I grab my binoculars and a small pack, then head west on State Street before turning north on Park. Once across the Erie Canal I track the towpath east, where another five minutes of walking brings me to a vantage point above a small, somewhat shabby-looking wetland. The wetland lies below a berm backing the […]

Question: what’s the connection between Houghton University, a conservative Christian school in western New York, and female Bobolinks cloaked in male Bobolink plumage? And no, Houghton University’s sports teams are not the Fighting Bobolinks, although that would be an extremely cool name, not to mention much more fearsome than the school’s actual mascot, which is […]

Early morning in Clarendon, Texas, ten days after spring equinox. I’m up hours before dawn and thirty minutes later I’m riding US Highway 287 south and east off the Llano Estacado, one of the largest mesas in North America, 38,000 square miles of empty High Plains sky and flat-earth sprawl. The early morning darkness is […]

During the last few weeks, I’ve been contemplating my position in the bardo. In Buddhist tradition the term originally referred to the period between one life and the next, but according to Francesca Freemantle, author of Luminous Emptiness: Understanding the Tibetan Book of the Dead, there are at least six bardos out there: life (or birth), […]

Why is it that we love the things that we love? And why is it that we sometimes recognize them immediately, as they call out to us with such insistence and power? What’s the alchemy? I’ve struggled with these questions for much of my adult life and this spring I’ve been hauling them around the Inyo Mountains, […]