YEARS AGO, when my wife and young sons and I lived in the Old Town neighborhood of Traverse City, we often walked to the Carnegie Library on Sixth Street. On winter evenings we would bundle up in coats, boots, hats, and mittens and set out through the snow. If it was very cold and much […]

Here are some notes from my journals, Decembers 1990-2016. Some of them appeared  in the “Field Notes” section of The Windward Shore: FIRST SNOW, barely an inch deep, and suddenly the world is pristine again. Climbed the hill out back and looked down on the land rolling beneath its new white coat and could see […]

OF ALL THE CONTRADICTIONS IN HUMAN BEHAVIOR, our relationship with nature is surely the most contradictory. We can’t decide if we’re part of it or apart from it. We love it and hate it to death. We abuse it heartlessly and defend it ferociously. We annihilate species, tear down mountains, poison oceans and rivers, and […]

ON THE EVE OF THANKSGIVING, in this year of complexity and setbacks, when I have more to be thankful for than ever, I’ve found myself going through my notebooks looking for observations from previous Novembers. Here are a few of them: The trees as bare as bones, standing shocked, and the hills are blank and […]

GLENN WOLFF AND I have been making limited-edition broadsides for awhile now. First with Chad Pastotnik over at Deep Wood Press (“The Trout in Winter”), and now at our own Big Maple Press. What’s a broadside? We get asked that a lot. In short: a one-page work of art and text suitable for framing. But […]

Literature and music come closest of all the arts to matching the creative opulence and diversity of nature. Just as the 117 elements in the Periodic Table are the raw material for all physical matter, the 26 letters in our alphabet create a spoken/written universe of virtually endless variety. Putting letters and words into new […]

EVERY YEAR THERE’S A DAY when summer gives way suddenly to autumn. Last year it began before dawn on September 30, when the temperature fell from the fifties into the forties and a powerful wind funneled down the Great Lakes. By midmorning, waves had reached twelve feet. NOAA measured one rogue near the center of […]

LAKE MICHIGAN IS BLUE TODAY, the color of robins’ eggs and summer sky. Other days it shows blues as varied as a painter’s palette. I have never seen it match the electric indigo of the Gulf Stream or the surreal carnival blues of Caribbean flats, but I’ve seen it as powder blue, baby blue, and […]

Postscript by Seamus Heaney And some time make the time to drive out west Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore, In September or October, when the wind And the light are working off each other So that the ocean on one side is wild With foam and glitter, and inland among stones The surface […]

A few weeks ago I got “schooled” in social media. The occasion was my first blog post for Mother Earth News, “A Murmuration of Starlings”, about the swirling, shifting, switching formations of starlings in large flocks. My point was about looking at the glass half-full: That starlings are invasive species and a scourge, yet in […]