Blog

There’s a story from the Arthurian cycle that involves a “riddle.” I put riddle in quotes because it really isn’t a big mystery at all. It’s common effing sense, but for thousands of years no white male writers could figure it out. Here’s the question: What do women really want? Well, gosh. This is sooooooo [...]

My shiny new husband has been away for 4 months taking care of parents who are end-of-life stage. It’s got to be done, so he’s there, doing it. Fortunately, or possibly unfortunately, he works “from home,” meaning wherever in the world he is, so he can work from darkest Arkansas as well as from right [...]

Enough with the doom and gloom for a minute; let’s have some fun. A couple years ago my town seemed to have cornered the market on the blackbird population. They were thick as thieves! They were everywhere! And they were funny little muses for me. I wrote two blackbird songs, one because there was a [...]

I’ve been watching a lot of space tv on PBS lately. I’m a huge fan of science documentaries and such, but especially space: cosmology, planetary science, origins of life, exploration, all the things. I love it. It’s my comfort food, I think because of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, which was like religion in my house. We [...]

Sometimes our students are our best teachers. A few years ago, I had a guitar and violin student (I love a multi-talented kid) that was one of my favorite people ever. One afternoon, they said to me in a voice filled with wonder, “Music is the wind, and we are the willow tree.” And I [...]

On the night of October 8, 1871, there was a wildfire in Wisconsin that killed 1400 people and destroyed hundreds of thousands of acres of forest. The little town of Peshtigo was completely destroyed, leaving a handful of survivors. One survivor was the Reverend Peter Pernin, who left one of the only eye-witness accounts of [...]

So this song is about the sensual magic of books. The first person I ever knew who openly talked about book-sniffing totally admitted to being a “dirty book sniffer.” For him it was a clandestine pleasure, opening a book and breathing in the smell of paper and ink while no one was looking and then [...]

So … my Friend on the River had some interesting things to say when I visited last. Below is the transcript of his … well, sermon, honestly. I think I’d put this up there with the Sermon on the Mount. Pretty powerful stuff. A few big surprises and adjustments that I need to be thinking [...]

Animism is something that gets stronger in my world and in my life everyday. Everything is people, rocks, trees, rivers, landscapes, birds, bees … all of it. People. Every one. Everything has an energy, a spirit. If you take the time to get to know things, they show you their personalities. There was a storm [...]

Microplastics are everywhere, and forever chemicals are, apparently, as forever as diamonds. Hooray for us. Well, that’s what you get for not thinkin’ things through, folks. And of course I wrote a song about it. Livin’ in the age of chemical cruelty We got shit that’s never goin’ away Microplastics in our bodies Is this [...]

So of course I wrote a song after last week’s post. Have you met me? And I will refer you to last week’s post if you didn’t happen to read it for the backstory. You can read it while you listen to the song. Or, you can listen to the audio post and then listen [...]

We got a gully-washer last night, a real midwestern frog-strangler. (‘Scuse my southern Iowa roots showing, I need to go see an heir dresser …) (Sorry about that.) (Won’t happen again.) (Yes, it totally will.) As I was saying, before I was so rudely interrupted, we got some serious water-works happening in the wee hours, [...]