Shining Light on the Prairie - Meteorological Spring

Maybe that title should better read meteoroillogical...

Freeze/thaw, freeze/thaw then freeze some more makes for a wicked nasty season.

Racing across three hundred miles of freezing big water before smacking into the prairie, arctic winds howl. The grayest February skies seen 'round these parts in fifty-seven years persistently weep. Even when a warming sun shines, the landscape is bone chill.

Every day the sun doesn't make an appearance and that's most of them, the world is cruelly muted. It's voice, a crackling murmur.

Still, signs of hope are found. And what's hope for anyway, if not to rely on during hard times?

Late autumn, I purged an accidental strawberry plant from the place it claimed in our garden where we'd let it grow wild through last summer, just to see. Purged that sucker with extreme prejudice, as only the squirrels benefited and not so much at that.

Yet there it is. Come back through hard frozen ground, even beneath a sheath of ice.

The new lens helped turn this barely transitional season that's normally opaque and indolent into a rich opportunity for fieldwork. On the right occasion, the freeze/thaw not only reveals but frames a post-seasonal spectrum of life and death. I'll remember that and be better prepared, next year.

"Death is life", the late poet Patrick O'Neil wrote. So it is. On the prairie as well as in the Northwoods, and everywhere else besides.

At least I know for certain that last autumn the Goldfinches twittering about outside my window feasted on this purple coneflower as it fell.

Beneath prairie tallgrass collapsed from exhaustion…

…and invasive bull thistle gone sandpaper sharp,

to inside the crust of barren native oaks obscured by waving ghosts, I believe renewed life grows.

Soon enough this will be Blazing Star shining with riotous life, not just its bones:

Call that a matter of faith if you wish, but in this one tough little bugger below, I keep finding early proof.

After the next chunk of polar vortex departs, I trust I'll find it still.

Shining Light on the Prairie – Late Winter, 2019

This year's dark season was by & large a forced march gone long from the start. Then in February between the stinking polar vortex and an ice storm, a new lens arrived. Count that as just in time, for me.

Step away from the screen, winter demanded. So I did.

Next week about this time, winter's over. My meteorologist tells me so. Meanwhile, the new lens is a keeper. 

Occasionally, the light is good and the wind doesn't blow too hard across the prairie. That and the inevitable turning of the season from dark to light is all I need know, for now.

With longer days, late winter's sun is warming. The season freezes, thaws then freezes again. Inexorably, cold darkness melts. There is but to look.

That first morning with the new lens, stepping gingerly so as not to slip and break my fool neck (or the lens) on a world sheathed in ice, I spotted the first frog of the year.

Maybe you don't see that speckled frog caught like a memory by winter in frozen Lamb's Ear. I didn't, at first. Now I can't unsee it.

But should you drive a harder bargain than me and find an illusory frog doesn't cut it to pin all seasonal hopes on, there's this:

Room With View(s)

To creatives of all sorts, everywhere --

October of 2012, for two weeks I held an artist's residency at Dan's Cabin in the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness, courtesy of the Friends of the Porkies.

The experience enriched my perspective on the real world and the folk who dedicate their lives to the protection and nourishment of it.

You'd like to think wilderness could just maintain itself. But, alas. The older I get, the greater the meaning of 'perpetual maintenance' becomes.

Two weeks at Dan's Cabin enriched me in ways that continue to unfold. If you've never spent two weeks living in the woods, I heartily recommend it. The wilderness will embrace you, give it half the chance.

If that's not your cup of tea, then find other residencies more to your liking and creative skillset. There's every sort of welcoming safe haven out there for creatives, maintained in all manner of fine places, catering to about every creative discipline under the sun.

My stay at Dan's Cabin was greatly productive. A fine place to work.

Maybe your residency wherever doing whatever will be too. I urge you to find out. You can start here.

The effect those two weeks had on my work is ongoing. My hosts were among the finest folk I've met. If I could change anything, it'd be that I didn't wait so long before giving it a shot, which would've left me more years to reap the benefit.

So go for it. Because the years do flow on…