine and Wyoming indian paintbrush blooming among big sagebrush

The sound of male elk bugling that wheezy nasal challenge in fall, as bighorn sheep males duking it out with a loud cracking of colliding foreheads. (Such guys!) The sour-sweet smell of fallen aspen leaves wet in the first snow.

The silence of winter nights; the howl of blizzard winds. The bite of sub-zero air on bare skin. The stars crackling bright against skies so dark they seem to swallow the earth.

A gnarled old big sagebrush shrub hanging on through winter

After I moved home to Cody between blizzards in January, some part of me that had been tense and alert for decades relaxed. The slant of the light at this latitude (45.5 degrees N, the same as Portland, Oregon, Chicago, Illinois, and the Gulf of Maine), felt right.

The blue winter twilights, so soothing after the dazzle of sun on snow during the day. The wind whooshing in the spruce trees in my yard; the resiny smell of spruce sap as the days began to warm. The sagebrush on the hill behind my neighborhood, their small evergreen leaves gradually turning from winter's silver-gray to silver-green again.

And now that the robins are back from their southern winter homes, their cheerfully fluting voices wake me. I lie in bed in my snug spot among the big spruces and my heart fills with joy. Home for me is more than people and memories. It is the light, the rhythm of the seasons, the smells and sounds of life going about its business.

It is something I feel in my cells, a kind of inner contentment at being in the place that is just right for me, inside and out.

Richard and I loved each other with our whole hearts. But born in Arkansas, raised in Salida, Haiti, and South Texas, my southern guy never understood the call of my particular North. Perhaps he would if he were here with me to get to know the place, but he isn't.

And in this bittersweet journey, I feel very fortunate to have found my way back home on my own.

My bedroom (still unfinished, but quite snug)

The Three Rs: Running, Renovation, Revision

Posted on March 19, 2017 | by Susan Tweit | Leave a Comment

I went for a run today, my first since I moved home to Cody two months and two days ago. I would say it felt great to be running again, but my relationship with running is much more complicated than that.

I need to run, something I know intellectually. But it takes a lot of emotional energy to talk myself into it, each time. I have an amazing ability to find excuses and wimp out. And then I feel bad because I didn’t run.

Once I get going though and find my pace, I feel pretty good, except when I run out of breath and don’t. Still, the fact that I’m out and running keeps me going, both because I am competitive and hate to quit, and because I feel pretty darned saintly to be exercising.

The best part is after I finish, when I feel simply and unambiguously great, my body tired, but loose and limber, my mind righteous, and my spirits high because running takes me outside, and as my artist-friend Sherrie York says on her website, “outside fuels our insides.” Time in nature is the best medicine for body, mind, and spirit.

Today’s run wasn’t long–I did about 2.5 miles through quiet streets and down the hill to the upper bench above the Shoshone River where it winds in its shallow canyon past town. I ran through fragrant sagebrush, looking for signs of spring in the still-winter-brown high desert landscape, like the mat of dwarf phlox in the photo above, the living parts of the aged mat greening up.

I followed the city-maintained river trail with its great views of the surrounding Bighorn Basin landscape until its end, and then I headed back, slowing to a walk for the switchbacks up the steep hill, and then running through city streets to home.

(The photo at the top of the post is from that river trail, looking southwest to Spirit and Rattlesnake mountains on the way to Yellowstone; the photo above is looking down-river in the opposite direction toward McCullough Peaks, a badlands wilderness northeast of Cody.)

On the renovation front, the biggest progress this week has been in the attic, where my contractor, Jeff, has been adding vents so the attic can breathe, which is important for all sorts of reasons, including letting the roof cool down in summer, and keeping mold from growing up there.

The other big change is the small bathroom taking shape in my bedroom, with a washer-dryer closet next to it, and a narrow linen closet between. When it’s all finished, I’ll have my own little suite–bedroom, bath, laundry, and my office opening off the bedroom.

The unused end of my bedroom before, with my office on the right.

And now, with the walls of the bathroom and laundry center taking shape, the plumbing and wiring roughed in.

Looking the other direction at my bed and its corner of windows that makes me feel like I’m sleeping in a treehouse…

On the writing front, I finished a feature article for Wildflower Magazine, and when I turned it in, my editor wrote back to say she loved it, “and thanks for making my job easier.” That’s music to any writer’s ears!

The more difficult part of my writing week was yet another rejection for my memoir, Bless the Birds, with a lovely note from the editor who said the writing was beautiful, the story touching and engrossing, and the characters and sense of place powerful. But she didn’t want it.

After listening to a webinar with Brooke Warner, publisher of SheWrites Press, I think I know what’s wrong and why despite all of the praise for this memoir of my heart, no editor has snatched it up: it’s the economics of publishing today. Memoirs normally run between 70,000 and 80,000 words, and Bless the Birds is 97,000 words, albeit downsized significantly from 125,000 in last summer’s intense revision.

Brooke explained the money end in a way I hadn’t heard it before. Sure, she said, a memoir or novel can be longer, but when an editor is making the calculations to sell a manuscript to the publication committee, she or he has to justify additional length in terms of some kind of great platform to drive sales, because the longer a book is, the more it costs, “and margins in publishing are already thin.”

A manuscript of more than 80,000 words, Brooke said, simply costs too much to produce. And then she added for me what was the kicker, “and people are reading shorter and shorter these days,” in part, she explained, because they’re reading in snatches of time between other commitments, or on a mobile device.

So I’ve made the difficult decision to clear time in my schedule and dive back into a manuscript I thought I was done with. My aim: shrink the word count by more than 20 percent and make the story stronger and more compelling, more universal, as I do so.

And not shred my heart along the way; this is a love story, but it’s a painful one. I owe it to the guy in the photo below, and the life we made even as brain cancer ended his, to get the story right so it can help us all live our days well and with grace, whatever our path.

Richard Cabe, 1950-2011

PS: My apologies about the issues with the comment function on this blog. It’s always been annoying, and now it doesn’t work at all. Sigh. Another thing to deal with in time, and thanks for your patience!

What to Do Now?

Posted on November 13, 2016 | by Susan Tweit | Leave a Comment

Every morning, I post a haiku and photo on social media: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. That observation in words and imagery of a moment in time, of the natural world, of a bit of beauty is my way of reminding us all to take time to engage with the real world beyond our digital devices. To be aware and mindful, to be grateful for the miracle that is life on this numinous, breathing planet.

Wednesday morning, after the election, I was moved to post a statement in haiku form, rather than my usual poem. (I’ve written about the rules of classical haiku before; here’s a reminder if you’re interested.)

what to do now?

stand for kindness, compassion, respect

for all on earth

That statement felt right at the time, and still feels right. My mission in life is to reconnect us all with nature and its power to heal, inspire, and inform. Research shows what we might guess intuitively: time spent in nature–the more natural the better–is a powerful cure, restoring our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health.

Nature is also a teacher, showing us the value of diversity (ecosystems comprised of more kinds of species are generally healthier and more stabile than those with few), cooperation (species cooperate as much as they compete), and what I would express as hope (life finds creative ways to continue, though not always the way we would most prefer).

As I know by my own experience with our formerly decaying industrial property and its block of urban creek, restoring nature can revitalize our neighborhoods and communities, clean the water and air we depend on, and provide homes and food for the wild species who are our partners in making earth a nurturing place. It can in fact, remind us that miracles are possible, given time, thoughtful action, and a loving and persistent commitment to the work.

So as I’ve gone through this post-election week, writing, talking with friends and family, hugging strangers, and taking long walks around Santa Fe, I’ve kept that haiku-form statement in my mind. It helps to have something positive to focus on.

Today I spent some time with the migrating salmon sculpture that Richard loved to visit whenever we came to Santa Fe. I thought about how salmon smell their way home to their natal streams from thousands of miles out in the open ocean, how they swim upstream to get to their spawning grounds, leaping waterfalls if necessary.

And I thought about these carved granite salmon sculptures, forever swimming upstream in the waterless high desert. “Doing the work” as my friend and fellow writer Steve Edwards said tonight on Twitter.

I am re-committing myself to doing my work, to my mission to reconnect we humans with nature, our home and teacher. I am more determined than ever to do that work with kindness, compassion, and respect for all. With, as I like to say, my heart outstretched as if it were my hand.

Walking home to the casita where I am staying this month thanks to the generosity of the Women’s International Study Center, I looked overhead and noticed that next year’s leaf buds are already swelling on the cottonwood trees. Those cottonwood trees are doing the work, steadily continuing in the business of life–making food, growing, healing their wounds, reproducing, and when the time comes to move on, moving on to leave room for new life.

That’s heartening. Life continues.

****

If you’re in northern New Mexico, please join me and my fellow WISC resident, playwright DS Magid, for a presentation about our work at Collected Works Bookstore this Wednesday, November 16, at 6:00 pm. DS and a local actor will read her 10-minute play about May Sarton and the boulder in her garden, and then DS will talk about her project here, a longer play on Sarton and gender issues, among other themes. (A strikingly relevant theme.) I’ll talk about the book I’m working on, The Ditch & The Meadow: The Power of Native Plants and Passionate Plantswomen to Restore Communities and Mend the World. (Also pretty darned relevant.) I hope to see you there!

Exploring Creativity: Musings Journal

Posted on October 2, 2016 | by Susan Tweit | Leave a Comment

When I took Sherrie York’s field journal workshop at Rocky Mountain Land Library‘s Buffalo Peaks campus in August, I came home inspired and vowed to make sketching a part of my creative routine. “I’ll do a few sketches every week,” I told myself.

And… I didn’t. Of course I have good excuses: writing and workshop deadlines got crazy. In September, I was on the road most of the month, driving almost 5,000 miles in just over three weeks. And so on.

Still, I could have made the time and I didn’t. Clearly, I needed a nudge.

So when my neighbor, Lisa DeYoung of Mountain Mermaid Studios, mentioned the other day that she had finished the new edition of her Musings Journal, I bought one on the spot.

Today I took time to play with it. (Lisa offers two versions of this hand-designed tool for creative play: a daily one dated with the months of the the year, and an undated one. I bought the latter so I wouldn’t feel guilty about missing a few weeks now and again.)

Pages in the undated journal, just waiting for me to fill those rectangles with something…

I took my journal and my trusty mechanical pencil out to the front steps to think about where to start. A comma butterfly fluttered in and landed on the rabbitbrush near me and began to feed. It sipped nectar from one flower cluster, crawled to the next, and sipped more.

I picked up my pencil and began a simple gesture drawing, sketching the general form with quick shapes, and then beginning to fill in the details. The comma was so cooperative that I had gotten the ragged outline of the wings and had begun on the somewhat complicated wing pattern when I looked up and…

The butterfly was gone.

Since the rabbitbrush hadn’t flown away, I sketched one of the small, compound flowers, and then took my journal inside. I dug out my favorite colored pencils and added color.

Derwent “inktense” colored pencils, which I love for the tin they come in as well as their great feel and handling.

I even colored in the shapes Lisa had drawn as a playful border for the page, and thought wryly as I did that my kindergarten report card probably said something like, “Very enthusiastic, but cannot stay in the lines.”

Which is quite true about my approach to life as well: show me a line or a wall or a boundary of any kind, and I’ll be the one quietly figuring out how to stray beyond it.

When I finished coloring, I made some notes (ever the scientist, observing and recording those observations), and looked at my first “creative play” page. My butterfly sketch isn’t finished–the comma flew away mid-pattern–but it pleased me, which is important.

The butterfly was actually perched upside down as it fed, so I drew it that way…

I learned something about myself in the doing. I’m not a doodler; doodles are abstractions, and I’ve never been particularly good at the abstract, whether in philosophy or art. I’m rooted in what I can touch, smell, taste; what I can measure and observe, describe and record. (There’s that scientist again!)

Nor am I am artist. I have friends who are wonderfully talented at interpreting life through visual and sculptural forms, who practice art in their daily life. My late love was one such.

I’m an observer of details, one who notices the everyday marvels around me, one who wonders constantly about how it all works: how all of the beings involved in creating this animate world fit together, the why and who and how and where of life. I’m happy practicing sketching as a way to notice and record, to witness life going about its business.

This moment, this now.

This comma butterfly who flitted before I could puzzle out the pattern on those dusky orange wings.

For now, I’m just happy to be able to translate a moment onto a journal page as a way to focus, to learn, and to express my gratitude in being alive on this glorious autumn day.

Thank you Lisa for the nudge, Sherrie for reminding me that I do love to sketch, and comma butterfly for fluttering into my day…

Road Report: 4,680 miles later…

Posted on September 25, 2016 | by Susan Tweit | Leave a Comment

I'm pretty sure that Red sighed with relief when I backed her into the garage late Thursday afternoon, home again after going 4,680 miles in the previous three weeks. (And five of those days we didn't drive anywhere. That's an average of 275 miles per driving day, which doesn't sound too bad until you add it all up!)

The last leg of the trip, US 285 southwest from Denver to the Upper Arkansas Valley, was the slowest. It's mostly two-lane road, and the leaf-peepers were out in force because the aspen colors were at their height, as in the photo above, which I shot as we cruised (slowly) over Kenosha Pass, at nearly 10,000 feet elevation.

I didn't mind the slow folks, but some drivers did, and hip-hopped their way up the long lines of cars and trucks, passing in dangerous spots. I'd rather be patient and get there alive, thank you very much. Besides, it's easier to shoot good photos of the gold and orange mountainsides when you're going slower…

I've said that windshield time is fruitful thinking time for me. So what did I learn in all those miles and hours on the road?

That I love the inland West and its rumpled, lava-covered, faulted, eroded, folded, and up-tilted landscapes; its spare and wild and wide spaces.

Split Rock Historic Site, near Jeffrey City, Wyoming

And that I love them best in autumn, when the leaves are turning brilliant colors: the scarlet fire of bigtooth maples in Utah's Wasatch Front, the quaking aspen turning whole mountainsides gold and orange, the river-side boxelders and their lemon-yellow leaves. And the shrubs: smooth currant in blaze-orange, brighter than any hunter's vest; burgundy chokecherry, Woods' rose ranging from russet to rust; crimson red-twig dogwood, and lemon dogbane.

Scarlet groves of bigtooth maple on the mountainsides above Spanish Fork, Utah

The landscapes, the colors, the people I worked with, the time with my family; even the houndstongue and knapweed I dug out by the roots in Yellowstone on my 60th birthday reminded me of why I write, and why I work with plants. I love these landscapes, and I not only want to show others their mysteries and magic; I want to leave the places I touch in better shape than I found them.

My work in life is to weave we humans back into the fabric of this living world in a way that we can be useful planetary citizens, that we can feel like we belong here. My work is also to restore that living fabric of nature wherever I can. I use those metaphors of fabric deliberately, because I think of this earth as a global tapestry in the sense that we're all connected, all part of a living, breathing, pulsing web, an organic network that makes this planet the luminous place it is.

I came home to my front meadow in glorious bloom, and the flowers crowning the rabbitbrush here in the valley echoing the lush gold of the aspen blanketing the mountainsides.

Part of my front meadow–the gears are industrial relics Richard planned to use in sculptures

To tomato, cucumber and squash plants that needed harvesting and cutting back; a flood of emails and messages to respond to, and deadlines for workshops and webinars and writing.

And to the feel of change in the air: the change that is autumn, the time we harvest summer's fruits of all sorts and prepare for the coming winter; and also the changes I sense in my life path. I can't articulate those yet, but I know they are ahead.

This morning I woke to frost on the deck and crisp 30-degree-F air. The peaks were dusted with snow from the previous night's storm, and the aspen were brilliant against that white lace.

I spent the first half of the day doing fall clean-up in Monarch Spur Park, the pocket park and habitat garden I designed and helped create for the City of Salida 16 years ago, and the second half of the day working in my own yard. The time in the company of plants and people who take joy from these sun-powered beings soothed me and settled my spirit.

I feel ready for whatever is ahead, whatever lies beyond the bend in my life-path I cannot quite see now. And I am conscious of one other gift of all of those road-miles: I am happy to be right here, right now.

Blessings to you all!

Bat Flight: Restoring Awe and Wonder

Posted on August 14, 2016 | by Susan Tweit | Leave a Comment

Last night I had the gift of one of those experiences that reminded me that the word "awesome" once meant to be filled with awe, a feeling my dictionary describes as "reverential respect."

I led a field trip to the Orient Mine in the northern San Luis Valley to see the evening out-flight of Brazilian Free-tailed Bats (Tadarida brasilensis). Some 230,000 to 250,000 male Brazilian Free-tails spend their summers roosting in the cool and safe confines of that partly collapsed underground mine, emerging each evening around sunset and flying 100 or more miles to catch tons of flying beedles and moths.

The batchelor colony in the Orient Mine is unusual because it's all males, and it's the farthest-north and highest-elevation summer roost of this subtropical species (at least that we know now).

Brazilian Free-tailed Bats migrate north from the tropical forests of Mexico and Central America in spring, and congregate by the millions in maternity roosts in caves in the southern Southwest. They are the bats of Carlsbad Caverns National Park in southern New Mexico, and of Bracken Cave in the Texas Hill Country.

Our only large Colorado roost is small by comparison to those, but it's also hundreds of miles north and far higher, located in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains at about 9,000 feet elevation.

The view from the Orient Mine toward the distant San Juan Mountains across the San Luis Valley.

The bats usually fly out for their night's feeding at about sunset, so when I planned the trip, I calculated that the group would need an hour to drive the 40+ miles to the trailhead–the last four miles on a steep two-track that is fairly rocky in spots, so it's slow, and another hour to do the mile and 700 feet of elevation gain to the viewing area for the bat flight at the mouth of the collapsed mine.

I checked the time when the sun would set, and called the land trust that owns the mine to find out what time the bats were flying out. "Sunset," I was told. "Be there 15 minutes early to get settled in before the first scouts fly out."

Okay. Subtracting the two-hour travel and hiking time and adding 15 minutes for good measure, I knew when we needed to hit the road. All seemed set. Until I got a frantic email on Thursday letting me know that the bats had changed their schedule and were flying out an hour earlier. I recaculated the departure time and sent out emails to the participants.

Our caravan set off last night at ten to five; the first part of the drive went quickly. The two-track road turned out to be a bit more of a challenge, but we still made it to the trailhead only about ten minutes behind my target time.

I gave a short talk on geology, the bats, and the mines, and then off we set up the old narrow-gauge railroad right of way, the gentlest part of the trail. I talked about plants and wildlife along the way, and then as we turned up through the town site of Orient, which sprang up in the late 1800s in the narrow mountain valley next to the mines and vanished as quickly as it had sprouted when they closed in 1940, we slowed as the grade steepened.

By the time we reached the viewing area next to the collapse hole, it was very close to the time the bats had emerged the night before. We could smell the guano on the air coming out of the mine tunnels, and we gathered in hushed anticipation, along with a couple of dozen other visitors, and waited.

And waited. Finally at just past seven-thirty, I spotted a bat fluttering overhead. And then another, and in moments a stream of bats began to pass overhead in a twisting current of flapping wings.

Bats beginning to emerge from the "Glory Hole," as the collapsed portion of the mine is called.

For the next twenty minutes, bats spiraled out of the mine and flew past in a noisesome current. They were so close that we could feel the wind of their passage and hear the sound of wings cupping the air with each beat.

We stood spellbound, awestruck by the swirling vortex emerging from the cave, by the way the sun's rays struck and glittered on bare-skin wings as the bats flew downhill from the mine, by the precision of the swirling river of furred bodies, their writing column seeming never-ending.

It was, as I told the trip participants later, far and away the best view I had ever experienced, because it was in daylight and we could see the dance of the bats' flight so clearly; usually by the time they emerge, the mine tunnels are in shadow and they vanish quickly into twilight.

We watched, silent, awed, until as suddenly as if someone had turned off a tap, the bat flight ceased.

As we hiked back downhill to the trailhead at a more leisurely pace, we stopped often to admire the sunset, to talk about plants along the trail, to read and discuss the interpretive signs at the townsite of Orient, and, as darkness snuffed the day, to admire Jupiter, shining above the western horizon.

A stunning sunset on the hike back

All the way back to Salida, down the trail and the old railroad grade to the trailhead, bumping down the rough road to the gravel county road and then speeding in a cloud of dust to the highway, then driving over the pass and dropping down into our own valley, pricked with clusters of lights in the darkness, I saw again that stream of bats spiraling out of the cave and flying in a twisting current over the valley, the air filled with the clapping sound of beating wings.

When I finally reached home, exhausted, at quarter past ten, I was still smiling, still awed by the wonder of seeing, hearing, and feeling the passage of hundreds of thousands of bats exiting an old mine on a Colorado mountainside to fly into the twilight in search of food.

The root word for "awe" comes from a Middle English word that also meant "terror" or "dread," a recognition of the close relationship between opposing pairs of powerful feelings: awe and dread, love and hate, fear and joy. Last night's bat-flight provoked my awe, and restored my sense of wonder and gratitude at being part of this living world.

Native Plants: Essential “Terroir” of Place

Posted on March 13, 2016 | by Susan Tweit | Leave a Comment

Walking between my hotel and the conference center for Colorado's first annual Native Plants in Landscaping Conference yesterday morning, I crossed a large expanse of boring turfgrass lawn, an even larger parking lot, and then a smaller area of closely-mowed grass. As I traversed the mowed area, I looked and listened for signs of the shortgrass prairie that once stretched from horizon to horizon, defining the High Plains.

Over the roar of traffic from the nearby interstate, I heard a familiar flute-like whistle: a male meadowlark, tuning up for spring–a true prairie sound. I looked down at the soil underfoot and saw dots of sunshine yellow: an alyssum, a tiny prairie mustard in bloom already.

I set down my briefcase and book bag and bent close to admire these first prairie flowers. The plant's small leaves sparkled in the sunlight, thanks to their water-saving and insulating cover of star-shaped hairs. The miniature flower stalks barely rose two inches above the sun-warmed soil, each miniature four-petaled blossom blooming brightly before spring has even come, bright yellow to signal their presence to pollinators. My mother would have called them "belly-flowers," dwarf wildflowers best admired from a prone position. Like alpine plants, these prairie natives hug the soil both for warmth in the harsh climate of the open plains and for protection against the constant wind.

I thought of those tiny wild alyssums as I gave my keynote talk, persisting even as the prairie around them is scraped away by development after development, proclaiming that whatever we do with the landscape, it is still prairie and will always be.

Their tenacity and fidelity to place illustrate for me why native plants matter to we humans. As I said in my talk,

I've come to think of plants as the living vocabulary of landscapes, the language that lends colors, shapes, and structures which define and give character to whole regions, the way words shape, color, and construct our language. Plants are the pioneers in constructing and also reviving the language of nature in any place.

Native plants provide the core of that language. Their gifts include aesthetics (their beauty through the seasons), biology (they are durable and adapted to the conditions of their specific places), health (both in terms of ecoystem health and the very real benefits we humans derive from time spent in nature), and what I would call "terroir" or dialect.

I am borrowing the word "terroir" from the French word used to denote specific wine regions and meaning roughly "the flavor of the land." It's a word now applied to local food as well to denote the unique taste that comes from soil, sun, climate, and the whole community of nature characteristic of particular places or regions. It seems to me that native plants speak the terroir of their specific landscapes and regions. Think of the towering redwood trees of the fog-draped Pacific Coast for instance, or the raised-arm saguaro cactus of the Sonoran Desert in the southern Southwest and Northern Mexico. Those plants clearly evoke the spirit and particulars of their places.

A saguaro cactus, its silhouette unmistakable at sunset, in the desert near Tucson, Arizona.

I believe that making space for native plants in our yards, parks, and nearby landscapes is essential for human survival, not just for the beauty and aesthetic benefits, nor even for native plants' powerful ability to reweave the fabric of healthy nature and healthy communities.

It is that connection to terroir that touches me most deeply. The cell-deep recognition within each of us of these rooted beings as the vocabularly of place, the very ‘flavor’ of soil, environment and landscape, and the connection they give us to the earth right where we live.

As I said at the end of my talk,

If plants are the living vocabulary of landscapes, those lives that restore the structure and function of healthy nature, native plants are the vernacular, the dialect, the terroir of individual places. In our gardens and landscaping, these “local” voices not only heal and transform, they reconnect humanity—breath, cell, and soul—to this singular, living planet. They bring us home.

As I walked back to my hotel, across the mowed expanse of not-yet-subdued prairie, I stopped again to admire the tiny alyssums, dots of sunshine hugging the sun-warmed earth. And thanked them for connecting me to prairie and meadowlark, sun and sky, to the wild world that sustains our lives on this astonishingly green planet.