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Be budding

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Not sure how much I’ll be blogging this week. The Festival of Faith and Writing starts Thursday and I leave Wednesday by bus to get up to Grand Rapids. The big news: Spring is coming. After the historic rainfall—4 inches in 24 hours—and intense backyard flooding, we’re down to a 4 foot in diameter puddle that the sump pump is slowly trickling down. We can’t seem to keep the 2-year-old out of it. There are multiple clothing changes throughout the day. But the tilt of the earth has shifted, we’re over some kind of hump. I believe. Today I noticed magnolia trees about to burst forth. The forsythia bushes are leafed out. The tree outside my door has hard little buds on it. I took a little over 2-hour bike ride this a.m. It was 43 degrees when I started out 70 by the time I walked into our courtyard at home. I needed to get some miles in as I’m hoping to ride home from Grand Rapids next Sunday. I write hoping because every time I try to train it’s either snowing, raining, or hailing. ...
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The senses sense

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In the winter I’d come home from work, fix food, and go to bed. These days I stay up later. I’ll have a tea and take a walk in the yard or around the block—depending on the moonlight. The blood flows faster. The senses sense. Spring. I cup the cup of hot tea and listen—wind ruffling the top of the pines. The ground is still cold, mossy wet but there’s something there—a hidden green.
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New Work Out--Wild Greens

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New Work Out Chariot of the Gods combines a childhood memory of a neighbor girl falling out of a tree and me volunteering to run to her house to get her mom and my son-in-law’s father who I refer to as my father-in-law. Removed. Anyway, their house is the fun one. The center of the universe for the family. When there, there’s always a story unthreading taking us through the night. None of the story is true, only true-ish. Find it here at Wild Greens : https://www.wildgreensmagazine.com/archive/april-2026-vi-vi#h.z2znarx3yh0i
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Tiny House—almost washed away

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Friday night to Saturday morning—apparently it rained. I was up under the eaves fast asleep. I awoke early to write and found the world weirdly silent. I opened the door and even without the drip drip of rain sensed wetness, the smell of water. I grabbed a headlamp which did nothing to penetrate the darkness, but I knew: the backyard was flooded as happens in the spring. Vernal ponding because of the amount of clay underground. We’re also in a little bit of a bowl. The last owners left us with a sump pump—for good reason. We’ve needed it in the spring and after large rain events. This time we had both. When the sun came up, dreary and bleak weak, I was able to see the edge of the pond licking the fire pit only feet from my Tiny House. At just that moment my daughter called to say there was water in the basement. They have a sump pump but it must’ve failed—just as we have a sump pump in the backyard and at the moment it too must’ve failed. I texted our neighbor to say we were bailing ...
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Working Through the Fear and Doubt

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It’s been a while. A struggle. But, there’s been a breakthrough. I’m not sure what happened— For so long I’ve felt like I was being dragged around by my hair, going from one thing to another without agency, like a monkey on my back. It wasn’t one thing but a million unnamed pressures. A sense of why bother. Fear and self-doubt. I didn’t know where to start. I cleared off my desk, I cleared out my head. I sorted through scraps of paper and opened a file on my computer meant to organize my thoughts. I started with making lists. In January I ordered a used copy of Art & Fear by co-authors David Bayles and Ted Orland. I once had this book but must have given it away or left it behind somewhere. I was reminded of it the end of 2025 and thought: the title alone is worth reading over and over. The fear doesn’t keep me away, I keep reaching, but the state of my soul is brittle. I needed to get beyond a certain paralysis. The result of reading this small book turned into a Su...
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