Bats
. . .

In a prayer house, bats perched
On the speaker, beside the pulpit.

I believed they could hear us,
And like the old days

We speak in tongues like our ancestors
But I don’t know what God made of it.

This was one of the earliest miracles
I knew, they were without food

And they left at almost the same time,
Just after maghrib prayer, three days later

I still don’t know what bats eat.
A flame of a lantern dances in its glass.

After the prayer, we whispered into our palms,
I was silent, but my eyes were stuck on the bats.

I was relieved when they flew out the window,
Back under the sky where every miracle belongs.

                                     ---Hussain Ahmed, Translated from the Yorùbá by the author

Hello Lovelies—

Buckets of gratitude for reading A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild. I appreciate all of you who sustain and help me grow these weekly meditations by reading and commenting or sharing and supporting my work with a paid subscription. Your generosity means the world to me. Thank you for being here.

Did you know you can LISTEN to A Woman’s Place Is in the Wild? Click the play button on the upper right of your screen when you go to the page of this post.

Each weekly meditation of A Woman’s Place is in the Wild is an offering, an evocation of the world around me. You will rarely find me writing about climbing to the top of a mountain or counting the miles I’ve walked as if collecting notches on a belt.

Instead, I want to adventure in.

This is the kind of nature writing needed now, narratives of place—localities, with its root in the Latin, locus, for place—the kind that rise over time out of relationship, that allow us to understand that we are place, too. As the Scottish writer, Nan Shepherd says, “The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else.”

This is my project here.

Subscribe now

Waning Sininen Kuu (Blue Moon) - Near Midsummer

I wake early. Night is still a presence when I roll from bed to hang hummingbird feeders. Theirs is the first sound of morning, almost before the robin whose call is the hinge upon which the day rises.

Outside in the half-light of the coming day, I catch two shadows flickering just on the edge of my vision. Just in time I turn to to see them flutter skyward, bats rising over the eave, a last piece of the dark flashing then gone. Suddenly, I am dreaming again as I watch the bats wearing my night self, suspended between dark and coming light.

I listen for the papery sounds of their wings shushing in air, and wonder where they are going and if they are our bats, the ones that take up residence behind the little opening in the eave at the corner of the deck. It seems early to season to see them. Perhaps the warm winter changed their patters and now they are already forming maternal colonies to raise pups, one per female, whose flight fill the darker mornings of August.

I stand and let my mind go with the bats, wondering what it would be like to navigate by sound, imagine for one instance an instinct that would allow me to feel my way through the world, to see in the dark.

But day rises quickly as it does this time of year and so I imagine the bats folding leathery wings against the coming light, to retreat to a roost in the crevices of a rock outcropping or in a mining pit or even in the bark of an ancient ponderosa.

I am glad to see these guardians of deep summer, whose bodies make up the night sky. I love watching them twirl in the evening, chasing shadows, flashing for insects, carving jigsaw patterns beneath the moon. Their presence means summer has arrived.

In some traditions, bat is a a symbol of rebirth given the way they suspend themselves upside down when sleeping, the same way a fetus is suspended in a human womb. In other traditions bat is a messenger, able to travel between night and day. In still other cosmologies, bat is a liminal being: the only mammal who can fly and a creature who emerges at dusk and haunts the edges of day.

I once found a bat beneath the deck, moving into the crevices between pine logs. It was summer and I worried she was sick so I left some berries nearby. The next day she was there, unmoving. I left her for the rest of the summer and then on the first day of fall, carried her small dried body inside and placed her in a bowl on my altar as a reminder of the the Wheel of Life, the eternal return: bat hibernation a kind of dying, their emergence, a rebirth.

In another early summer, the first after Greg and I bought this house, a bat got stuck in the fire box after slipping down the chimney. I gently gathered her in tea towel, much to the interest and consternation of our cat, Dottie, and brought her to a pile of leaves in the yard where she could shelter for the day. When the very next day, I found Dottie chasing another bat in the house, I had the chimney inspected then the stove pipe sealed with bat proof mesh, something the previous owners had never done, to keep the bats safe.

When I lived at the little cabin on Overland I often discovered a bat flapping near the peak of the roof on summer evenings. Who knows how he got in. Then, I’d open the front door and wait for the bat to find his way out but one night I grew too sleepy so I called my dog elvis to the bedroom and shut the door, letting night in and the bat out.

I search for what a gathering of bats might be called, hoping there is some amazing word pairing like “a murder of crows.” but the only phrase my search turns up is “colony,” (obvious), “cloud,” (poetic and unverifiable) and “cauldron,” (modern and too hokey Halloweenish).

So I make my own: A blessing—because of the way bats make me feel, for their mystery, their beauty.

As I write, the morning blossoms. Bats have returned. I feel their blessing.

Hold onto beauty, friends, and to each other. Carry hope. And practice being human, practice loving the earth and each other, each day. Thank you for reading.

Big love,

Karen

A Writer’s Note: If these this have brought you outside, or made you stop and look at the beauty of the natural world, please consider becoming a paid supporter. Doing so keeps this work alive.

You can also purchase a copy of Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living here. or order a personalized first-edition here.

Please click the heart if you appreciate this post and of course, feel free to restack or share with friends.

Writing Wild: Ritual

Sunday October 4th 10-3:30

6 Spaces Left

As we prepare to enter enter fall, this daylong workshop focuses on not only helping your understand your own writing rituals (best times + places for inspiration, how to keep coming back to writing over and over) in order to help you feed your creative self, but also on inspiring some new ones. Plus, we’ll take a deep dive in the mystery with an intuitive inspiration hike and using tarot cards to help us access images, stories, poems swimming in our subconscious bodies.

Rollinsville, CO

Space Limited to 8 Women

Full Day Workshop - $150 or $125 when you sign up with a friend.

Lunch + Snack included.

For More Information or to Register

"It is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not." — Thich Nhat Hanh

Hello Lovelies—

Buckets of gratitude for reading A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild. I appreciate all of you who sustain and help me grow these weekly meditations by reading and commenting or sharing and supporting my work with a paid subscription. Your generosity means the world to me. Thank you for being here.

Did you know you can LISTEN to A Woman’s Place Is in the Wild? Click the play button on the upper right of your screen when you go to the page of this post.

Each weekly meditation of A Woman’s Place is in the Wild is an offering, an evocation of the world around me. You will rarely find me writing about climbing to the top of a mountain or counting the miles I’ve walked as if collecting notches on a belt.

Instead, I want to adventure in.

This is the kind of nature writing needed now, narratives of place—localities, with its root in the Latin, locus, for place—the kind that rise over time out of relationship, that allow us to understand that we are place, too. As the Scottish writer, Nan Shepherd says, “The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else.”

This is my project here.

Subscribe now

Waning Sininen Kuu (Blue Moon) - Spring 2026

On the night of the full Blue Moon I dream of family, a tribe, of black bears. They are all sizes and shapes, some with long snouts, some with a white stripes near their eyes.

The dream comes after the small male bear, a yearling, hops to the railing on the deck outside the bedroom doors, knocking over the Happy Buddha who sits at the corner. The whump wakes me.

Yuki gets up and gives a short series of barks, then whines excitedly. She wants to go see the bear. I rise and push her back from the door, then step out. I worry that she wants to play instead of protect. The bear clings to the ponderosa just off the deck.

“Go!” I say, clapping my hands and he stares.

“Go!” I say again, pounding the rail just six feet from the treed bear.

Finally, he scrambles down and runs off into the forest. I love the bears but I am wary of the destruction one might cause were she to get into the house. Already a bear has torn down some wire fencing that circles the wood storage area.

Still the bear returns.

Each night since the full blue moon, bear climbs the deck. Greg and I now are careful to brush away any of the day’s leftover sunflower seed and Greg has been busy bagging up any extra seed in the yard. Still, last night the bear walked up the steps and opened the gate to the deck not once but twice. Each time, Yuki jumped from bed, whining, like there was a dog outside and she wanted to play.

I’ve counted as many as four bears at a time in our yard this year. I’m blaming it on the new game cam that makes it feel as if we’re flush with bears, but who knows? It is remarkable to know they are moving around nearby while I sleep. I imagine them circling my dreams. And they do.

Into these days, thunder arrives. Not the teasing thunder that sometimes happens with snow in February but the thunder of summer. Thunder that is long and rolling, filling the air. It comes before a short and hard rain, on the day after the bear dream and after the night of the bear knocking the Buddha from the deck. Thunder is a presence, rippling across the wide bowl of a mountain valley, as if carving the landscape with its voice.

The next day, I walk Yuki and we find more bear scat on one of our favorite paths. I am thinking about bear and thunder as the sky darkens, bruising the skyline to the east.

This past weekend I heard several Bear origin stories from a Finnish Folk witch. In one, Bear is born of the moon beside the sun on the shoulders of Otava, Ursa Major, which is said to be his cradle. In another, fire flashes in the sky and Bear is shaped by this moment of air and fire. In that tradition, the bear’s name cannot be spoken at certain times of the year because to do so is the call Karhu to you. Unlike others in the workshop, I am not afraid of bears. I do not worry about finding them in the woods or them finding me.

I have neither in my life been afraid of lightning. I once drew lightning with charcoal on the soft inner side of a rabbit skin as a promise that I would not be afraid, that I would refuse fear and terror. I was thinking of my fear of the dark at the time, but there are always other fears, other terrors.

I had just put the rabbit skin on the wall one early spring with the return of lightning, when my cabin burned down and I lost half a lifetime of things, including much of my writing.

Lightning is featured in The Tower, a tarot card of the unseating of structures. In a moment of prescience, the card appeared in a reading just before the cabin fire. But I have come to see the destruction of my house not as loss, but as symbolic for the necessary destruction of the way I had been living—as if I could do it all alone. Fire revealed to me the lie of that deeply held truth and I at last understood the necessity of connection and community.

While lightning is a symbol of shock and dramatic change, it also carries an erotic charge. I once heard a story about lighting as the visible union of sky and earth, a sexual union that heals the earth wherever the lightning touches. Sexual intercourse is, of course, electric and both creative and destructive. We make love but while doing so efface our illusion of separateness.

Thunder, the sound made when ions and atoms crash back together, returns as I write this; I open the window to listen to the sizzle and crackle of its voice. A simultaneous flash and crack splits the sky. A booming follows.

On the mountain, summer is circling like bear, like thunder. I see it in clouds of chickweed—field mouse’s ear—beneath a newly greened aspen grove. In the emergence of bright gold orange wallflower and yellow golden banner. In the garden, the wild rose tips race to open. I pull dandelions and wild strawberry that threaten to choke columbine and pansies in the aspen garden and think about the two-edged sword of growth: something must die away for something else to be born.

I am mulling over the connection between thunder and bear, listening to the storm when I hear a sizzle and my computer screen goes dark. I spend two hopeless hours on recovery and switch to my phone to finish this Substack on time. The answer to the question I still do not know is in the audible zht-zht of the computer’s demise.

Later in the night, a bear opens the door to my car, leaving a singe and perfect print between the seats.

Something is stalking me. Sometimes a new way of being—even one that serves us, even one that changes our lives for the better—feels exactly like the mystery of bear returning in the night or the sudden crack of lightning.

Instead of freezing, I breathe. I’ve always said it’s our resistance that kills us. What will come will come. The only thing I can change is how I welcome it.

I make a little offering for this moment of mystery, for the thing I cannot yet see.

I will not afraid.

Hold onto beauty, friends, and to each other. Carry hope. And practice being human, practice loving the earth and each other, each day. Thank you for reading.

Big love,

Karen

A Writer’s Note: If these this have brought you outside, or made you stop and look at the beauty of the natural world, please consider becoming a paid supporter. Doing so keeps this work alive.

You can also purchase a copy of Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living here. or order a personalized first-edition here.

Please click the heart if you appreciate this post and of course, feel free to restack or share with friends.

1 Space Left

Writing Wild: Writing the Language of the Land

Rollinsville, CO

Space Limited to 8 Women

Workshops - Rollinsville, CO

SUMMER 2026 - Space Limited to 8 women

Full Day Workshop - $150 or $125 when you sign up with a friend.

Lunch + Snack included.

For More Information or to Register

These places are where the creators, Gods, deities and powerful beings live.

—Ofelia Zepeda, from “The Home of the Sacred”

Hello Lovelies—

Buckets of gratitude for reading A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild. I appreciate all of you who sustain and help me grow these weekly meditations by reading and commenting or sharing and supporting my work with a paid subscription. Your generosity means the world to me. Thank you for being here.

Did you know you can LISTEN to A Woman’s Place Is in the Wild? Click the play button on the upper right of your screen when you go to the page of this post.

Each weekly meditation of A Woman’s Place is in the Wild is an offering, an evocation of the world around me. You will rarely find me writing about climbing to the top of a mountain or counting the miles I’ve walked as if collecting notches on a belt.

Instead, I want to adventure in.

This is the kind of nature writing needed now, narratives of place—localities, with its root in the Latin, locus, for place—the kind that rise over time out of relationship, that allow us to understand that we are place, too. As the Scottish writer, Nan Shepherd says, “The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else.”

This is my project here

Subscribe now

Waxing Moon, Sininen Kuu, Blue Moon - Spring

Spring unfolds on the mountain.

After the snows last week, the forest takes a long deep drink, sighs, and exhales dandelions and tiny purple Townsend daisies. As anticipated, moss opens leaflets lighting small green fires along the hillsides. While the Front Range is moving headlong into summer, mountain spring is just becoming.

Yuki and I walk the circled path through the woods, stopping at places where little altars take shape at the base of trees or stumps or have formed from stones emerging from earth or spiraled into a clearing.

Some I’ve helped to make with my own hands; others have been shaped by elementals—earth and air, stone and root. I see them everywhere now—places that bloom with a certain wild magic.

These are not the altars of my Catholic childhood, where the dais was inhabited by priests austere in their white albs and where I once imagined I saw God in the incandescence of the candles framing the space.

Instead of marking the place where heaven touches earth, as my catechism lesson taught, these tiny altars are where earth is revealed as both living and sacred; the divine and the earthly are not separated or opposite, but intertwined and alive.

As a child, I’d lie awake in bed at night, trying to imagine heaven—that cloud-filed elsewhere—and cry. I did not want to spend eternity in such a place. Instead, I wanted to roll myself in the dirt. I understood earth to be holy and in my own version of communion, licked the sidewalk when I was a child. I still love the feel of earth between my fingers and beneath the soles of my feet.

I have only ever wanted to cloak myself in the mystery of the forest, in the light on aspen leaves, in scent of dirt after rain. How lucky I feel to be able to live where I do and to be able to touch these elementals each day.

I began making altars in the land in answer to a call, an instinct to make visible what I already understood as sacred and holy. At first, I was trying to entice what the ancient Finns call haltija, the spirits who dwell in rocks and trees and other forest places.

I remember a story my father told about dwarves who came out at night but froze mid-gesture at the first light. He took us to a wooded ravine to show us the story was true and there, indeed, were a dozen figures caught mid-tumble or chop, frozen in place among the the ivied undergrowth of the forest.

I have long carried the wonder of that moment with me.

So when Greg placed an earthen-colored toadstool with a tiny door along the path that led into the woods, then another over-turned pot with a crack for a door, I sometimes left little gifts for the haltija who might find a home there.

But what started as whimsy, grew. Last year, as part of the lineage work I have been doing, I made an altar for my ancestors in the place where my mother’s ashes are buried beneath the large ponderosa that marks the edge of the yard beneath the Buddha head that belonged to her. There, I laid a bowl of stones filled with water, the icon of an owl that survived my house fire, and crow feathers.

I imagined the altar as the place where the spirits of my mothers gathered, a place where they touched the daylight world.

Something shifted then.

Perhaps it was the deep time I had with the land both pre- and post- last year’s surgery, perhaps it was that first altar in my garden, but suddenly the forest opened to me in a new way. I saw tiny altars everywhere and my morning meditation expanded to include offerings to each new day. I greet the sunrise, the birds, the haltija, my ancestors, and especially the trees, the guardians and the strength of this place.

In return, the forest began to reveal her secrets.

Suddenly I saw little “glimmers” on my walks: the magic of tall S-curved pine, the mystery of the hollowed base of a lightning struck tree or the way a filled in fire pit grew a tableau of moss and lichen-covered rock, each an altar, a place where the sacred has been made visible.

In acknowledgment, I began to help form them, placing rocks and bark, offering pinecones and feathers. One emerged into a heart shape, another a simple ring at the base of a tree. Recently I discovered a perfect raised dais at the base of an old stump, one I had not shaped.

These places mark the meeting point between the known and the unknown, between the human and more-than-human. They are places of mystery as much as magic, places where the forest speaks in the language of earth and stone and shape.

Now each day into the forest is a pilgrimage, each walk a way of praising the wild world.

This act is an act of reciprocity. The forest holds me and and I her.

There is power in this.

When we take the time to make sacred our world, we help to shift perception, to awaken something that has been forgotten. To recognize the beauty and awe and wonder of the natural world the most holy thing we can do.

This week’s creativity practice, for paid subscribers, invites you to make altars of your own.

Hold onto beauty, friends, and to each other. Carry hope. And practice being human, practice loving the earth and each other, each day.

Thank you for reading.

Big love,

Karen

Please click the heart if you appreciate this post and of course, feel free to restack or share with friends.

A Writer’s Note: If these this have brought you outside, or made you stop and look at the beauty of the natural world, please consider becoming a paid supporter. Doing so keeps this work alive.

You can also purchase a copy of Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living here. or order a personalized first-edition here.

For access to the Creativity Practice below, please become as subscriber.

Writing Wild: Writing the Language of the Land

5 Spaces Left

Rollinsville, CO

Space Limited to 8 Women

Full Day Workshop - $150 or $125 when you sign up with a friend.

Lunch + Snack included.

For More Information or to Register

Living Wild Creativity Practice: Tiny Altars Everywhere

This practice helps you to deepen your relationship with wildness and make sacred your own world.

Read more

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

—Leonard Cohen

Hello Lovelies—

Buckets of gratitude for reading A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild. I appreciate all of you who sustain and help me grow these weekly meditations by reading and commenting or sharing and supporting my work with a paid subscription. Your generosity means the world to me. Thank you for being here.

Did you know you can LISTEN to A Woman’s Place Is in the Wild? Click the play button on the upper right of your screen when you go to the page of this post.

Each weekly meditation of A Woman’s Place is in the Wild is an offering, an evocation of the world around me. You will rarely find me writing about climbing to the top of a mountain or counting the miles I’ve walked as if collecting notches on a belt.

Instead, I want to adventure in.

This is the kind of nature writing needed now, narratives of place—localities, with its root in the Latin, locus, for place—the kind that rise over time out of relationship, that allow us to understand that we are place, too. As the Scottish writer, Nan Shepherd says, “The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else.”

This is my project here.

Subscribe now

Waxing Sininen Kuu (Blue Moon) - Spring 2026

Water returns.

Into this strange spring-no spring landscape, into the perilous month of May when there will be not one but two full moons1, two chances for fruition and fulfillment, two bright full bright faces presiding over the mountain as it awakens fully to emerge into the long days of summer.

This water comes first as fierce rain that pelts an earth still so dry, it kicks up tiny puffs of dust. But hours later, by midnight, the rain has shape-shifted, becoming first sleet then slush then at last fat flakes of snow.

The weather guy says a foot might fall.

I flip the heat back on and move my newly potted pansies to the green house as Hummingbirds strafe the feeders. Then I cancel plans to drive down to Boulder and instead, sit in bed to watch the the forest through a delicate scrim of falling snow.

Greg lights a fire.

This snow is wet and dripping—as any good spring snow is—and I swear I can feel the earth throw her arms wide to drink in its embrace.

Just last week I was spending mornings on the deck writing and, at night, Greg and I slept with the deck doors open. Then, on the heels of the driest winter in fifty years, we seemed to be running headlong into a hot and tinder-dry summer, fire-worry fluttering at the edges of our days.

On the first full day of the storm, snow drifts and flurries, falling and melting, falling and melting. Each day will be like this, clouded and full of wet, dripping snow, for three days.

On the second day, I clip a few early-blooming tulips to keep them from crumping beneath the weight of all this moisture and and listen to the crash of snow cleaving in clumps from the tops of trees or landing in great thumps on the deck as whole sheets release from the roof.

I pull on my rubber boots to walk Yuki. Slushy puddles fill the sides of the road and the trees makes mysterious and arcane forms with snow-laden limbs. Tiny pools of water form in patches and slush dissolves beneath our feet.

All the world is, as e e cummings, says, mud-luscious.

Yuki and I walk the loop through the forest and come across the clotted tracks of bear: the mama and her twins following exactly behind her, their footsteps placed inside hers, into the morning landscape.

The snow continues, filling the air. It’s as if a curtain of white has been dropped over the landscape. I cannot see the horizon as trees holding their bundles of snow fill the space. I imagine the skirts of some water goddess covering us. Imagine this tender mercy, the unexpected offering of much-needed moisture.

I think of the greening of plants beneath the snow, the emergence of moss stretching open their leaflets to collect water in a thousand tiny basins, then swelling and swelling. By this weekend, her patches will emerge a deep and glowingly green along with bouquets of wildflowers.

We each of us opens to our moment when it arrives. What grace.

More and more I try to live my life by this instinct—the one that looks wide-eyed into the new day and embraces what is offered in appreciation and quiet celebration. I’ve spent so much of my life fighting and gripping, forcing and just holding on that I return often in my writing to the image of a salmon swimming up stream; this has been my fight: determination, grit, perseverance.

Now in what is the last third my life, I no longer feel the need to push so hard. Instead, I want to gather, to accept, to praise, to open wide.

At home, I feed Yuki and then play every version of Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah” I can find (my favorite, by k.d. lang, I play over and over). It’s an aching song about heartbreak and disappointment, but also somehow transcendence—the ability to praise even through pain.

So much of the world is on fire right now—metaphorically and literally. Some days I think the Destroyers ae winning, but this, the unexpected grace of water, this beauty, reminds me the world holds so much possibility even still.

So Hallelujah for the mystery. Hallelujah for water. Hallelujah for this renewal, this chance, this small blessing.

Halleluiah by Mary Oliver

Everyone should be born into this world happy
     and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward  it.
Halleluiah, anyway I'm not where I started!

And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
     almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
         and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
     is ever that easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.

Halleluiah, I'm sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.

Hold onto beauty, friends, and to each other. Carry hope. And practice being human, practice loving the earth and each other, each day. Thank you for reading.

Big love,

Karen

A Writer’s Note: If these this have brought you outside, or made you stop and look at the beauty of the natural world, please consider becoming a paid supporter. Doing so keeps this work alive.

You can also purchase a copy of Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living here. or order a personalized first-edition here.

Please click the heart if you appreciate this post and of course, feel free to restack or share with friends.

5 Spaces Left

Writing Wild: Writing the Language of the Land

Rollinsville, CO

Space Limited to 8 Women

Workshops - Rollinsville, CO

SUMMER 2026 - Space Limited to 8 women

Full Day Workshop - $150 or $125 when you sign up with a friend.

Lunch + Snack included.

For More Information or to Register

I awaken I think. Marshlights

reappear, geese

come trailing again up the flyway.

In her ravine under old snow the dam-bear

lies, licking

lumps of smeared fur

and drizzly eyes into shapes

with her tongue. And one

hairy-soled trudge stuck out before me,

the next groaned out,

the next,

the next,

the rest of my days I spend

wandering: wondering

what, anyway,

was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?

——”The Bear” by Galway Kinnell

Hello Lovelies—

Buckets of gratitude for reading A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild. I appreciate all of you who sustain and help me grow these weekly meditations by reading and commenting or sharing and supporting my work with a paid subscription. Your generosity means the world to me. Thank you for being here.

Did you know you can LISTEN to A Woman’s Place Is in the Wild? Click the play button on the upper right of your screen when you go to the page of this post.

Each weekly meditation of A Woman’s Place is in the Wild is an offering, an evocation of the world around me. You will rarely find me writing about climbing to the top of a mountain or counting the miles I’ve walked as if collecting notches on a belt.

Instead, I want to adventure in.

This is the kind of nature writing needed now, narratives of place—localities, with its root in the Latin, locus, for place—the kind that rise over time out of relationship, that allow us to understand that we are place, too. As the Scottish writer, Nan Shepherd says, “The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else.”

This is my project here.

Subscribe now

Waning Moon, Toukokuu, Sowing Moon

In a snow storm a few weeks ago, a remarkable sight on the game cam: a family of bears in the yard, nosing for sunflowers beneath eight inches of snow. Astonishingly, there are four of them—an enormous sow, her twin cubs, and then a fourth, bear, smaller than the sow. Perhaps a yearling still traveling with her mother.

The bears look big and healthy, the cubs far larger than is typical for this time of year. I wonder if the snow-less winter has allowed the sow to fatten even more before she birthed her twins.

I see the family again, just a week later.

It happens as I surprised the sow and her her cubs after dinner one night as I open the deck door to let Yuki outside. The cubs scramble up the big ponderosa that tends the ancestor garden, clinging to the bark on either side one just a bit higher than the other, while the mother puts her body sideways in front, swinging her huge head to me and grunting a warning.

She is magnificent and huge, close to 300 pounds I would guess. My heart blooms at her fierceness, her beauty.

Yuki barks, going wild, and the mother turns and lopes down the forest path with her cubs in tow, circling another tree in the gulch in case I or the dog come in pursuit.

The fourth bear is gone now, perhaps chased off to begin a life on her own. I imagine her in the forests and end something like a wish for her beauty, for her long life.

This morning, I find a bit of bear scat near the base of the ancestor tree, along with an overturned ceramic bowl where the cubs must have stepped while scrambling to safety. I right the bowl and place its stone offerings back inside, and the garden.

I have bears in my lineage. In Finland, bear is Karhu, King of the Forest and worshipped as a deity.

Bear stories have always circled my poems and now slip themselves into the novel I am writing, which has a story about sisters who get lost in a snow storm and burrow into a berm only to find a sleeping bear so they pull up the fur on their coats and pretend to be bears themselves. In the spring, they emerge, gamboling with their mother bear.

This morning, bundled like a bear myself in my big woolie bathrobe, a hat and Uggs, I inhale the raked air of spring on the deck as the morning burns orange then pink on the horizon and read bear poems.

First Linda Hogan’s “Bear” from her brilliant collection The Book of Medicines which begins

The bear is a dark continent

that walks upright

like a man.

My heart lurches as I read. I have carried these lines for thirty years through seasons of loneliness and love, seasons of drought and mercy. Hogan’s poem reveals our relationship with bear, our kinship, along with the folly of humans who don’t understand this because they believe in a god who “lives/larger than death.”

Hogan’s lines are a kōan to me. They permeate my existence, circling my heart, getting stuck under my skin and touching a place that exists before language, before words. They touch wildness.

Their knowing pierces me.

Then, I read Galway Kinnell’s “The Bear,” in which a man eats bear scat, becoming bear, only to wonder, “what, anyway,/was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?”

I have just finished a novel Greg gave me for Christmas, The Girl Who Speaks Bear, about a girl who suddenly grows bear legs in the night and must enter the Forbidden Forest in search of who she is.

I think about bear. The way the forest changes with her presence. There is a knowing, something palpable when she emerges into the daylight world of spring and summer.

I have written poems for her, one about a Bear Woman:

. . .Rotund, bare-breasted
		women with too much hair,
		skins of grit, fingers 
cultivating sex;

women who bleed 
and bleed,
		grow pelts
between legs, scent corpulent as spring,
the fetor of death thinking on tongues. . .

And another about Bear herself:

. . .A waning moon shivers through the branches
and the cup of heaven pours out its stars

as you awaken to the deep marrow of earth 
where an ancient singing names you,

carves your mystery from night
in the pungent language of peat and fur. . . .

May is the moment of emergence on the mountain. In this month, her laboring produces bits of tender green aspen teasing awake and the sudden beauty of a returning pansy and violet, the astonishing white of the poet Daffodils Greg planted for me. Now is the time of plants pushing and pushing and pushing through earth.

Into all this becoming, comes bear and her cubs reminding me of the twin sisters in my story, reminding me of the magic of homographs: the appearance of the Sow beneath the Sowing moon.

The message? Becoming. Fierce Defense of seeds, the stories given to my care.

I have come to understand that I am the storyteller of my line, the one has been entrusted with bringing the tale of who we are from the silence of the winter cave into the daylight world of spring and summer.

In the past weeks, I have been mired in the roots of the trauma my lineage carries, trying to write through the sticky muck of family dysfunction. How to write in the spell of it without letting it swallow the story I am telling?

But, Bear reminds me the Story is bigger than that. She says there is new life and wonder to shield and shelter, to foster in this new season.

Let me remember again and again: What is the poetry by which I live?

I go out to the ancestor garden again and place the bear scat inside the ring of stones at the base of the tree, a promise I will keep to Bear and to those who came before. Then I return to the deck to write as sun cascades through the forest, and birds sing the day awake.

Hold onto beauty, friends, and to each other. Carry hope. And practice being human, practice loving the earth and each other, each day. Thank you for reading.

Big love,

Karen

Please click the heart if you appreciate this post and of course, feel free to restack or share with friends. If you can afford it, please consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber or buy a copy of my book, Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living from your local independent bookstore.

Registration Open!

This Summer + Fall - Join Me for Writing Wild

Space Limited to 8 Women

Workshops - Rollinsville, CO

SUMMER 2026 - Space Limited to 8 women

Workshops exploring the landscapes of the body and the earth.

Writing Wild Workshops are season-based generative workshops exploring our wild, physical selves in all the landscapes we inhabit. Participants drop into their senses and write to and from this place in a series of exercises meant to inspire and get their creative juices going. Open to beginners and seasoned writers as well as the writing curious. Plan for camaraderie, craft talk, nature walking, discussion, and plenty of writing. Space limited. #writingwildworkshops

Writing Wild: Writing the Language of Land

Sunday, June 7th 10-3:30

With summer coming into bloom, we’ll take our cue from the abundance of wildflowers and birds, seasonal thundershowers and flourishing gardens to learn how to listen to the more-than-human world. Become an animal in landscape or a cloud blown on the wind, spend time inspecting the woodpecker-tattered bark of an aspen or examining the tendrils offered by moss to learn to engage your senses to and fill your inspirational cup. Join me for this immersive workshop to explore your wild senses and dive into writing.

Writing Wild: Ritual

Sunday October 4th 10-3:30

As we prepare to enter enter fall, this daylong workshop focuses on not only helping your understand your own writing rituals (best times + places for inspiration, how to keep coming back to writing over and over) in order to help you feed your creative self, but also on inspiring some new ones. Plus, we’ll take a deep dive in the mystery with an intuitive inspiration hike and using tarot cards to help us access images, stories, poems swimming in our subconscious bodies.

FULL DAY WORKSHOPS - $150 OR $125 When You Register with a friend.

Lunch + Snack Provided!

r

...I think

I’ll call this mercy too.

—”Spring Snow” by Linda Gregerson.

Hello Lovelies—

Buckets of gratitude for reading A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild. I appreciate all of you who sustain and help me grow these weekly meditations by reading and commenting or sharing and supporting my work with a paid subscription. Your generosity means the world to me. Thank you for being here.

Did you know you can LISTEN to A Woman’s Place Is in the Wild? Click the play button on the upper right of your screen when you go to the page of this post.

Each weekly meditation of A Woman’s Place is in the Wild is an offering, an evocation of the world around me. You will rarely find me writing about climbing to the top of a mountain or counting the miles I’ve walked as if collecting notches on a belt.

Instead, I want to adventure in.

This is the kind of nature writing needed now, narratives of place—localities, with its root in the Latin, locus, for place—the kind that rise over time out of relationship, that allow us to understand that we are place, too. As the Scottish writer, Nan Shepherd says, “The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else.”

This is my project here.

Subscribe now

Waning Moon, Toukokuu, Flower Moon, Spring - Gunnison, CO

On the first morning, I awaken to rain, its unexpected patter on the roof. A curtain sweeps down the valley, obscuring in a cloud-filled elsewhere the peaks that surround Crested Butte. I’ve slipped over the Front Range to the Western Slope of Colorado for a few days of deep work, a way to ground my summer in the intention of writing. The Gunnison valley, not yet in bloom, spreads out in muted sage and dried browns. The peaks up valley toward Crested Butte are barely dusted with snow.

I arrive after more than half of my four hour drive barreling down the highway with a tire light on. I’ve stopped to check tire pressure—all good—and then rechecked, then check the owner’s manual which says it’s likely a worn out sensor. I file the information for later, hoping I’ve got the diagnosis, but proceed with an eye on the dash board.

It’s almost hot in Gunnison when I arrive. I have brought a bag full of warm weather gear—sun dresses and a tank top and jean skirt—ready for highs in the 60s, ready for sitting in the sun with my notebook and pen, my legs stretched out, feet bare, but the forecast takes an unexpected turn. My arrival coincides with the warmest day of the week as I watch each day dawn more cloudy and cooler than predicted, chilled by Gunnison’s ever-present wind and sliding toward snow.

Which arrives on the forth night—at first as rain that pounds the roof, blown by wind that rattles me awake at regular intervals with the jiggling of the bedroom door. At 2am, I get up at last and close the windows but sleep the same disrupted sleep until dawn. It’s not just the wind, but worry for my sister who has texted me from the ER with a killing sore throat that has turned out to be an abscess in her tonsil. Despite a text that says the docs are sending her home, I do the stupid thing and read up on the condition right before bed learning that it can cause a sudden collapse of the airway. My dreams swirl. Doors bang open and closed. I keep an ear out for the phone, which I’ve left on.

In the morning I am so tired I can barely write but I hammer out 1000 words anyway, realizing with alarm I haven’t finished my weekly substack in time for an early Wednesday publication. Outside, clumps of wet snow cover the sage hillside.

The snow calms me, the late season storm a boon. I watch all morning as bands of weather pour in from the north. Just now, all sense of depth in the landscape disappears as thick flakes slap against the glass in front of me. Back at home on the other side of the Divide, Greg reports more than a foot of snow and still coming down. My remote yoga class is cancelled—no power in Nederland—and even CU in Boulder closes for the day.

This late snow is a much welcomed antidote to Colorado’s parched winter. This year, 70s and 80s along the Front Range have been routine and my mountain house has seen too many 50 and 60-degree days for months. In my own yard, there are no wintered hardened banks of snow left to thaw.

Water is the oldest medicine, I think, watching wet snow, and stand and spread my arms to the storm as it pummels the glass.

Then I step through the bathroom door and into a puddle of water. The skylight is leaking. I put down a towel and a pan and call my friend Dan who owns the house. I describe the problem, send pictures, then climb up on a ladder, and take a video.

“I guess this happens with older skylights,” I say, trying be helpful, consoling.

“It’s pretty new,” he says ruefully.

The snow continues outside. It’s graupeling now. Water drips from the eaves outside in a curtain of drops in front of the windows.

The day has a strange feeling.

No sooner do I think this than Greg texts to say he’s lost Yuki, who ran away in the woods chasing something. My number is on her tag, so I text the neighbors and post to Facebook as Greg goes back out in search of the dog. A neighbor posts that “a bunch of dogs” are out having fun in the snow on the lower bend of our road, as if dogs running wild is just how we do it here in the mountains.

Eventually Yuki returns and I talk to my sister, whose is better, then I try unsuccesfully for two hours to nap, so tired I feel weary and wired all at once.

The snow melts. The sky opens to a patchy blue. High puffed clouds sail overhead.

For this substack, I had intended to write about the magic of Beltane and the flower seeds I left for the forest spirits in the garden, and about the emergence of bears—the family of four—a sow, a yearling, and two cubs that appeared in the yard on the night of the super full moon or the coyote pup Yuki and I scared up the very next day on a hike at Kelly Dahl. I wanted to write about this time of year and how the landscape is so thick with promise and the energy of roots stirring in soil and sap rising that you feel it coming up through the earth and into your body which also unfurls. I wanted to tell you about the catkins, loose and fluttering, hanging off aspen limbs for weeks and weeks, then the early spring green of aspen leaves opening in the forest behind my house. I wanted to say how much I love this time of year, this quickening, this quiver.

But my days this week have been a bit like the weather, changing and trumpeted by wind.

A friend of mine recently wrote to tell me she had been waiting for the “chaos of her life to settle down” in order to make a commitment to a graduate program in writing, but had decided to “move forward.”

The truth is, I write back, is “the chaos will never settle, but we learn to write with it and through it because we must.”

In the afternoon, I sit back down, tired and bone- and brain- weary, just as my sister texts she is going back to the ER, to revisit this post.

This is what pours out.

I think/I’ll call this mercy, too.

Hold onto beauty, friends, and to each other. Carry hope. And practice being human, practice loving the earth and each other, each day. Thank you for reading.

Big love,

Karen

Please click the heart if you appreciate this post and of course, feel free to restack or share with friends. If you can afford it, please consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber or buy a copy of my book, Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living from your local independent bookstore.

Local Folx!

This Summer + Fall - Join Me for Writing Wild

Registration Open - Space Limited to 8 Women

Workshops - Rollinsville, CO

SUMMER 2026 - Space Limited to 8 women

Workshops exploring the landscapes of the body and the earth.

Writing Wild Workshops are season-based generative workshops exploring our wild, physical selves in all the landscapes we inhabit. Participants drop into their senses and write to and from this place in a series of exercises meant to inspire and get their creative juices going. Open to beginners and seasoned writers as well as the writing curious. Plan for camaraderie, craft talk, nature walking, discussion, and plenty of writing. Space limited. #writingwildworkshops

Writing Wild: Writing the Language of Land

Sunday, June 7th 10-3:30

With summer coming into bloom, we’ll take our cue from the abundance of wildflowers and birds, seasonal thundershowers and flourishing gardens to learn how to listen to the more-than-human world. Become an animal in landscape or a cloud blown on the wind, spend time inspecting the woodpecker-tattered bark of an aspen or examining the tendrils offered by moss to learn to engage your senses to and fill your inspirational cup. Join me for this immersive workshop to explore your wild senses and dive into writing.

Writing Wild: Ritual

Sunday October 4th 10-3:30

As we prepare to enter enter fall, this daylong workshop focuses on not only helping your understand your own writing rituals (best times + places for inspiration, how to keep coming back to writing over and over) in order to help you feed your creative self, but also on inspiring some new ones. Plus, we’ll take a deep dive in the mystery with an intuitive inspiration hike and using tarot cards to help us access images, stories, poems swimming in our subconscious bodies.

FULL DAY WORKSHOPS - $150 OR $125 When You Register with a friend.

Lunch Provided!

r

The same stars come around and around and around

The same sun dips her head into the ocean

The same tree in the same poem by the same poet

—-Marilyn Chin, “Millennium, Six Songs”

Hello Lovelies—

Buckets of gratitude for reading A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild. I appreciate all of you who sustain and help me grow these weekly meditations by reading and commenting or sharing and supporting my work with a paid subscription. Your generosity means the world to me. Thank you for being here.

Did you know you can LISTEN to A Woman’s Place Is in the Wild? Click the play button on the upper right of your screen when you go to the page of this post.

Each weekly meditation of A Woman’s Place is in the Wild is an offering, an evocation of the world around me. You will rarely find me writing about climbing to the top of a mountain or counting the miles I’ve walked as if collecting notches on a belt.

Instead, I want to adventure in.

This is the kind of nature writing needed now, narratives of place—localities, with its root in the Latin, locus, for place—the kind that rise over time out of relationship, that allow us to understand that we are place, too. As the Scottish writer, Nan Shepherd says, “The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else.”

This is my project here

Subscribe now

This week, while I’m away, a repost from last spring about this time. Please enjoy. I’ve opened the Creativity Practice up for all readers.

Waning Gibbous Moon, Toukokuu, Planting Moon - May 2025

Hummingbird comes first.

I hear her sounding call from the well of deep sleep.

Light opens on the horizon and I rise, tiptoeing from the bedroom to the kitchen in the blue light of morning, to retrieve the feeders.

Outside, night has already let slip her shawl to reveal the husky pink of a new day. At my head, hummingbirds dart and whir.

Yuki follows—after belly rubs and good morning kisses—watching the fox who looks up from the yard. It’s 40 degrees outside, 54 inside.

I pull a sweater over my summer dress, meditate, make coffee, as I do each morning, watching as light splashes through the east window making whatever it touches look briefly holy: the clutter on the kitchen table (newly canned pickles, a bird feeder, camera, errant napkins, a tub of flower seeds), Yuki’s quilt covered kennel, the plate- sized river stones of the hearth.

I breathe deeply, watch a puffed grey Clark’s Nutcracker regard Yuki as she watches her back. She loves all flying things, will sit with her head up, tracking birds on the roof and in the trees or chase butterflies through the woods.

I sip coffee and write, my morning ritual of taking each new day in, of gathering beauty.

It will be my birthday in a couple of days. I have splurged on lamb and my favorite expensive bubbly, and invited a few friends who will bring flowers and poems to dinner. Each year, I make a tiny spectacle of the day—visiting psychics, hosting goddess parties, getting a massage or facial, sharing good food with friends. I enjoy the deep ritual of this annual celebration, taking delight that I was born in May when the world is opening wide after the long cold slumber of winter.

When I lived in the little cabin on Overland Mountain, I celebrated my birthday each year with a mimosa and a bagel spread with lox cream cheese, tomato, onion and capers, sitting outside in a broad patch of sun and writing as Elvis wandered the meadow before settling at my feet.

In those days, one of the highlights of my day was a call from my grandmother, Barbara.

“Karen, honey, it’s me, Grandma,” she’d say every time, as if I didn’t have caller ID, as if I would not know her voice on the line. She never quite trusted the technology of the telephone, still had a rotary phone perched on a console by which she had positioned a chair. I pictured her sitting near the window, stationary, as we talked, while I stalked the length of my deck and wandered out into the garden. Barbara was a precise, elegant woman who liked her table a certain way and was quietly horrified by the chaos my brothers and I brought to her tidy home each Christmas. She was my grandfather’s second wife, special because she was my also godmother, and had never had children of her own.

There were years when I wore her disapproval like a yoke, never feeling quite refined and lady-like or beautiful enough for her, but in the more than ten years after my grandfather died, we developed a tenderness cultivated through weekly telephone calls. She worried for me—still single and living in what she thought were the wilds of the Rocky Mountains—while secretly admiring my spark.

“Oh, you!” she’d exclaim when we argued good naturedly about politics. In those days, she called Clinton and Gore, “Tweedledee and Tweedledum” and railed about “socialized medicine.”

“If socialism means everyone has healthcare, the sign me up!” I’d say.

Oh, you! She laughed.

On my birthday, I will miss the comforting ritual of her call ,as I have every year in the decade since she passed. Miss the way she called me hon-ney, drawing out the word like the tip of a seesaw. Miss her giggle when I said something naughty, miss our mock outrage at the other’s politics. Wonder if we could be so light about the state of the world now.

On Friday, I will set my table with her china, which I long ago inherited but which all these years has been packed away since she passed at the age of 93. I will drink champagne—her favorite drink, next to a very dry martini—and raise a glass to beauty, to the “same stars that come round and round” and to the ritual of celebration that roots us to this life.

Hold onto beauty, friends, and to each other. Carry hope. And practice being human, practice loving the earth and each other, each day.

Thank you for reading.

Big love,

Karen

Please click the heart if you appreciate this post and of course, feel free to restack or share with friends. If you can afford it, please consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber or buy a copy of my book, Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living from your local independent bookstore, or get a personalized signed edition here.

A Woman’s Place is in the Wild is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Living Wild Creativity Practice: Taking Root in Ritual

Start by thinking about your own rituals. What are they? Perhaps you garden each morning or even each night, as my friend Helen does, by candle light, singing to her plants. Perhaps you like the ritual, as I do, of a beautifully set table or a glass of wine on the deck in summer. Maybe you take baths or go for quiet walks alone or light candles in the dark winter morning. Perhaps you always kiss your dog or your partner first or last thing in the day. Perhaps you too have a grandmother you call each week.

List your rituals. Describe them in as much succulent detail as you dare. Flesh them out in all their fecundity.

Now list your writing rituals in the same detail. When I was a young poet, I took a bag of poetry books to the Boulder library and wrote on the glass-in bridgeway over Boulder Creek with the words of other poets for inspiration. Now, it’s the silence hours of each morning when I write before speaking, first in my journal and then on my computer, adding words to the novel I am writing.

Describe the meaning your rituals give to your life. Examine the ways they connect you to yourself and to the natural world and others. Think about the way they allow you to take root and grow.

Imagine now what you are growing in your life. Imagine the roots of your ritual growing. Imagine what you are cultivating now and for the future. Write a poem or a story from these imaginings. Write a letter to yourself.

More Inspiration

Here is a link to how fox, who still comes to my yard each day, inspired me and a book.

And here, another inspirational offering, The Bigger Heart.

Thank you for your practice and for being here.

I see you.

Big love!

Thanks for reading A Woman’s Place is in the Wild! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

This Summer + Fall - Join Me for Writing Wild

Registration Open - Space Limited to 8 women

Workshops - Rollinsville, CO

SUMMER 2026 - Space Limited to 8

Workshops exploring the landscapes of the body and the earth.

Writing Wild Workshops are season-based generative workshops exploring our wild, physical selves in all the landscapes we inhabit. Participants drop into their senses and write to and from this place in a series of exercises meant to inspire and get their creative juices going. Open to beginners and seasoned writers as well as the writing curious. Plan for camaraderie, craft talk, nature walking, discussion, and plenty of writing. Space limited. #writingwildworkshops

Writing Wild: Learning the Language of Land

Sunday, June 7th 10-3:30

With summer coming into bloom, we’ll take our cue from the abundance of wildflowers and birds, seasonal thundershowers and flourishing gardens to learn how to listen to the more-than-human world. Become an animal in landscape or a cloud blown on the wind, spend time inspecting the woodpecker-tattered bark of an aspen or examining the tendrils offered by moss to learn to engage your senses to and fill your inspirational cup. Join me for exploration and generative exercises.

Writing Wild: Ritual

Sunday October 4th 10-3:30

As we prepare to enter enter fall, this daylong workshop focuses on not only helping your understand your own writing rituals (best times + places for inspiration, how to keep coming back to writing over and over) in order to help you feed your creative self, but also on inspiring some new ones. Plus, we’ll take a deep dive in the mystery with an intuitive inspiration hike and using tarot cards to help us access images, stories, poems swimming in our subconscious bodies.

FULL DAY WORKSHOPS - $150 OR $125 When You Register with a friend.

Upcoming Events For National Poetry Month - For Local Readers

Thanks for reading A Woman’s Place is in the Wild! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

“And forget not that the Earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair”

---Kahil Gibran“

I imagined the wind moving through all these places and many more like them: places that were separated from one another by roads and housing, fences and shopping centres, street lights and cities, but were joined across space at that time by the wildness in the wind. We are fallen in mostly broken pieces, I thought, but the wild can still return us to ourselves.”

—-Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places

Hello Lovelies—

Buckets of gratitude for reading A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild. I appreciate all of you who sustain and help me grow these weekly meditations by reading and commenting or sharing and supporting my work with a paid subscription. Your generosity means the world to me. Thank you for being here.

Did you know you can LISTEN to A Woman’s Place Is in the Wild? Click the play button on the upper right of your screen when you go to the page of this post.

Each weekly meditation of A Woman’s Place is in the Wild is an offering, an evocation of the world around me. You will rarely find me writing about climbing to the top of a mountain or counting the miles I’ve walked as if collecting notches on a belt.

Instead, I want to adventure in.

This is the kind of nature writing needed now, narratives of place—localities, with its root in the Latin, locus, for place—the kind that rise over time out of relationship, that allow us to understand that we are place, too. As the Scottish writer, Nan Shepherd says, “The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else.”

This is my project here.

Subscribe now

Waxing Moon, Toukokuu, Planting or Flower Moon, Spring - Earth Day

There is a spot near the top of Overland Mountain that knows me.

In this spot, which is not so mountainous as it is rolling and rock-strewn, there is a pond that overlooks the Front Range, part of the southern Continental Divide. For a decade, I circled the path around the pond following the clock of winter—when the water receded and iced over—into summer, when the pond filled the entire basin, the home of wild iris and shooting stars and mating pairs of mallards.

I walked to the peeper pond, named for the chorus of tiny frogs who make a brief appearance in early spring, nearly every day when I lived in a tiny cabin nearby as I followed the the ebb and flow of the seasons of my life, walking at first with Elvis, then alone, then with Greg.

The pond bore witness to the phases of my life as I stalked, picked wildflowers, collected dried grass and rocks, lounged, picnicked, made prayers and ritual, taught writing to groups, and wrote in its presence. On the first day of May seven years ago, Greg and I eloped near the rocks that buttress one end as a blustery spring storm sent both rain and snow spitting from the sky and the clouds blew wild and thunderous. That day marked the return of hummingbirds, the return of joy to the mountain.

In return, I, too, have borne witness—to the pond’s seasons, to the years when it was so full, it flooded the walking path, the years when the heat dried it up and the banks were absent of iris and shooting stars. Years when the I discovered moose—the first on the mountain—along its edges, and years when the sedges grew chest high and the whole basin carried a minty scent. Years of bear tracks and mountain lion scat, years of rabbit and deer droppings. I witnessed it all.

In the morning after my dog elvis died, I walked with friends the path I had so often walked with my boy, through the seasons of our life together at the little cabin on Overland Mountain. The morning was brisk as the song of peepers rang like sleigh bells and I came upon the first Pasque flower of the season, a flower that signals the threshold of spring and I knew then that elvis would always be with me.

On a visit to the peeper pond last year, Greg and I again saw the first Pasque flower of the season. We noticed, too, several large pines, including one that had to be well over two hundred years-old and had once stood sentinel-like along the pond’s rim, had succumbed to winter wind.

As Yuki ran ahead, her head low inhaling new terrain, I understood we had crossed another threshold: the last time Greg and I had walked the pond, it was with River, who left us too soon. We’d entered a new season of our lives and this place, with its ancient eye, one of my wild places, was watching.

The pond has known me through so many seasons—times when it was just me and elvis, times times when Greg painted and I wrote as we picnicked in the early days of our romance, times after River joined our family and he wandered among wildflowers, times when the three of us searched the wooded crests of hills for a Christmas tree.

In his book, The Wild Places, Robert Macfarlane travels to remote landscapes in search of an understanding of the wild, only to realize, in the end, that the wild is everywhere. He celebrates this realization by listing his wild places, the places with whom he shares memory and a bond, the places that live with him.

This year I realized the lodgepole pine forest that surrounds my house in the gulch has become one of my wild places.

I’ve been making fairy ring at the base of trees where I leave gifts when I walk and there are certain trees I acknowledge every single time I see them. Some trees invite me to ask permission for passage, others call out for embrace.

Each morning when I greet the sunrise, I make an offering for the trees—the ponderosa and aspen—in whose presence I live. I remember fox and the returning robins, the tender pink of tiny kinnickinnic flowers, the deer who come to eat sunflower seeds in the night. I remember them, along with my human ancestors, because we are all kin.

I’ve fought hard in my life for a place where I feel like I belong.

Born to a rootless family of wanderers, people cut off from who they were supposed to be and who did not much value the lives of women, I have have had to work to slough off the mantle of alienation.

Even now I confess there are days when I am haunted by the spaces that surround me, forever on the outside looking in, caught by the feeling that I still lurk the margins, unseen, uncounted. In my dreams, I am forever in search of a place to live. I visit familiar places that have changed or discover my house has gone missing in the night.

I have to remind myself over and over that the story of alienation is one that has been handed to me. It’s a story, I live to un-tell.

So I write. The novel I am working on is a spell cast against the hex of my birth.

And so I walk the landscape, my wild places, the places that hold me and beckon to me, places where the earth delights in the touch of my foot, where I understand I am recognized the more-than-human world and where I am kin.

Hummingbird returned to the mountain yesterday. I heard her whir and then there she was at the feeder. She is early and I am filled with gladness. Now when the world is too heavy, when the days lurch, there is this piece of beauty, this moment of joy.

It is enough.

It is as Li-Young Lee writes in his poem “From Blossoms”:

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

In honor of Earth Day, I offer you this practice:

Take a moment to list your wild places.

These are landscapes that call you, that you return to, that haunt you. It can be an abandoned field near your childhood home where you played stalking games with your brothers, or a translucent alpine lake reflecting clouds where you floated one day feeling your body a part of the sky. It can be remote or very near. Close your eyes and imagine the wild in your life.

Keep a list. Or sketch them if you like. Put this up somewhere where you can see it. These places are as important as breathing. They give you life.

And you can visit them anytime because your feeling for them, your relationship with them is something you carry in your body as memory and synthesis.

Acknowledging the wild is what Earth Day means to me. And it is every single day.

Note: Next week, I will be taking a much needed break and so will be re-posting a popular Substack. Enjoy the Earth awakening, enjoy this season of rebirth.

Hold onto beauty, friends, and to each other. Carry hope. And practice being human, practice loving the earth and each other, each day. Thank you for reading.

Big love,

Karen

Please click the heart if you appreciate this post and of course, feel free to restack or share with friends. If you can afford it, please consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber or buy a copy of my book, Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living from your local independent bookstore.

This Summer + Fall - Join Me for Writing Wild

Registration Open - Space Limited

Workshops - Rollinsville, CO

SUMMER 2026 - Space Limited

Workshops exploring the landscapes of the body and the earth.

Writing Wild Workshops are season-based generative workshops exploring our wild, physical selves in all the landscapes we inhabit. Participants drop into their senses and write to and from this place in a series of exercises meant to inspire and get their creative juices going. Open to beginners and seasoned writers as well as the writing curious. Plan for camaraderie, craft talk, nature walking, discussion, and plenty of writing. Space limited. #writingwildworkshops

Writing Wild: Learning the Language of Land

Sunday, June 7th 10-3:30

With summer coming into bloom, we’ll take our cue from the abundance of wildflowers and birds, seasonal thundershowers and flourishing gardens to learn how to listen to the more-than-human world. Become an animal in landscape or a cloud blown on the wind, spend time inspecting the woodpecker-tattered bark of an aspen or examining the tendrils offered by moss to learn to engage your senses to and fill your inspirational cup. Join me for exploration and generative exercises.

Writing Wild: Ritual

Sunday October 4th 10-3:30

As we prepare to enter enter fall, this daylong workshop focuses on not only helping your understand your own writing rituals (best times + places for inspiration, how to keep coming back to writing over and over) in order to help you feed your creative self, but also on inspiring some new ones. Plus, we’ll take a deep dive in the mystery with an intuitive inspiration hike and using tarot cards to help us access images, stories, poems swimming in our subconscious bodies.

FULL DAY WORKSHOPS - $150 OR $125 When You Register with a friend, Lunch Provided!

Upcoming Events For National Poetry Month - For Local Readers

r

You could grow into it,

that sense of living like a dog,

loyal to being on your own in the fur of your skin,

able to exist only for the sake of existing.

—Ioanna Carlson, “Over and over Tune”

Hello Lovelies—

Buckets of gratitude for reading A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild. I appreciate all of you who sustain and help me grow these weekly meditations by reading and commenting or sharing and supporting my work with a paid subscription. Your generosity means the world to me. Thank you for being here.

Did you know you can LISTEN to A Woman’s Place Is in the Wild? Click the play button on the upper right of your screen when you go to the page of this post.

Each weekly meditation of A Woman’s Place is in the Wild is an offering, an evocation of the world around me. You will rarely find me writing about climbing to the top of a mountain or counting the miles I’ve walked as if collecting notches on a belt.

Instead, I want to adventure in.

This is the kind of nature writing needed now, narratives of place—localities, with its root in the Latin, locus, for place—the kind that rise over time out of relationship, that allow us to understand that we are place, too. As the Scottish writer, Nan Shepherd says, “The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else.”

This is my project here.

Subscribe now

15 April, Huhtikuu, Last Waning Crescent of the Pink Moon - Spring

On a trip to southern Colorado for a yoga retreat I encounter a Great Horned Owl.

The sky is has just deepened to cobalt in the high altitude desert of the San Luis Valley when I look up to see the shadow of the bird, a piece of silhouetted night, balanced on the limb of a still-bare cottonwood.

He tips forward with each hoo-h’HOO-hoo-hoo.

I listen for a long time to the owl’s night song. He is perhaps twenty yards away. The deepening dusk seems to gather on the bird’s wings as he tips and calls, tips and calls.

I am transfixed.

Still, it takes days for the event to register. I am already back at home after three days of soaking and asana in which, irritated and restless, I never feel fully in my skin when I understand the owl’s call: That night was the fifteen anniversary of the death of elvis, my companion all those years when I was living a solitary mountain life. He had circled back, as he always does, for me.

My first love.

It’s true what they say—you don’t pick the dog, the dog picks you. I went looking for a forty-pound female, a dog who would be obedient and manageable, smart and devoted. A dog like Tikka, my friend Julie’s border collie, who waited leash-less and quiet for her owner outside stores and restaurants and in the back of Julie’s pickup. Instead, I got an underweight fifty-two-pound runner, an escape artist with a mind of his own; he only ever listened to me when he felt like it. With Elvis, I would have to qualify my statements with the phrase for a husky—as in “Elvis is pretty well-behaved for a husky.” He was devoted and manageable. For a husky.

The dog had been found loping down a stretch of highway outside Boulder that angled toward cows and open space. He wore a spiked leather collar slung around his neck, a costume at odds with his disposition; elvis was no brute. Instead he was joy incarnate, delighted for each day to rise up, for each adventure to begin.

Weeks went by before I could name him. It wasn’t at all obvious what he should be called. At first, I thought because of the collar he should be Sid, like the Sex Pistols bassist, but Elvis’s disposition was more pretty boy modern rock than gnashing punk. I tried Ezra and Levi on, but both suggested a roughness the dog lacked. Loki, the name of the Norse god of wiliness and chaos, seemed like asking for trouble. I was already worried he was more dog than I could handle: Impulsive and impatient, he didn’t stand so much as stab the ground with his paws. When not sleeping, his body was in constant motion.

Finally, I hit on elvis, which I spelled with a lower case e. I’d carried a torch for the King of Rock and Roll back in my preteens, when I’d listened to Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite until I could sing and say the album by heart. Plus, I remembered at the humane society the dog’s name tag had said Aron, and I thought I might be shaking my fists at the fates to give him any name but the King’s.

I thought I was simply getting a companion to my days, a trail buddy, but the dog offers so much more. I’d learned from a very young age to isolate myself from people and from a world that offered up far too many dangerous uncertainties. I thought I was being smart. I would saddle up and ride off into the sunset, alone, armored-up and invincible. But then Elvis inserted himself between my breastplate and skin.

I knew I was smitten the day not long after I brought him home when I watched Elvis’s paws paddle back and forth while he slept and he called out in a high bubbling cry. Tenderly, I reached out and put my hand on his head, thinking of him alone in his pen at the pound. and began to cry.

“It’s okay,” I said. For the first time in my entire life, I understood love.

With elvis, an animal who’d fused himself to me the way I was told wolves do, I moved more instinctually, alert to the things that drew his attention. It was as if the tether I’d used to train him to stay with me had become an extended invisible cord.

He was my sixth sense.

At first I was simply more aware of whatever could get him killed—ledges, wildlife, hunters with guns—but that awareness deepened to take in texture and sound and smell, the nuances of terrain.

With him, I became more present.

The feeling of his body next to me anchored me to the physical world, filling me with a calm I seldom felt. My mind wanted too much to go tumbling down the hill, getting ahead of the day and whatever was just beyond the tip of my nose, but the still-wild husky gathered it back. Elvis became at first my eyes, my ears, then my guru, my guide: His presence reminded me to play now, sleep now, explore now, be now.

We had fourteen and half years together but whole lifetimes of love and devotion.

I’ve said it over and over: the love of a dog is no small thing.

Every moment of my days with elvis conspired to alter the architecture of my heart. My life was bigger, richer, deeper, and more profound because I’d taken the dog with the spiked collar home with me.

After I had made the decision to let elvis go, his body wracked with a bladder cancer that was causing urine to leak into his gut, I gathered friends and we sang and told stories and rang bells before his vet Lisa gave him the final shot. I felt his heart stop beneath my hand as I whispered in his ear. Then I lay with him as friends drove us to have his body cremated. I was the one to give his body to the flames.

It was an act of love, one of the greatest of my life.

When I returned home that night, I heard the first peepers of the season and then, the call of a Great Horned owl. I understood the sound was Elvis’s call and response to me.

He would never really leave me.

In the years since his passing I have often felt him on the trail ahead of me whether I am wandering the terrain of the woods or a dream.

His message?

All there is, is love.

Not the love of soul mates and candy hearts but the force that orders the stars, the heartbeat of the universe.

He circles back now to remind me, as I’ve been making furrows of my days, feeling the weight of too much getting an doing.

Look up, he says. Remember wonder.

Elvis stands even still at the threshold of the wild world, the real world, his tail fanning back and forth as he leads the way. Come on, he says, there’s more between heaven and earth . . .

And there is.

Hold onto beauty, friends, and to each other. Carry hope. And practice being human, practice loving the earth and each other, each day.

Thank you for reading. Please click heart if you appreciate this post and feel free to share or restack.

Big love,

Karen

If you can afford it, please consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber or by ordering a copy of Rough Beauty from Bookshop.org or a personalize edition from my website.

Share

This Summer + Fall - Join Me for Writing Wild

Registration Open - Space Limited

Workshops - Rollinsville, CO

SUMMER 2026 - Space Limited

Workshops exploring the landscapes of the body and the earth.

Writing Wild Workshops are season-based generative workshops exploring our wild, physical selves in all the landscapes we inhabit. Participants drop into their senses and write to and from this place in a series of exercises meant to inspire and get their creative juices going. Open to beginners and seasoned writers as well as the writing curious. Plan for camaraderie, craft talk, nature walking, discussion, and plenty of writing. Space limited. #writingwildworkshops

Writing Wild: Learning the Language of Land

Sunday, June 7th 10-3:30

With summer coming into bloom, we’ll take our cue from the abundance of wildflowers and birds, seasonal thundershowers and flourishing gardens to learn how to listen to the more-than-human world. Become an animal in landscape or a cloud blown on the wind, spend time inspecting the woodpecker-tattered bark of an aspen or examining the tendrils offered by moss to learn to engage your senses to and fill your inspirational cup. Join me for exploration and generative exercises.

Writing Wild: Ritual

Sunday October 4th 10-3:30

As we prepare to enter enter fall, this daylong workshop focuses on not only helping your understand your own writing rituals (best times + places for inspiration, how to keep coming back to writing over and over) in order to help you feed your creative self, but also on inspiring some new ones. Plus, we’ll take a deep dive in the mystery with an intuitive inspiration hike and using tarot cards to help us access images, stories, poems swimming in our subconscious bodies.

FULL DAY WORKSHOPS - $150 OR $125 When You Register with a friend.

Upcoming Events For National Poetry Month - For Local Readers

There’s a crack, a crack in everything—That’s how the light gets in.

—Leonard Cohen

Hello Lovelies—

Buckets of gratitude for reading A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild. I appreciate all of you who sustain and help me grow these weekly meditations by reading and commenting or sharing and supporting my work with a paid subscription. Your generosity means the world to me. Thank you for being here.

Did you know you can LISTEN to A Woman’s Place Is in the Wild? Click the play button on the upper right of your screen when you go to the page of this post.

Each weekly meditation of A Woman’s Place is in the Wild is an offering, an evocation of the world around me. You will rarely find me writing about climbing to the top of a mountain or counting the miles I’ve walked as if collecting notches on a belt.

Instead, I want to adventure in.

This is the kind of nature writing needed now, narratives of place—localities, with its root in the Latin, locus, for place—the kind that rise over time out of relationship, that allow us to understand that we are place, too. As the Scottish writer, Nan Shepherd says, “The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else.”

This is my project here.

Subscribe now

8 April, Huhtikuu, Waning Pink Moon - Spring

Spring emerges on the mountain like the pages of a picture book flipped in a ferocious wind. First sun, then clouds; now a hint of snow turning to rain.

One blue sky morning, wind blows solitary snow flakes that sparkle like spirits between trees. Each crystal catches the sun, glistening—a glimmer of another world. I breathe, suspended for a moment of what feels like grace in these turbulent days as I watch bits of incandescent fire drift through the forest.

That day first thunder arrives. Then a cold rain that turns icy, covering the landscape with a thin layer of crusted snow. In the garden, crocuses hide their heads.

The next day, a chorus of coyotes, raucous at dawn. Also a first. I come full stop in the late morning sun, my legs bare, and my only ambition—to watch pygmy nuthatches twitter at the feeder.

Robins have returned, their song ringing in dawn and dusk. The forest is alive now with movement: grey squirrels spiral up the trunk of the ponderosa off the deck or chitter at me from a branch, and juncos hop among juniper and kinnickinnic, their trill the music of my days. Chipmunks, newly emerged, race underfoot as I step outside.

Still will I gather beauty.

The season is uncertain. For so many reasons. The entire world is on the precipice of monumental change—but to what?

In spring, each day teaches me to meet it on its own terms, accepting what is offered; to do the work of tending and preparing, of opening, of accepting, as part of ritual of rebirth as old as time.

We must all do our part.

In the woods, I practice glorying at each new appearance, each first bud or blossom, resting my mind on possibility, on emergence instead of destruction because I believe each act of appreciation is an act of reciprocity that strengthens the web of life.

On the day before Easter, Greg and I walk Yuki out to the overlook and discover a Pasque flower opening in the meadow ringed by aspens that looks west toward Indian Peaks.

A first.

Until now, I’ve been convinced there weren’t enough sunny patches in our dark wood for the delicate purple blossoms. Greg and I wander the meadow as Yuki scouts for bones and scat. I see another blossom and then another. Suddenly there are dozens of flowers opening up to the morning.

They’ve been here all along.

It is as Sylvia Plath says in her poem about the surprise of encountering a poppy out of season, “A gift, a love gift./Utterly unasked for…”

At home, we color boiled eggs, writing a wish for what we want to grow on each, and place them on the table, an act of faith in this embryonic season.

On Easter, we hide raw eggs for the foxes, placing them along the path that winds up the gulch where we’re certain they have a den with mewling kits.

The egg, of course, is a symbol of creation and rebirth. In the Finnish mythology, a cracked egg makes the world:

In this story, the egg must break, must crack wide open and spill its contents in order for the world to be formed. I take that metaphor with me into my days, gathering the beauty of this broken world because I believe it makes all the difference.

Hold onto beauty, friends, and to each other. Carry hope. And practice being human, practice loving the earth and each other, each day.

Thank you for reading. Please click heart if you appreciate this post and feel free to share or restack.

Big love,

Karen

If you can afford it, please consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber or by ordering a copy of Rough Beauty from Bookshop.org or a personalize edition from my website.

Share

Upcoming Events For National Poetry Month - For Local Readers

And this Summer + Fall - Join Me for Writing Wild

Registration Open - Space Limited

Workshops - Rollinsville, CO

SUMMER 2026 - Space Limited

Workshops exploring the landscapes of the body and the earth.

Writing Wild Workshops are season-based generative workshops exploring our wild, physical selves in all the landscapes we inhabit. Participants drop into their senses and write to and from this place in a series of exercises meant to inspire and get their creative juices going. Open to beginners and seasoned writers as well as the writing curious. Plan for camaraderie, craft talk, nature walking, discussion, and plenty of writing. Space limited. #writingwildworkshops

Writing Wild: Learning the Language of Land

Sunday, June 7th 10-3:30

With summer coming into bloom, we’ll take our cue from the abundance of wildflowers and birds, seasonal thundershowers and flourishing gardens to learn how to listen to the more-than-human world. Become an animal in landscape or a cloud blown on the wind, spend time inspecting the woodpecker-tattered bark of an aspen or examining the tendrils offered by moss to learn to engage your senses to and fill your inspirational cup. Join me for exploration and generative exercises.

Writing Wild: Ritual

Sunday October 4th 10-3:30

As we prepare to enter enter fall, this daylong workshop focuses on not only helping your understand your own writing rituals (best times + places for inspiration, how to keep coming back to writing over and over) in order to help you feed your creative self, but also on inspiring some new ones. Plus, we’ll take a deep dive in the mystery with an intuitive inspiration hike and using tarot cards to help us access images, stories, poems swimming in our subconscious bodies.

FULL DAY WORKSHOPS - $150 OR $125 When You Register with a friend.

Vesi on Vanhin Voitehista - Water is the oldest medicine

—Finnish Proverb

Hello Lovelies—

Buckets of gratitude for reading A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild. I appreciate all of you who sustain and help me grow these weekly meditations by reading and commenting or sharing and supporting my work with a paid subscription. Your generosity means the world to me. Thank you for being here.

Did you know you can LISTEN to A Woman’s Place Is in the Wild? Click the play button on the upper right of your screen when you go to the page of this post.

Each weekly meditation of A Woman’s Place is in the Wild is an offering, an evocation of the world around me. You will rarely find me writing about climbing to the top of a mountain or counting the miles I’ve walked as if collecting notches on a belt.

Instead, I want to adventure in.

This is the kind of nature writing needed now, narratives of place—localities, with its root in the Latin, locus, for place—the kind that rise over time out of relationship, that allow us to understand that we are place, too. As the Scottish writer, Nan Shepherd says, “The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else.”

This is my project here.

Subscribe now

1 April, Huhtikuu, Full Pink Moon - Spring

Mist arrives.

Not the mist of a winter storm unfurling across the mountain thick and white as cotton balls, but the mist of spring, a kind of creeping, ethereal presence that blurs the spaces between trees and invites dreaming.

Last night, rain instead of the much-promised snow and this morning the first flicker, her piercing cry in the woods. The air is damp; I can smell water on the slight breeze. In this too-dry winter, the scent intoxicates, it coils around me like a cat.

The mist curls up the gulch, a moving presence, a gauzy shawl thrown over the forest. I think suddenly of the mists of my childhood living for a brief time in the South Bay of California. I remember walking alone to kindergarten across what then seemed like a great distance, but was just over half a mile, perhaps ten or twelve blocks.

Back then, the walk through mist was an eternity of slate and smoke, the shadows of grey like a a shroud thrown over the world. In such a mist, I thought, I might get lost—or simply disappear. I imagined stepping into other worlds, aware even then that my presence was an elsewhere in my family, that I longed before I could articulate it, to belong to other people.

As a very small child, I jumped on the bed in my parent’s room in the trailer where we lived in front of a large vanity mirror. Jumping, I watched the girl in the mirror, my twin, jumping as I jumped, moving with me. One day, I said to my mother, “Someday I will jump into the mirror and go live with her.”

I was certain that girl lived in the kind of world I longed for, a world of magic, a world that could only exist beyond an ordinary mirror. Perhaps I had read a children’s version of Alice climbing onto her mantel and through the looking glass as it turns into a “silvery mist.” There, everything had the reverse logic of this world.

In my fantasy, the girl in the mirror and I would have great adventures together in a place different and more mysterious and magical from the mundane place where I lived in a shabby two bedroom trailer with my two brothers and my parents.

But my mother stayed my impulse, saying, “If you go, I will not have a little girl of my own.”

It was the most loving thing she ever said to me.

So I stayed, still dreaming of another world where wonder lived, a world where all that I was certain existed—talking animals, fairies and nature spirits, and twinned little girls—did.

Now, as I watch the mist come over the mountain, I think of the little girl I was. How she has never really lost the piece of her that imagined how it could be, how she has grown into a woman who walks the woods, who makes little fairy circles at the foot of trees, and hangs notes and pieces of poems on branches. A woman who sets out a bowl of stones and water for her ancestors at the first signs of spring because Vesi on Vanhin Voitehista, water is the oldest medicine. The water is an offering to the women in my line, our bodies connected by the water of lands we come from in the Kainuu region of Finland and the water we hold inside these skins.

Science tells us mist is formed when water vapor condenses into droplets in air. I remember mist forming in tiny test tubes in organic chemistry class as we measured condensation points. Text books say there are types of mist: radiation (where fog forms at night as the ground cool rapidly, affecting the air above it); advection (when moist and warm air moves over colder water or land) and upslope (the type I see most often on the mountain where air cools as it ascends uphill).

But my body tells me that mist is the liminal world made visible; it is the space between water and air, the space between dreaming and waking.

In my lineage the sauna existed not just for bathing and purification but as another kind of liminal space, a place of birthing and also preparing the dead. It was the gateway to another realm.

Like mist, it holds the mystery and perhaps what some call magic.

As a species we have forgotten the ordinary magic of the elemental world: water, stone, fire, steam.

Magic is an ancient way of knowing that lives too often in stories, in some children’s book or what is has been relegated to folktale and myth, because we have forgotten the kind of wonder for the world magic engenders.

But more and more I see its return—in the rights of nature movement, in animism, in the number of people I see speaking and acting on behalf of the wild.

We understand the planet is alive. We understand that the way forward is to acknowledge the we have a responsibility to share the world with the more than human.

Here is ordinary magic. The world I dreamed so many years ago.

There is magic just now in the mist rising up over the mountain. Mist is a memory that holds the land. Her presence is ancient medicine. Perhaps, I pray, she has come to help the land remember water.

The American West is experiencing a historic drought. I cannot remember a winter with so little snow, nor can I think of the fire season to come. The earth is out of balance.

Always the question: What can I do?

I rise and welcome the mist singing Vesi on Vanhin Voitehista. On behalf of land, welcoming it.

But I also do this: I write. I tell the story of mist here, because as Leslie Silko says, “stories are all we have.'“

And they have power.

Right now we are caught in the spider web of the story of destruction. But I believe in another story, one where the edges of the known world are soft and each moment is a moment of beauty.

When we create, when we imagine, when we dream, we move toward a world of beauty, we cultivate it as the seeds of the future.

Every act of creation in our lives is an act of re-enchantment. With them, we call the old medicine back.

Mist arrives on the mountain as a harbinger of spring, of the season of possibility and change, of seeds stirring, and new growth, but also as a remembering for the girl I was and the woman I have become.

It is the oldest medicine.

Hold onto beauty, friends, and to each other. Carry hope. And practice being human, practice loving the earth and each other, each day.

Thank you for reading. Please click heart if you appreciate this post and feel free to share or restack.

Big love,

Karen

If you can afford it, please consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber or by ordering a copy of Rough Beauty from Bookshop.org or a personalize edition from my website.

Share

Upcoming Events - For Local Readers

Join Me for Writing Wild

Workshops - Rollinsville, CO

SUMMER 2026 - Space Limited

Workshops exploring the landscapes of the body and the earth.

Writing Wild Workshops are season-based generative workshops exploring our wild, physical selves in all the landscapes we inhabit. Participants drop into their senses and write to and from this place in a series of exercises meant to inspire and get their creative juices going. Open to beginners and seasoned writers as well as the writing curious. Plan for camaraderie, craft talk, nature walking, discussion, and plenty of writing. Space limited. #writingwildworkshops

Writing Wild: Learning the Language of Land

Sunday, June 7th 10-3:30

With summer coming into bloom, we’ll take our cue from the abundance of wildflowers and birds, seasonal thundershowers and flourishing gardens to learn how to listen to the more-than-human world. Become an animal in landscape or a cloud blown on the wind, spend time inspecting the woodpecker-tattered bark of an aspen or examining the tendrils offered by moss to learn to engage your senses to and fill your inspirational cup. Join me for exploration and generative exercises.

Writing Wild: Ritual

Sunday October 4th 10-3:30

As we prepare to enter enter fall, this daylong workshop focuses on not only helping your understand your own writing rituals (best times + places for inspiration, how to keep coming back to writing over and over) in order to help you feed your creative self, but also on inspiring some new ones. Plus, we’ll take a deep dive in the mystery with an intuitive inspiration hike and using tarot cards to help us access images, stories, poems swimming in our subconscious bodies.

FULL DAY WORKSHOPS - $150 OR $125 When You Register with a friend.

Near Spring Equinox

A ruby crocus near the porch sends up

hope—winter of sorrow is waning

the dire moon of almost-spring rises

full with promise of renewal,

shaming twinkling city lights in its splendor.

I search for my faith, wonder where

I lost it, find it in deep cinnamon

mud smushing up between my toes.

—-Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

Hello Lovelies—

Buckets of gratitude for reading A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild. I appreciate all of you who sustain and help me grow these weekly meditations by reading and commenting or sharing and supporting my work with a paid subscription. Your generosity means the world to me. Thank you for being here.

Did you know you can LISTEN to A Woman’s Place Is in the Wild? Click the play button on the upper right of your screen when you go to the page of this post.

Each weekly meditation of A Woman’s Place is in the Wild is an offering, an evocation of the world around me. You will rarely find me writing about climbing to the top of a mountain or counting the miles I’ve walked as if collecting notches on a belt.

Instead, I want to adventure in.

This is the kind of nature writing needed now, narratives of place—localities, with its root in the Latin, locus, for place—the kind that rise over time out of relationship, that allow us to understand that we are place, too. As the Scottish writer, Nan Shepherd says, “The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else.”

This is my project here.

Subscribe now

25 March, Huhtikuu, Waxing Pink Moon - Spring

In Finland the April Full Moon is known as the Pink Moon, named for the for color of early spring flowers like deep blushing phlox.

As if on cue, a magenta crocus opens along the privacy fence in front of our hot tub. It’s one of the sunniest spots on our shaded hillside and the flower sprouts, defiant with joy in too dry soil.

The crocus appears on the Equinox, answering the promise of renewal and growth in the wheel of the year at the exact time when night joins hands with day as equals.

That night I hear the first robin singing cheerily cheer up cheer up cheerily cheer up in the dusk of the evening.

Colorado, along with the rest of the West is bone dry. We are staring down the barrel of what could be a catastrophic fire season. Meanwhile the world burns, too, set on fire by the Mad King and his Destroyers. Each day a new destruction, a new horror. All of our hearts are breaking for the earth, for the cavalier loss of human and more-than-human life, for the craven greed that seeks to consume the goodness of the world.

It’s hard for the heart to hold it all. It’s hard not to despair.

Still, spring arrives.

The season trumpets the news of renewal, the certainty beyond human machinations, beyond human logic that natural cycles bend ever toward life. This is what I hold on to in these days. I focus my body on the bodies of trees who bear witness in our woods, juncos happily twittering in their limbs.

I love nothing so much as the hopefulness of flowers—their faces open to the sun, their color, panacea for this scraped-bare, dun-dry, and umber colored winter, for the heart-breaking state of the world.

Theirs, is a rowdy and effulgent celebration of life against all odds.

This, my friends, is my sweet spot. I know what it’s like to make a garden out of nothing, to find the beauty of the cliff edge and water in the desert.

I, too, was born in spring.

Crocus invites first spring pollinators, throwing the doors open for insects who emerge as the weather warms. Their presence sets in motion the increase in a season where they will happily engage in both sexual (via pollinators) and asexual (through corms) reproduction. In short, they are polygamists, harnessing the instinct to reproduce in any way they can.

They are a bellwether. Not simply for the season, but for us.

Only a few day after that first bloom, dozens of crocuses pop out along the fence. Now ivory faces mix with flushed ones, an orgy of blossoms.

I think of them suddenly as mouths crying not just their joy but their pleasure, their insistence on fecundity in the world.

We have arrived in the season of renewal and opening. I have not lost my faith. It has always been here, all along. I have only to search the spring landscape to remind me, to remember.

“…[T]here is only one great thing: to live and see the great day that dawns, and the light that fills the world.”

—Old Inuit Song

What a privilege it is to be alive.

So go forth and fuck, my friends, in the ways that affirm the goodness of life, in the ways that make both love and beauty.

Here is the antidote to despair.

Hold onto beauty, friends, and to each other. Carry hope. And practice being human, practice loving the earth and each other, each day.

Thank you for reading. Please click heart if you appreciate this post and feel free to share or restack.

Big love,

Karen

If you can afford it, please consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber or by ordering a copy of Rough Beauty from Bookshop.org or a personalize edition from my website.

Share

Upcoming Events - For Local Readers

Hope to see you in April

Join Me for Writing Wild

Workshops - Rollinsville, CO

SUMMER 2026 - Space Limited

Workshops exploring the landscapes of the body and the earth.

Writing Wild Workshops are season-based generative workshops exploring our wild, physical selves in all the landscapes we inhabit. Participants drop into their senses and write to and from this place in a series of exercises meant to inspire and get their creative juices going. Open to beginners and seasoned writers as well as the writing curious. Plan for camaraderie, craft talk, nature walking, discussion, and plenty of writing. Space limited. #writingwildworkshops

Writing Wild: Learning the Language of Land

Sunday, June 7th 10-3:30

With summer coming into bloom, we’ll take our cue from the abundance of wildflowers and birds, seasonal thundershowers and flourishing gardens to learn how to listen to the more-than-human world. Become an animal in landscape or a cloud blown on the wind, spend time inspecting the woodpecker-tattered bark of an aspen or examining the tendrils offered by moss to learn to engage your senses to and fill your inspirational cup. Join me for exploration and generative exercises.

Writing Wild: Ritual

Sunday October 4th 10-3:30

As we prepare to enter enter fall, this daylong workshop focuses on not only helping your understand your own writing rituals (best times + places for inspiration, how to keep coming back to writing over and over) in order to help you feed your creative self, but also on inspiring some new ones. Plus, we’ll take a deep dive in the mystery with an intuitive inspiration hike and using tarot cards to help us access images, stories, poems swimming in our subconscious bodies.

FULL DAY WORKSHOPS - $150 OR $125 When You Register with a friend.

Invitation

Oh do you have time
        to linger
                for just a little while
                       out of your busy

and very important day
        for the goldfinches
                that have gathered
                       in a field of thistles

for a musical battle,
        to see who can sing
                the highest note,
                       or the lowest,

or the most expressive of mirth,
        or the most tender?
                Their strong, blunt beaks
                       drink the air

as they strive
        melodiously
                not for your sake
                       and not for mine

and not for the sake of winning
        but for sheer delight and gratitude—
                believe us, they say,
                       it is a serious thing

just to be alive
        on this fresh morning
                in the broken world.
                       I beg of you,

do not walk by
        without pausing
                to attend to this
                       rather ridiculous performance.

It could mean something.    
It could mean everything. . . 

                  ---Mary Oliver, from A Thousand Mornings, 2012

Hello Lovelies—

Buckets of gratitude for reading A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild. I appreciate all of you who sustain and help me grow these weekly meditations by reading and commenting or sharing and supporting my work with a paid subscription. Your generosity means the world to me. Thank you for being here.

Did you know you can LISTEN to A Woman’s Place Is in the Wild? Click the play button on the upper right of your screen when you go to the page of this post.

Each weekly meditation of A Woman’s Place is in the Wild is an offering, an evocation of the world around me. You will rarely find me writing about climbing to the top of a mountain or counting the miles I’ve walked as if collecting notches on a belt.

Instead, I want to adventure in.

This is the kind of nature writing needed now, narratives of place—localities, with its root in the Latin, locus, for place—the kind that rise over time out of relationship, that allow us to understand that we are place, too. As the Scottish writer, Nan Shepherd says, “The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else.”

This is my project here.

This week I marks both the new Pink or Clearing moon and also the Spring Equinox so I am offering free access to Living Wild Creativity Prompt normally for paid subscribers at the end of this post, which includes a ritual and some nature practices meant to deepen your your relationship with the natural world.

For full access to my archive, and to support my mission to re-member beauty between the human and non-human world, the please become a patron of A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild.

Subscribe now

18 March, Huhtikuu, New Pink or Clearing Moon

Spring approaches, wild and chaotic. I hear her tromping across the land, heavy-footed and furious, her skirts carrying the mud of a new growing season, the seeds of what is to be planted. On her shoulders, migrating birds.

This week she swung not a pendulum but an battle axe splitting the landscape with near hurricane-force winds and then a thick and lingering snow.

Battered by 80mph winds, we lose power for a few days. The roar is so loud it drowns out even the sound of neighbor’s obnoxious gas-powered generator. Gusts reach 114mph. Trees snap, leaving sharp spikes poking up in the forest. In some places whole groupings of trees are scrambled and tossed.

I hunker down at home, read books. I work on my computer to its last percentage of power. For dinner, I make pizzas on the grill outside and Greg and I watch a movie spooled on the dvd player hooked to our old television plunked down on the living room coffee table. We’ve saved the power in the rechargeable generator bought after the last big wind in December for just this purpose. Yuki, confused by this change in routine, paces at first, then settles, disgruntled, in the bedroom. Later, we light battery-operated candles and sit in bed and read a bit more.

We are in a boat tossed on enormous, unfurling waves on an angry sea. The roar and crash, our constant companion. That night I sleep with a pillow over my head to drown out the sound.

On the third night, snow replaces wind. It falls heavily, mercifully, filling up the landscape. I walk out to let it fall on my head and face, a benediction. More than 8 inches rains down in just a few hours, adding to the foot from last week that has mostly melted. The storm circles into the next day, splashing out to the plains and coming back like a tide, when suddenly the sun breaks out and mud blooms in the road.

This is the season of whiplash. One day brings snow and clouds, another opens wide and warm, temping crocus and daffodils from their winter beds.

But this year feels different.

Spring is furious.

And why not?

Why shouldn’t there be stomping and cacophony?

Nature wants our attention. Are we listening?

Earth speaks not just in the language of hurricanes and floods, of earthquakes and drying up aquifers, of shock and catastrophe—these the language of climate crisis— she also speaks in the emergence of catkins which freeze and thaw, freeze and thaw on aspens; in the butterfly I saw flying ahead of the snow storm and the caterpillars who, my cousin wrote to me, are spinning themselves into cocoons on his balcony; in the first robin on the mountain—always a sign of hope for me; in the way the trees in our yard seem, as Greg observed “to hold on to each other” in the wind; and in Mary Oliver’s goldfinches with their “expressive. . .mirth.”

Earth speaks in songs and melodies, in signs and semaphore: in the coyote who crossed the yard during the snow;the raven whose silent presence I feel from the ponderosa off the deck or the foxes curl, waiting for first light in the yard; in the green world rising from the cavern of winter despite everything; in the chrysalis of stars at night.

Hers is the language of hope, the language of presence.

I am reminded of Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan’s poem, “Bamboo” which tells us about the plants:

They have lived too long in the world of men.

They are hollow inside.

Lord, are you listening to this?

Plants are climbing to heaven

To talk to you.

The whole world is speaking to us every second of every day. There are hundreds of stories of renewal and rebirth right outside the door. All we have to do is offer the reciprocity of our attention.

When the wind rises, I’ll confess my first instinct is to turn away. I find not just the sound, but the explosion of ions in the air, unmooring.

But what if wind, too, is an invitation. What if I simply breathed and listened?

It could mean something.
It could mean everything.
It could be what Rilke meant, when he wrote:
You must change your life.
                                 ---Mary Oliver

This week, in honor of the New Pink Moon and kevätpäiväntasaus, the Spring Equinox, I offer some immersive practices that help you honor your unique relationship with Earth in this week’s Living Wild Creativity Practice. Here you can explore listening to the Earth in writing and through ritual. You can revisit some of the Earth Practices from this recent Living Wild Creativity Prompt or keep reading.

For access to my full archive or to support my work, please become a patron for as little as $7/mo..

Subscribe now

Hold onto beauty, friends, and to each other. Carry hope. And practice being human, practice loving the earth and each other, each day.

Thank you for reading. Please click heart if you appreciate this post and feel free to share or restack.

Big love,

Karen

If you can afford it, please consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber or by ordering a copy of Rough Beauty from Bookshop.org or a personalize edition from my website.

Share

Living Wild Creativity Practice - Invitation

Give the Gift of You Attention

Go to your favorite outdoor spot. It doesn’t have to be far. You can simply sit outside. Pledge 5 or 10 or 20 minutes each day to simply being with this place. Allow yourself to simply be still. Soften your gaze. Open your senses, gather sensation. Let it wash over you. Let it enter through your body not your brain. Experience.

This is earth listening.

I promise you your not just your life, but your world will be richer for it.

When you are complete, feel gratitude rise up in you.

What Does the Nature Say?

Write a poem in which some part of Nature speaks. How? Listen to sound and movement, listen to smell and touch. Write in an embodied way.

New Moon Clearing, a Ritual

In the honor of the new moon and spring, clear some space in your life of clutter. Dust, clean a closet, wash the items that don’t often get cleaned—the cushion covers on the couch, the baseboards and heat registers.

Write a word or two that represents what you are really ready to be done with. Then burn the paper.

Do what you need to clear and make ready for the new season.

Ritual for the Equinox, a Ritual

Here I am reposting instructions for making a Love Charm. Not for yourself but for the World, for the healing that only love can bring.

You’ll need a pack of seeds—your favorite flower—a square of red cloth, and silver thread. You will also need a candle, a bit of water, incense and a tiny bit of kosher salt for the blessing.

Sit. Gather your circle around you. Call your ancestors or guides. Or simply draw a circle on the floor or ground by tracing your finger. Imagine you are safe and protected. Or light candles to the four directions.

Close your eyes and breathe.

Imagine your roots in the earth, holding earth. Imagine the energy of the dark entering your roots to become light. Feel this reciprocity.

Pour the seeds into your hand. Breathe into them. Fill them with your fierce love and joy. Imagine them blossoming in the world, making it more beautiful and harmonious. Charge these seeds with your inspiration and deep love. Vision the world you want to see not for yourself but for All Beings.

When you feel complete, place the seed inside the square of cloth and gather the sides up to make a small pouch. Wrap the neck of the pouch with the silver thread three times, then tie the thread with three knots.

Hold your charm and fill it again with your energy and love.

Charge your Love Charm by Earth Air Fire Water.

Touch it to the earth you have gathered in a bowl.

Pass it through the smoke of incense.

Pass it over a candle flame.

Sprinkle it with water.

Say a blessing for your charm.

Release the energy. Ground. Drink a glass of water.

Place your charm outside as a gift to the earth.

Embody a Storm

Sit outside in a storm—wind or snow or rain—and let your senses open. Touch on sound and smell, taste and touch. Then touch sight. Write or dance or sing your experience as it is happening. Do not simply recount it. Embody it.

Make an Earth Gift

Make a gift for the earth as it emerges in this season of quickening. You can place a precious object, write a poem and tie it to a tree, place an icon in a special place as a gift, as recognition of the earth.

Many Blessings, my friends.

I’m asking you

to be a forest

where mud and leaves,

shadows and light,

growth and decay

all have their unquestioned

belonging.

—James A. Pearson

.Hello Lovelies—

Buckets of gratitude for reading A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild. I appreciate all of you who sustain and help me grow these weekly meditations by reading and commenting or sharing and supporting my work with a paid subscription. Your generosity means the world to me. Thank you for being here.

Did you know you can LISTEN to A Woman’s Place Is in the Wild? Click the play button on the upper right of your screen when you go to the page of this post.

Each weekly meditation of A Woman’s Place is in the Wild is an offering, an evocation of the world around me. You will rarely find me writing about climbing to the top of a mountain or counting the miles I’ve walked as if collecting notches on a belt.

Instead, I want to adventure in.

This is the kind of nature writing needed now, narratives of place—localities, with its root in the Latin, locus, for place—the kind that rise over time out of relationship, that allow us to understand that we are place, too. As the Scottish writer, Nan Shepherd says, “The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else.”

This is my project here.

Subscribe now

11 March, Maakuu, Waning Earth Moon

The time change has me waking late, tired in the afternoon, buzzy at night. The world, the world is a curtain of chaos. Some of us wake in the night with tight chests, some are haunted in dreams, some can’t sleep at all.

A heaviness hangs in the air. Anticipation or dread? Many of us stop, listening for an answer to a question.

We wear our apprehension in our bodies. I carry mine into my dreams: Someone is making charges on my credit card without my consent, someone is lurking in a dark hallway in an unfamiliar set of rooms.

And yet. . . .

Here is the edge of Spring. Forsythia send yellow arms skyward. Tips of tulip leaves poke through soil. A stubborn crack of green emerges through the blacktop. That robin, who sings to me as I walk to campus.

Here is beauty.

The days are an unfurling. The air is changed, shifted. The world unknotting in wild and disordered ways. Not because of world-stopping events, but because of spring which is a messy birth.

Last week the snow returned, dumping more than a foot, unfolding in such a way that I understand the world is remaking itself.

Over and over.

And although the news is horrific, we bear witness, we each do what we can.

Each day I gather beauty into my notebook, watch the wild world blossom and rise, resisting:

In the streaked pink light of sunrise.

In the sound of Jays and Nutcrackers calling and croaking over the suet feeders, their chatter like gossips meeting in a public square.

In the shadow of fox on the edge of morning, curled, waiting.

In the taste snow or rain, taste of ponderosa and mountain air, taste of sun on my arms and face.

I touch snow, touch mud, touch ice, touch the dewy tips of pine.

This morning, the surprise of a squall. It comes at first as rain. I smell it in the thick air as I step out with Yuki late, and then as damp frozen crystals in the early morning. The sky is misted with snow, wind rushes, the forest transformed. Snow wasn’t in the forecast and yet here it is. I rethink my plans for the day—where to walk with Yuki, whether to take my yoga class in person or via Zoom, what to have for dinner.

In the dark of the morning, I think what the forest thinks about weather, about world-stopping events. They must be gathering songs of tending and songs of knowing for the season, for whatever is to come. I wonder what they can see and sense, what stories they can tell about flux and time. How much they have witnessed year after year, generation after generation.

I think how change comes to a body, how shifts are experienced differently from the perspective of deep earth time, from the skin of bark, from the language of pith and xylem and phloem surging ever toward light, toward life. I imagine I hear the singing, imagine how much they have to tell.

Outside the wind rushes, furious with first light. Trees shake and bend, limbs clamoring, riotous, but roots solid.

I am grateful for the story of trees, for the story of forest, which holds all of it:

mud and leaves,

shadows and light,

growth and decay

Where each part is the next part in belonging.

And becoming.

Hold onto beauty, friends, and to each other. Carry hope. And practice being human, practice loving the earth and each other, each day.

Thank you for reading. Please click heart if you appreciate this post and feel free to share or restack.

Big love,

Karen

If you can afford it, please consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber or by ordering a copy of Rough Beauty from Bookshop.org or a personalize edition from my website.

Share

Upcoming Events - For Local Readers

Hope to see you in April

Join Me for Writing Wild

Workshops - Rollinsville, CO

SUMMER 2026 - Space Limited

Workshops exploring the landscapes of the body and the earth.

Writing Wild Workshops are season-based generative workshops exploring our wild, physical selves in all the landscapes we inhabit. Participants drop into their senses and write to and from this place in a series of exercises meant to inspire and get their creative juices going. Open to beginners and seasoned writers as well as the writing curious. Plan for camaraderie, craft talk, nature walking, discussion, and plenty of writing. Space limited. #writingwildworkshops

Writing Wild: Learning the Language of Land

Sunday, June 7th 10-3:30

With summer coming into bloom, we’ll take our cue from the abundance of wildflowers and birds, seasonal thundershowers and flourishing gardens to learn how to listen to the more-than-human world. Become an animal in landscape or a cloud blown on the wind, spend time inspecting the woodpecker-tattered bark of an aspen or examining the tendrils offered by moss to learn to engage your senses to and fill your inspirational cup. Join me for exploration and generative exercises.

Writing Wild: Ritual

Sunday October 4th 10-3:30

As we prepare to enter enter fall, this daylong workshop focuses on not only helping your understand your own writing rituals (best times + places for inspiration, how to keep coming back to writing over and over) in order to help you feed your creative self, but also on inspiring some new ones. Plus, we’ll take a deep dive in the mystery with an intuitive inspiration hike and using tarot cards to help us access images, stories, poems swimming in our subconscious bodies.

FULL DAY WORKSHOPS - $150 OR $125 When You Register with a friend.

Darkness has something to teach the light.

—Nina, Moon Omens

.Hello Lovelies—

Buckets of gratitude for reading A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild. I appreciate all of you who sustain and help me grow these weekly meditations by reading and commenting or sharing and supporting my work with a paid subscription. Your generosity means the world to me. Thank you for being here.

Did you know you can LISTEN to A Woman’s Place Is in the Wild? Click the play button on the upper right of your screen when you go to the page of this post.

Each weekly meditation of A Woman’s Place is in the Wild is an offering, an evocation of the world around me. You will rarely find me writing about climbing to the top of a mountain or counting the miles I’ve walked as if collecting notches on a belt.

Instead, I want to adventure in.

This is the kind of nature writing needed now, narratives of place—localities, with its root in the Latin, locus, for place—the kind that rise over time out of relationship, that allow us to understand that we are place, too. As the Scottish writer, Nan Shepherd says, “The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else.”

This is my project here.

This week I offer a Living Wild Creativity Prompt for paid subscribers at the end of this post, meant to inspire you to deepen your relationship with the natural world.

For full access to my archive, and to support my mission to re-member beauty between the human and non-human world, the please become a patron of A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild.

Subscribe now

2 March, Verikuu, Full Blood Earth Moon

As if only I could carry the moon inside me. . .

Words of an old poem circle me this morning like the turning of a Tarot card. I hunt my memory for the rest of the lines, for the poem that they belong to, wondering why they have surfaced just now. . . .

First Day of March

March opens with the softness of thaw. I walk Yuki in the woods on a day that threatens rain. I can smell its earth scent in the thickening air and I think, Let it come. The earth squishes beneath my feet, the landscape is equal parts ice and water. Later, I drive through low clouds north across the Peak to Peak Highway to visit my friend Helen. The sky is bruised, turbulent.

Helen and I sit in her remarkable living room with its high apricot walls and precious objects. On the mantle, an image of a fox painted on the rough surface of granite; her eyes call to me and I stop mid conversation to get up and look at her. It is an image of the fox who visits Helen. “She is beautiful,” I breathe, holding the heavy stone with two hands.

Helen and I speak of spring, of the changes on the mountain, the harbingers of the coming season. She tells me she saw a butterfly the other day. I am surprised but Helen shrugs.

Helen is a decade older than me. I have always thought of her as my elder, but now we have entered the same life stage, more sisters as our birth years matter much less. I see it in the way we speak about our lives, the things that matter, and in how our minds work now. How much less urgent and dramatic circumstances feel. How much we gravitate toward what is simple.

Helen and I have been dear friends for over twenty years. She and her family anchored me in the stormy years after my cabin burned down when I flirted with isolation and despair. They visited me one memorable and lonely Christmas when it was just me and Elvis, bringing presents and a yule log, fresh-baked scones with a bottle of champagne for mimosas.

Helen has borne witness to many turnings in my life, many transformations.

She reminds me as this as we lay out cards on the floor and I’m bemoaning the mark I am afraid I am not leaving on the world. “Look how different you are,” she says, “Look at everything you have built.”

My inclination is to resist her observation; my mind jumps to “But. . . this or that” instantly objecting to good news.

On the way home, I see a rainbow arcing over Nederland, the clouds to the north as black as any summer storm. Of course, Helen is right..

That night I dream a single Mourning Cloak floating on a soft wind over the yard.

What the conscious mind won’t hold, the subconscious mind will.

The season of change is upon us. March is the month of promise, the month of hope, the month of first robins on the mountain and the return of osprey and Mountain bluebirds. Each day, something new in the landscape.

And tonight, a full Blood Moon presiding over all of it.

Unlike some traditions that see the red moon as a bad omen, I take her for a promise, for purification, and for renewal because I associate her with women’s bodies and blood, with cycles of fullness and release. I do not share the fear of the dark, nor of women’s blood that runs through our culture because these are feminine spaces and I celebrate them.

To me, a full blood moon isn’t an ill-omen, but a potent one. A powerful manifestation, a burgeoning red blossom, and coming as it does in the month of March, a signifier of change.

So tonight I will set my alarm hoping to catch a glimpse of her and make my offerings, letting her blood red light fill me, gathering her darkness to me in the way my ancestors might have—hopeful, revelatory, wild—in order to learn about the light.

In honor of the Blood Moon, this week’s Living Wild Creativity Prompt offers some immersive practices meant to inspire you and help you clear the way for the world we all dream. Here you can explore your own relationship with the moon in writing and also in ritual.

And if you are reading this after the Full Moon, don’t worry. This moon’s effects will be with us for the next six months and is one in a string of lunar eclipses that are said to bring about great change.

If you sponsor this Substack, read on for access, or become a patron for as little as $7/mo..

Subscribe now

Hold onto beauty, friends, and to each other. Carry hope. And practice being human, practice loving the earth and each other, each day.

Thank you for reading. Please click heart if you appreciate this post and feel free to share or restack.

Big love,

Karen

If you can afford it, please consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber or by ordering a copy of Rough Beauty from Bookshop.org or a personalize edition from my website.

Share

Living Wild Creativity Practice for the Blood Moon

Read more

I’m climbing out of this season, fingernails ragged, belly soft. I tuck a stem of dried mint behind my ear to remind myself.

Once, I bared my shoulders. The bottom of my feet roughed up the dirt with their hard calluses. . .

Now, a ball of twine in the grey sky. The sun rolls low on the horizon. Hangs. Then dips back down again, wind howling us into night.

. . .I never meant to find myself in such a cold place, my hair thinning against winter.

—-”February” by Tamiko Beyer

.Hello Lovelies—

Buckets of gratitude for reading A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild. I appreciate all of you who sustain and help me grow these weekly meditations by reading and commenting or sharing and supporting my work with a paid subscription. Your generosity means the world to me. Thank you for being here.

Did you know you can LISTEN to A Woman’s Place Is in the Wild? Click the play button on the upper right of your screen when you go to the page of this post.

Each weekly meditation of A Woman’s Place is in the Wild is an offering, an evocation of the world around me. You will rarely find me writing about climbing to the top of a mountain or counting the miles I’ve walked as if collecting notches on a belt.

Instead, I want to adventure in.

This is the kind of nature writing needed now, narratives of place—localities, with its root in the Latin, locus, for place—the kind that rise over time out of relationship, that allow us to understand that we are place, too. As the Scottish writer, Nan Shepherd says, “The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else.”

This is my project here.

Subscribe now

25 February, Maakuu, Waxing Earth Moon

All winter I have held my breath, filling myself with the wish for snow. I walk each anxiety-filled day mouthing the words, I can’t remember a drier winter like a mantra. Each day, a resistance, a hex against a spring season come too soon.

No, I say, to blue sky.

No to out of season 50-degree days when I open up the bedroom doors to let the stale air out.

No to forsythia putting up slender green leaves and tiny white flowers. No to tulip leaves, to columbine fronds, to every bare patch of earth in the woods. No to robin song.

No to the ground squirrel who emerged two weeks ago, a full two months early.

I have the feeling of a baby entering the birth canal before her time and, against logic, press my legs tightly together. At night I dream of stopping the birth with my hands, holding all that life in because I know in my bones it is not yet time to receive it.

I have made myself miserable for months . And now I’m shipwrecked on the shore of February—typically my least favorite month anyway—the month when winter stretches to its icy limit, when the days, though longer, are still relentless and cold.

But this year there have been so few storms, scant in their delivery—glorious for an hour or two—and then gone. Snow scuds the forest path I’ve walked almost every day, unimpeded by what should be layers of accumulated storms, my boots touching earth instead of drifting snow.

This February has been unbearable not for its relentless cold but for its warmth and wind. Nearly every day a Fire Weather Warning. Like the day this week when gusts hit 60mph and I drove over a downed powerline on my way home, understanding too late what it was or the threat it posed.

It is this wind that pulls me from sleep as a great gust slams into the house. I stand outside with Yuki in the dark and watch the shadows of trees twirl and shake. This season, the forest is littered with fallen trunks—so many new ones this year. I rub my hands along roughen bark, whispering quiet words for the way their bodies fall toward earth becoming soil, becoming forest floor, a haven for butterflies, for birds.

I look up. The waxing Earth Moon is a thin cup, a fingernail, a perfect crescent hanging in the early morning sky. The world sails on. The season shifts. The moon waxes in all her glory.

What is my worry next to all of this?

I can neither conjure weather nor stop wind. What has been the purpose of so much anxiety? Months and months of it. What has carrying the weight of it done?

At night, my hips ache. I can’t sleep on one side. I have spent a fortune on massage and chiropractics, arnica and magnesium salt baths.

The next day after the wind, after the downed power line, after another visit to the chiropractor--a bearded man I see every two years to adjust the instability in my S-I joint--after I tell him the pain is different this time, not stiffness, but sharp pain, he says, “I don’t know why your muscles are so involved this time,” I finally understand.

I have not just been holding my breath for snow but holding on.

Recently, I said to someone, “I’m like a tank. I just keep going.” My determination is my superpower.

This winter my body has borne the brunt of holding on to the idea of how it should be. I wear my worry in my muscles, in tight bands that clutch bones, in the knots forming at insertion points.

That night, I can’t stay awake. Seven pm and I am already falling asleep watching a baking show. I can’t keep my eyes open. At eight thirty, I take Yuki outside then turn out the lights. Exhausted.

I wake to rain. A soft spring rain sounding its hush-hush outside, the gentle tapping like memory, like a whispered voice saying, let go.

I had been dreaming about a birthday party gone wrong; my careful plans for an elegant cake and a lovely intimate dinner slipping away as others I do not know are sat at my table and someone presents me with a jar of pick relish with a candle on top.

I step out into the rain to welcome it.

It does not matter that it is out of season. It does not matter that we are all living out of time. What matters is the way we can open to receive what is given.

What matters most is saying Yes.

When I look up from the page just as I am ready to hit publish on this substack, the rain turns to snow.

Hold onto beauty, friends, and to each other. Carry hope. And practice being human, practice loving the earth and each other, each day.

Thank you for reading. Please click heart if you appreciate this post and feel free to share or restack.

Big love,

Karen

If you can afford it, please consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber or by ordering a copy of Rough Beauty from Bookshop.org or a personalize edition from my website.

Share

But the earth said last night that what I feel,
you feel; what secretly moves you, moves me.
One small, sensuous catastrophe
makes inklings letters, spelled in a worldly tremble.

—”Earth Tremors Felt in Missouri” by Mona Van Duyn

.Hello Lovelies—

Buckets of gratitude for reading A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild. I appreciate all of you who sustain and help me grow these weekly meditations by reading and commenting or sharing and supporting my work with a paid subscription. Your generosity means the world to me. Thank you for being here.

Did you know you can LISTEN to A Woman’s Place Is in the Wild? Click the play button on the upper right of your screen when you go to the page of this post.

Each weekly meditation of A Woman’s Place is in the Wild is an offering, an evocation of the world around me. You will rarely find me writing about climbing to the top of a mountain or counting the miles I’ve walked as if collecting notches on a belt.

Instead, I want to adventure in.

This is the kind of nature writing needed now, narratives of place—localities, with its root in the Latin, locus, for place—the kind that rise over time out of relationship, that allow us to understand that we are place, too. As the Scottish writer, Nan Shepherd says, “The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else.”

This is my project here.

This week I offer a Living Wild Creativity Prompt for paid subscribers at the end of this post, meant to inspire you to deepen your relationship with the natural world.

For full access to my archive, and to support my mission to re-member beauty between the human and non-human world, the please become a patron of A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild.

Subscribe now

18 February, Maakuu, New Earth Moon

The moon that begins in snow-encrusted February and grows toward fullness in March is know as the Earth Moon by my Finnish ancestors because it presides over land emerging in patches after the long winter.

This morning I am caught in her spell.

It begins as I imagine the still-frozen earth revealing herself gently, teasingly as prelude to the explosion of spring. The sky is moonless, but the stars burn with incandescent fire. I inhale the deep metallic scent of storm. The hush before dawn is tantalizing. as

Snow is coming. And my wish is for it to fall over the earth like a lover, to cover and bury her in an embrace so passionate, it startles us all.

In some cosmologies, sky is the male lover of earth and the places where he touches her with lightening in their sexual union, heals her. In another, her orgasm on the stark plain of the desert gives birth to the sun.

It is dawn now and outside, a raven appears suddenly, ahead of the snow. A harbinger of a shift, an opening between worlds. I watch him fly over the the yard, disappearing into the forest, carrying the mystery of night away.

Suddenly the snow begins.

At first soft and raining, a fine mist falling gently to the earth. It begins to cover the deck, tentatively at first, as clouds pull down from the sky. I breathe in its voluptuousness, delighted.

Then the storm shifts, gaining momentum. It’s fierce now, filling the air with flakes that fall urgently. I rise to stand outside and take in the squall in my morning shirt and bare feet. The air is glorious, suffused, white.

The snow continues in waves, shifting between hard and gentle, urgent and light, feathering and furious, and I am thrilled by it.

My connection to earth and storm is skin to skin, bone and blood. It is embodied and sensate.

Living is a sensual act. For us, for earth. This moon asks us to remember that.

Imagine entering landscape with the newness of a lover. Imagine drinking in the details of a single patch of ground with the focus you gave to every second with your beloved in the first days of your embrace when the minutes were days as you kissed and kissed.

Imagine now, landscape responding to your attention the way a lover responds. Imagine yourself meeting that embrace.

For this moment in time, imagine your body and the body of the earth.

This is the message of Maakuu, the earth moon.

Do you dare? And what is revealed?

In honor of the Earth Moon, this week I offer some immersive practices that help you articulate you unique relationship with Earth in this week’s Living Wild Creativity Practice. Here you can explore your own relationship with Earth in writing and in observation.

If you sponsor this Substack, read on for access, or become a patron for as little as $7/mo..

Subscribe now

Hold onto beauty, friends, and to each other. Carry hope. And practice being human, practice loving the earth and each other, each day.

Thank you for reading. Please click heart if you appreciate this post and feel free to share or restack.

Big love,

Karen

If you can afford it, please consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber or by ordering a copy of Rough Beauty from Bookshop.org or a personalize edition from my website.

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Living Wild Creativity Practice - Writing With The Earth

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I want to put down what the mountain has awakened.

My mouthful of grass.

My curious tale. I want to stand still but find myself moved patch by patch.

There’s a bleat in my throat. Words fail me here. Can you understand? I sink

to

my knees tired or not. I now know the ragweed from the goldenrod, and the

blinding

beauty of green. Don’t you see? I am shedding my skins. I am a paper hive, a

wolf spider,

the creeping ivy, the ache of a birch, a heifer, a doe.

—”Another Pastoral” by Vievee Francis

Hello Lovelies—

Buckets of gratitude for reading A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild. I appreciate all of you who sustain and help me grow these weekly meditations by reading and commenting or sharing and supporting my work with a paid subscription. Your generosity means the world to me. Thank you for being here.

Did you know you can LISTEN to A Woman’s Place Is in the Wild? Click the play button on the upper right of your screen when you go to the page of this post.

Each weekly meditation of A Woman’s Place is in the Wild is an offering, an evocation of the world around me. You will rarely find me writing about climbing to the top of a mountain or counting the miles I’ve walked as if collecting notches on a belt.

Instead, I want to adventure in.

This is the kind of nature writing needed now, narratives of place—localities, with its root in the Latin, locus, for place—the kind that rise over time out of relationship, that allow us to understand that we are place, too. As the Scottish writer, Nan Shepherd says, “The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else.”

This is my project here.

For full access to my archive, and to support my mission to re-member beauty between the human and non-human world, the please become a patron of A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild.

Subscribe now

11 February 2026, Helmikuu, Waning Pearl Moon

When I was a child, I loved the dirt smell of rain, that first loamy scent that rises when water meets earth.

I used to lick the sidewalk because I loved to taste of dirt in my mouth, loved the smell that filled me as my tongue swept the cement.

Of course, it was earth I was after. Earth I was greedy for.

I was a wild, dirty child, my fingers forever grimy, my elbows rough, my legs skinned, my hair a tangled mess . My mother sprayed No More Tears on my wet head, but there were still tears as she yanked the comb through ratted hanks of dirty blonde hair. Later, my grandmother—a woman not related to me by blood—who was lithe and elegant with slim legs that lay neatly against one another when she sat, admonished me for my puckered fists as she tried to spread them into a chord on a toy piano.

“These hands, these chubby little hands,” she exclaimed, holding them up before my eyes as if they were evidence of my imperfection, evidence that I’d never gain entrance into the temple of womanhood.

Even then, it was clear to me that I was a foundling who’d wandered into a family where all of me was suspect: I could not press myself into the mold they called girl.

I would never be dainty or petite. I wanted to rub up against things, to swallow everything whole.

My grandfather tells a story of me eating waffles on his lap when I was perhaps two or three. My appetite surprised him.

“I would feed you a bite and Zoop!, it was gone.” He said I was like a baby bird,. Zoop! Zoop! he said, laughing, but it was clear from his look that my appetite was also a source of bemusement.

In short, it was terrifying.

In all the photos I have of me as a child, my mouth is open wide. I wanted it all. Of course I did not understand these impulses as first—the ones that said, roll in the dirt, lick the bark of trees, dig-dig in the earth. Instead I grew up thinking there was something not quite right with me.

But even then, I was in love with the corporeal world, especially those bodies I could experience by touch and taste and smell. I wanted to burrow in earth, to dig and stomp.

I wanted to be embodied.

What I understand now is that I was searching kinship with the planet. I recognized in my body as the body of the earth. We were rough and round and wild and messy.

And beautiful.

Over my life, my understanding of landscape has deepened. When I look now I see not just kinship but kin.

There is a tree that grows in the forest where I live that is misshapen, curved, with a magnificent tuft of pine needles at the top. She stands alone in a circle of lodgepoles on the gentle rise of a hill. In the morning, her trunk catches sun.

I stop when I pass her, in greeting, in recognition, in blessing. I feel her follow me into the woods and as I walk, each step a gratitude, a prayer, an embrace.

Yesterday I saw a video of the sound a tree makes when touched. It sounded like bells.

Imagine that world. The one in which we listen to nature, to the more than human world not just with our ears, but with our bodies, with the part of us that falls in love, with the universal place that nurtures and cherishes, that takes care.

This is the world I dream. It was the world my child self understood instinctively long before my adult self could.

Living on the mountain here on the Front Range of the Rockies has awakened me to the child I was and to the human I was born to be.

Don’t you see? I am shedding my skins. I am a paper hive, a wolf spider, the creeping ivy, the ache of a birch, a heifer, a doe.

Hold onto beauty, friends, and to each other. Carry hope. And practice being human, practice loving the earth and each other, each day.

Thank you for reading. Please click heart if you appreciate this post and feel free to share or restack.

Big love,

Karen

Some Responses to World Events - What You Can Do

Don’t forget the No Kings Protest on March 28th. Pay attention to the calls for National Strike Days .

Here is a list of what you can do:

• Stand with Minnesota Click here for links to actions, giving, and sending notes of support.

• Tell the Senate: Not a penny more for ICE brutality

• Demand Hotels Stop Collaborating With ICE

• Demand Target Stand Up to ICE

• Demand Enterprise Rent-A-Car Stop Providing ICE With Cars

• Dump Amazon who support ICE primarily by providing critical cloud computing infrastructure through Amazon Web Services (AWS)

• Boycott Home Depot who allows ICE to patrol its stores.

• Or check out this list I posted last week by Leona Waller, which includes calling your Senators everyday about ICE funding. Do Not Let Up.

A Woman’s Place is in the Wild is a reader-supported weekly meditation on all things wild. Both free and paid subscriptions are available. If you would like to support my work and these weekly posts, the best way is by becoming a paid subscriber, which gives you access to the full archive of weekly Living Wild Meditations plus all of the Living Wild creativity and writing prompts. If you want to read more, check out Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living.

Subscribe now

Dear darkness. Dear where we bow our heads in disbelief.
Dear disbelief, hardly bow our heads and
hardly speak, so we sing, such words as darkness
shows us how on days on end. So I sing it is
not hopeless. Hurry hurry. Nor faithless—to stand
without faith, keeping open—

—”Storm Psalm” by David Barker

Hello Lovelies—

Buckets of gratitude for reading A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild. I appreciate all of you who sustain and help me grow these weekly meditations by reading and commenting or sharing and supporting my work with a paid subscription. Your generosity means the world to me. Thank you for being here.

Did you know you can LISTEN to A Woman’s Place Is in the Wild? Click the play button on the upper right of your screen when you go to the page of this post.

Each weekly meditation of A Woman’s Place is in the Wild is an offering, an evocation of the world around me. You will rarely find me writing about climbing to the top of a mountain or counting the miles I’ve walked as if collecting notches on a belt.

Instead, I want to adventure in.

This is the kind of nature writing needed now, narratives of place—localities, with its root in the Latin, locus, for place—the kind that rise over time out of relationship, that allow us to understand that we are place, too. As the Scottish writer, Nan Shepherd says, “The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else.”

This is my project here.

For full access to my archive, and to support my mission to re-member beauty between the human and non-human world, the please become a patron of A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild.

Subscribe now

4 February 2026, Helmikuu, Waning Pearl Moon

Today, a memory. . .

I watch as the dust storm devours the desert valley. It advances ominously, a boiling and ruddy cloud that churns toward me. I have never seen anything like it. Not on this scale.

I am thirty-something and camped at the back of Capitol Reef National Park, Utah in the wide basin of Cathedral Valley, a remote stretch requiring clearance (mandatory) and 4-wheel drive (recommended). I’d driven the length of the valley earlier in the day—about 30 miles—without seeing another person or vehicle. I am certain I am alone and make camp on a series of cascading rock outcroppings that spill toward the horizon.

It’s just me and my dog, Elvis, a fabulously handsome blonde husky-mix, traveling Utah in the spring in my rear-wheel drive Toyota pickup fitted with a too-large metal camper shell secured with C-clamps.

I’ll admit I am restless, spooked.

The wind has been furious all day and now it sends clouds skittering across the sun. The red rocks dull and the landscape mute. Why didn’t I see this coming? I think.

It comes as I heat water for pasta on my single burner propane stove. A gust of wind so fierce, it shoves the notebook from my lap and sends the stove and pot tumbling. Elvis, who has taken refuge beneath the tail gate, leaps up into the bed of the truck.

That’s when I lookup. Notice the storm is not simply a thunderstorm sweeping in but something more.

The light shifts in an instant. A dark rumbling wall fills the horizon, obliterating the sun. It advances toward me. The day dims unnaturally.

Wind scrapes my skin, dust needles my eyes as I sweep up my Therma-Rest and cook stove, pasta water already a dark stain on the rocks.

Elvis watches from the back of the truck bed as the air fills with debris—twigs and pebbles—and begins to swirl around me. I gape at the storm, dare myself to watch as long as I can. It feels important to witness.

Finally, I climb inside the bed of the truck and close the gate. For a moment, the sound of the storm is muffled, distant. For a moment I feel relief. Refuge.

When the boiling edge of wind and clouds and debris and rain makes contact, the truck rocks and jerks, feeling like a tiny boat tossed on a vast chaotic sea. Sand skitters across the shell and through cracks in windows and gusts thwak against metal. Elvis shivers, head down, and I speak soothingly to him, fit my body next to his, spooning in the dark.

The night will be long as I sleep in fits and starts, waking with a jolt over and over, as if I have come suddenly and crashingly back to earth. My dreams are full of strange misshapen things blown away and lost, sudden plunges down steep canyons, transfigurations and transmutations, a whirlwind of waiting and watching as the air invents new ways to pierce and shred. I wonder in my sleep-not sleep if the truck will slide from its perch.

For once I am grateful for the camper shell, which makes me look like an oddity as I drive, hermit crab-like, down the road, Elvis upright on the bench front seat beside me, the battered and duct-taped shell, laughable and distinctly uncool.

I pull a jacket over my head, arm draped over Elvis who is, uncharacteristically, coiled into me. His back to my belly his nose beneath his tail. And in this moment I realize that Elvis is as much refuge as the camper shell that contains us. We are, to each other, a place of safety and resistance.

I lose track of how many times I am blown awake, but at some sleepless point, I fall asleep.

The morning opens calm and clear and blue. I make coffee, my ritual, as Elvis sniffs the perimeter, his. Then I set up my Therma-Rest to watch my favorite thing in the desert: the shifting morning light on the red rocks.

Maroon edifices come suddenly alive, blooming crimson with the sun. As I watch their faces shift from shadow to light, I imagine their sentience, their silent presence. What stories do they hold? What perspective would they offer as the witness to the ancient cycle of seasons and weather, of snow and wind, thunder and flood, the cycles of creation and destruction.

This morning, they too, are refuge.

The drive out reveals a changed landscape, one newly reconfigured. My truck plows through red furrows reconfiguring the road as the Fremont River jumps its banks. I am rerouted along a path that takes me, unexpectedly, through a series of orchards planted nearly a century ago.

I stop the truck, put Elvis on a leash, and walk out to stand in a cathedral of delicate pink blossoms. The miracle of apricots in the desert.

Also refuge.

The world is a lot right now. Every day a new horror. In a year, we’ve gone from losing jobs or protections to losing life. We are being silenced. The land, our kin, put at risk along with us. A storm like nothing we’ve ever seen. Ominous clouds devouring the horizon.

And yet, refuge is possible. Because it is more than simply finding safety; instead it is about finding each other and together cultivating what that holds us.

Just yesterday I passed a young aspen whose slender limbs wrapped an older dead trunk in its embrace. I stood for a long time in what felt like the presence of love. This is how we hold and care for each other, the new holding the old as it dies away. This is what is happening, this dying away. The old paradigm can’t hold. It must die and something new will be born.

So let us seek refuge not just in the beauty of the new day, the splash of stars at night, the endurance of trees, but in each other.

Let us find refuge in the love we make, in the company of friends and community, in all acts of courage and inspiration, holding creation and witnessing as an antidote, as light and faith, against the destruction.

Because we have each other and we have this community, we have hope and hope is a warrior emotion.

Keep open. Take refuge. Make this your daily practice.

Hold onto beauty, friends, and to each other. Carry hope. And practice being human, practice loving the earth and each other, each day.

Thank you for reading. Please click heart if you appreciate this post and feel free to share or restack.

Big love,

Karen

What You Can Do

Don’t forget the No Kings Protest on March 28th. Pay attention to the calls for National Strike Days .

Here is a list of what you can do:

• Stand with Minnesota Click here for links to actions, giving, and sending notes of support.

• Tell the Senate: Not a penny more for ICE brutality

• Demand Hotels Stop Collaborating With ICE

• Demand Target Stand Up to ICE

• Demand Enterprise Rent-A-Car Stop Providing ICE With Cars

• Dump Amazon who support ICE primarily by providing critical cloud computing infrastructure through Amazon Web Services (AWS)

• Boycott Home Depot who allows ICE to patrol its stores.

• Or check out this list I posted last week by Leona Waller, which includes calling your Senators everyday about ICE funding. Do Not Let Up.

A Woman’s Place is in the Wild is a reader-supported weekly meditation on all things wild. Both free and paid subscriptions are available. If you would like to support my work and these weekly posts, the best way is by becoming a paid subscriber, which gives you access to the full archive of weekly Living Wild Meditations plus all of the Living Wild creativity and writing prompts. If you want to read more, check out Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living.

Subscribe now

I don’t love you as if you were rare earth metals,

conflict diamonds, or reserves of crude oil that cause

war. I love you as one loves the most vulnerable

species: urgently, between the habitat and its loss.

I love you as one loves the last seed saved

within a vault, gestating the heritage of our roots,

and thanks to your body, the taste that ripens

from its fruit still lives sweetly on my tongue.

I love you without knowing how or when this world

will end. I love you organically, without pesticides.

I love you like this because we’ll only survive.

in the nitrogen rich compost of our embrace. . . .

—Craig Santos Perez, from “Love in a Time of Climate Crisis”

Hello Lovelies—

Buckets of gratitude for reading A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild. I appreciate all of you who sustain and help me grow these weekly meditations by reading and commenting or sharing and supporting my work with a paid subscription. Your generosity means the world to me. Thank you for being here.

Did you know you can LISTEN to A Woman’s Place Is in the Wild? Click the play button on the upper right of your screen when you go to the page of this post.

Each weekly meditation of A Woman’s Place is in the Wild is an offering, an evocation of the world around me. You will rarely find me writing about climbing to the top of a mountain or counting the miles I’ve walked as if collecting notches on a belt.

Instead, I want to adventure in.

This is the kind of nature writing needed now, narratives of place—localities, with its root in the Latin, locus, for place—the kind that rise over time out of relationship, that allow us to understand that we are place, too. As the Scottish writer, Nan Shepherd says, “The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else.”

This is my project here.

This week I offer a Living Wild Creativity Prompt for paid subscribers at the end of this post, meant to inspire you to deepen your relationship with the natural world.

For full access to my archive, and to support my mission to re-member beauty between the human and non-human world, the please become a patron of A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild.

Subscribe now

Last Call ! This Saturday.

Hope to see you for my upcoming ZOOM Workshop:

The Memoir Toolkit: 5 Best Practices for Writing Your Book.

Saturday January 31st 10AM -12PM MT

Essential tools for new and experienced memoir writers that take your personal story and make it something shareable and universal.

• Jump start our book project

• Go home with a tips handout that is easy to use, including writing prompts

• Ask burning questions.

Introductory Price - $65 (normally $80)

Space Limited.

Click Here for More Information or To Register

What others say:

“Best memoir class I’ve ever taken” - Nancy E.

“Karen makes it so easy. I feel ready to tackle my book.” - Donna R.

“Such clear, concise guidance.” - Stewart P.

“A great investment in my book and my story.” - Jen A.

More About Me. More About A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild.

28 January, Helmikuu, Waxing Pearl Moon - 5 Days to Imbolc

January is barren. A wide landscape I walk carrying the wish for snow.

This month, in the woods, emerald moss instead of wind-sculpted drifts meant to hold land in a long caress in this time of too short days and little light. The absence is like a missing lover, the arms of the land emptied and aching, holding instead signs of a too-soon spring in what I fear will be a tinder-dry summer.

January, the old ones say, is the time of the oak—the strongest wood—the heart of winter when the slumbering self dreams of the year to come, when we hold still in the deep roots and compost of the previous year and fortify, readying for the new.

What dreams will come of this season out of time, in this spell of brutality and fear?

How to know how to hold still in the midst of it all, to honor the dark face of the year before light even while out-of-season columbine sprouts punch through the surface of soil three months early and tiny threads of green unfurl to the siren song of too-warm days? When the same men who feared their government enough to try to violently overthrow it on January 6th, 2021, are now the enforcement arm for a government violently killing its own citizens?

The world is turned upside down. We are out of season.

But this knowledge, fortified by my love of the earth, only strengthens my resolve.

Each day, I go into the woods to gather beauty. I watch the snowless spaces between lodgepole form basins of light and try to love each scrawny patch of snow not for its promise but for its presence, each piece of scudded earth, each wind-harvested tree for the beauty of survival, for the wisdom that lives beyond me.

Each day I offer what I have to give, fiercely--my love and kindship for the places that hold me—as I try to hold this season for what it is: a sign of shift in a crisis brought on by my own kind while also holding earth, whose cycles will outlast me, as tenderly as the beloved whose face suddenly changes in the night.

This is my practice. Each day, the recognition of the goodness of this world, of intelligences I can only dream. I will not close my heart but instead remain determined to search for good.

I pledge my allegiance to land, to wild places, and fortified by the beauty that lives there still, by the way she mirrors strength, adaptation, and endurance. And I resolve to resist the brutality of these times in the ways I can.

Here is a list of what you can do:

• Stand with Minnesota Click here for links to actions, giving, and sending notes of support.

• Tell the Senate: Not a penny more for ICE brutality

• Demand Hotels Stop Collaborating With ICE

• Demand Target Stand Up to ICE

• Demand Enterprise Rent-A-Car Stop Providing ICE With Cars

• Dump Amazon who support ICE primarily by providing critical cloud computing infrastructure through Amazon Web Services (AWS)

• Boycott Home Depot who allows ICE to patrol its stores.

• Or check out this list I posted last week by Leona Waller, which includes calling your Senators everyday about ICE funding. Do Not Let Up.

  And Remember

  

  ---

Imbolc, what the Finns call Kyntelli, is upon us.

Celebrated on Feb 1st or 2nd, this day marks the beginning of spring and is also a celebration of the Celtic Goddess Brigit, who presides over hearth, home, and healing. She is the goddess of fertility, fire, inspiration, and poetry. It is a time of candle lighting and seed gathering, a time of intention and will. This week’s creativity practice offers a writing practice and a ritual for this time out of time, for the earth, for inspiration, for the fires of gathering and healing and for love.

If you sponsor this Substack, read on for access, or become a patron for as little as $7/mo.

Subscribe now

Hold onto beauty, friends, and to each other. Carry hope. And practice being human, practice loving the earth and each other, each day.

Thank you for reading. Please click heart if you appreciate this post and feel free to share or restack.

Big love,

Karen

If you can afford it, please consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber or by ordering a copy of Rough Beauty from Bookshop.org or a personalize edition from my website.

Share

Living Wild Creativity Practice

For Inspiration + Love in a Time of Crisis

Read more