Hope for Navigating Life | Help for Navigating Yellowstone
Waiting For What We Can’t See
Along the road between Mammoth Hot Springs and Cooke City, the meadows are open and greening, quite in agreement with the calendar: spring has arrived. Leave the dry, temperate north end of Yellowstone and try to head into the interior, though, and you'll see a...
Gifts and Graces: Spring Edition
Yesterday I hurried into Walmart for a few things and emerged--much more slowly--pushing a cart. Right outside the door I caught the fragrance of something I'd seen but not stopped to appreciate on the way in: flowers for sale. It was the scent of spring. I...
Every Day We Show Up
Encouraged by this post? Receive an audio file of another story from the stage:The Single Seat. Subscribe to the quarterly{ish} newsletter in sidebar. Every Monday during the winter, I drive into town. There, twenty young actors and a few directors gather to work. We...
Overwhelm: A Bridge Toward Saner Living
J and I took our first trip to Yellowstone together twenty-two springs ago. As we zipped down the interstate ahead of schedule in the middle of the afternoon, I realized we could make it to the park that night. We could cancel our along-the-way reservation, drive to...
Winter’s Good Graces {and Why to Keep Track}
The bleak midwinter, Christina Rossetti called it. And while her poem is lovely, living with continual strings of short, cold, sunless days is not. I believe that there is a time for everything, even bleak days. And yet. It's at such times when my practice of pausing...
Seeing Blue Beyond the Grey {and Welcome!}
Because it intersects with two subjects that fascinate and teach me, the rhythms of the seasons and Yellowstone, I bought a book, For Everything There is a Season: The Sequence of Events in the Grand Teton-Yellowstone Area. Through it, I see the general happening of...
Taking the Best of One Year Into the Next
Gravel crunched under the tires as I made my way through early morning’s darkness down the lane, away from my home in the country toward a hospital in the city. Des Moines has six general hospitals and I could picture and plot a route to every one of them. Every one...
Look at the Pretty Lights
Our headlights cut through the blinding darkness of the December night, illuminating the country highway as my littlest girl and I made our way home from church. “Look at the pret-ty lights, Mom-my,” she called from her car seat in the back of the van. “Do you see the...
Gifts and Graces
Gratitude. It doesn’t always come naturally. grat i tude noun the quality of being thankful; readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness. Along with the continual quest to lift my eyes so I can see, I’ve been trying to acknowledge life’s...
Bridges Between
One fall, when I attended the University of Iowa, I went a few weeks between visits home. When my parents drove me to school, the fields were full and green. When they brought me home, the fields stood empty. Even the combines and trucks had gone home. Growing up...
Because Winter is Inevitable
Once, long ago, before babies and moves to houses in new communities, I picked up the beginning of an understanding of the seasons—their rhythms, their tasks, their hard realities. Learning to be a mom to three babies while finding my way in three different towns left...
The Light of Summer
As the sun set over the baseball field at the end of a sweltering July day, I sat in the stands and tried not to long for fall. Extreme heat is kind of my kryptonite, so I found myself fighting to not wish the light of summer away over a little...
Because of New Normals
On the eve of our son’s return to college when the kids were snarly and I was weepy, my husband looked at us and said, “Transitions are always tough.” They are. I know. But I forget. With his words barely out into the air between us, I remembered...
On Clearing and Cultivating
Eight years ago, two months after we landed in a new place, spring unfolded like the twelve days of Christmas, each morning bestowing blossoms of a new color. Crocus peeked over the winter’s covering of melting snow. Creeping phlox draped over the rock wall and tidy...
Rest Along the Way
We sprinted up the switchbacked trail, pausing occasionally to measure how far we'd come, to rest our already used-up legs, to fill our lungs with as much oxygen as the mountain air would give. In previous years, I would have decided that it wasn't worth it. Not the...
All Because of a Little Fire
The springtime landscape in rural Iowa wears a mosaic of ever-deepening swaths of green broken by plots of freshly turned fields and charred black ditches. Growing up, I saw the burns and wondered why people, including my farmer-grandparents, endured the stress of...
She Needed Me to Play
Sometimes, when we head west, we land for a few days at a cabin. In a meadow in Custer National Forest, it's far enough from civilization that the siren song of phone, internet, and television falls silent, replaced by the gentler sounds of wind in the trees and water...
Tracks in the Snow
The twelve-passenger van made its way down Yellowstone’s snow-covered road not on traditional tires, but on treads meant to traverse the groomed roadway. Gone were the crowds and the fly fishermen of fall, replaced by seas of white broken by swaths of evergreen and...
Adele and the Rearview Mirror
At our Christmas celebration the cover image of a magazine in my parents' living room caught my eye. It featured Adele. I like reading about celebrities, usually in germ-infested copies of People magazine at the doctor's office. I wasn't at the doctor's and...
Where She Belonged
I woke, just after midnight, to contractions. Forcing myself to remain motionless under the covers, I tried to convince myself that it was nothing more than a long series of Braxton-Hicks and go back to sleep. But the contractions were strong and regular, each one...
Because Sometimes We Forget
Once upon a time I looked at the empty picnic tables at interstate rest areas and wondered Who uses those? I never saw them in use and our stops were always quick and utilitarian. Then J and I had kids. Each of our three children was less than a...
Do Not Approach
The girls and I emerged from the cozy, fire-warmed lobby, braced ourselves against the chilled morning air, and took to the sidewalk that led to Mammoth Hot Spring’s historic chapel. Aware of the cow elk lounging on the lawn between the buildings along the way, I...
Influenced By the One That Came Before
Summer’s green is wearing thin. Before long, it will give way to the colors of autumn. Some years, summer’s heat and its green march across the lawn arrive with a suddenness that suggests we’ve gone straight from winter to summer with no stop for spring. This doesn't...
Because
Because the things of earth end, because beginnings arrive disguised as endings, because this week brings both to our family in the form of college--a repost. It made sense when I was young. The cicada’s song signaled school’s imminent return. I enjoyed school, so...
Ponder the path of your feet; then all your ways will be sure. Proverbs 4:26
