Can I just say this? Those of us born in the 1960s and ‘70s are in a special hell right now. With jobs being taken away and careers being cut short and talents losing out to “influencers” and AI and Bots that Chat, it’s been a uniquely painful time. Those in my generation who chose […]
Miscellaneous
Going into nature, how long does it take till you feel like you’re there? There meaning not sending emails in your head and not wincing at shifts of temperature or humidity when sun turns to rain? There’s a comfort that comes over you. Hands and the heart are no longer so far apart and pulling […]
Ben has had to leave LWON but has kindly left us these memories, these posts which we rerun because we like him so much. Since I published a book about beavers two years ago, I’ve heard from dozens, maybe hundreds, of readers with their own beaver experiences to share. This is a wonderful perk of authorhood: […]
This post first ran in March 2022. A few days ago, a friend texted me that a red-flanked bluetail had been spotted a couple of miles from where I live. I had to look up what a red-flanked bluetail was. Turns out that the red-flanked bluetail—also known as the orange-flanked bush-robin—is a small songbird with […]
My preschooler is awed by many things, some of them more generally relatable than others. A spider in the sliding-door track. Mist coming through the woods. Irish butter. And rocks. For a long while now, her favorite miracles have been rocks. She doesn’t anthropomorphize them, turn them into pets, or expect unreasonable things from them. […]
“Whether we like it or not, there are things out there, not alive, that think about us,” wrote a contributor on the internet anthropologist Katherine Dee’s substack. He was talking about the networks of technologies designed to stalk our movements and use the information to influence our decisions and command our attention. In the age […]
I’m in my office. It is snowing lightly outside, and suddenly I hear them — a flock of sandhill cranes flying overhead. So I step outside for a moment to observe their formation and remember that the world is still a beautiful and wondrous place. This realization is what is keeping me grounded amidst the […]
I always knew flying squirrels lived among us, probably of the southern variety, in the trees at our cabin-in-the-woods in central Virginia. But those buggers are hard to spot. They’re night-owls, first of all, and they’re pretty small. So, I was delighted to see a whole nest of them in our woodshed this winter. (Okay, […]