An Inheritance of Open Space

August 19, 2026August 19, 2026 annacitrino

“Instructions for Having a Soul”

Take it out in the rain sometimes.
It has vast, invisible wings that gather dirt
and need rinsing.
When it tries to kill you
that is because you’ve forgotten
to let it look into someone’s eyes
for longer than a minute.
It needs that the way a bee needs nectar
in the early morning dew.
Every so often, take it on a journey.

an excerpt from—Joseph Fasano

This past June I took a trip to visit the place my grandparents and great grandparents lived and worked. Though I never lived there, Nebraska, Wyoming, and South Dakota are central to my heritage. It’d been years since I’d visited these states. I wanted to place my feet on that earth once more, and sense how it felt. After writing Stories We Didn’t Tell, I wanted reimagine the lives of my ancestors who made their way through an era of extreme change during their lives while once again walking the land they walked. I wanted to stand on that land, breathe its air, and let my eyes gather the landscape into my soul. I wanted to deepen my awareness about what it means to inhabit such a place, and it to inhabit me.

When driving from Hot Springs, South Dakota to visit Fort Robinson outside of Crawford, Nebraska, we stopped the car and got out to take in the Oglala Grasslands, a vast expanse of prairie expanding in every direction. Clouds hung low. Wind whispered through the grass, quivered wild flowers’ purple tips. As I stood listening, absorbing the scene, I imagined my great grandparents walking and working the land. There’s a kind of voice in the voicelessness of the grasslands that speaks of time, endurance, and the strength of perseverance through all kinds of weather and change. The land’s silence fell into me like a pebble dropped into a deep well. Even now, if I go back to that moment in my mind, I feel the ripple effect of standing on that ground in all its solidness, a profound, ancient quiet reaching into my bones, wrapping me in it like a shawl.

Born into an era where many people were small farmers living in remote landscapes with no running water or electricity, life changed for my ancestors with the arrival of telephones, then the radio, and later the automobile with the subsequent development of highways. My grandparents survived the Great Depression, observed the airplane’s invention, and the arrival and departure of two world wars. Small farms and ranches mostly became a thing of the past as the country turned to the use of pesticides, big machinery, and industrial farming. My ancestors experienced the emergence of television, witnessed the moon landing, the rise of women’s rights and civil rights, and the emergence of environmental awareness. Combined together, these changes fundamentally and dramatically altered the way we live and function as a society.

My grandparents and great grandparents’ lives and the communities they were a part of, along with everyone else’s ancestors, helped shape who we became as a nation. Learning more of a place’s history can give us a clearer picture of what in our culture may have been invisible or hidden in shadow so we can make better choices that will affect our future. We don’t live individual lives isolated from the past or from the actions of people across our neighborhoods, cities, country or the world. The way we respond to events and the choices we make or fail to make today in connection with those events shapes our lives now and in the future.

I lived outside of my home country for more than two and a half decades. Each culture taught me different ways of seeing the world that arose out of their history, traditions, and interaction with the land the people inhabited. Returning to the US, I realized there’s a lot to learn about my country’s history that I was unaware of earlier. Writing both Stories We Didn’t Tell and A Space Between helped me see a fuller and more detailed picture of my cultural roots, heritage, and my country’s history. One book that has been especially helpful for me to understand current dynamics and tensions in the US is Colin Woodard’s American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. (You can see a map of the different cultural nations inside of the US map here and hear Woodard talk about some of the main points in his new book on this topic here.) The various values and characteristics of the nations people had previously lived in who first came to what we now call the North American continent, continue to affect us today, explains Woodard. One current example of this tension are those organizations in the US that work to preserve and protect forests such as American Forests, The Conservation Fund, The Nature Conservancy and the National Forest Foundation. “Recognizing “enoughness” is a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more,” writes Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book, Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. “When an economic system actively destroys what we love, isn’t it time for a different system?” A different perspective, however, is taken by the current US administration, (influenced by values prevalent in the area Woodard calls Tidewater and the Deep South.) This month the US president’s administration proposed opening nearly 45 million acres of national forest land across 37 states to commercial logging, mining, and road construction.

Why must the natural beauty of open spaces offer constantly be pushed aside in the name of business and development? Hiking through Sinks Canyon and Crazy Woman Canyon, visiting Devils Tower in Wyoming, driving around the area of the Badlands and through the Needles Highway in South Dakota, would be enough, it seems, to encourage us to answer Kimmerer’s question with a resounding yes, we need a different system, a different way of thinking. These areas are sacred places full of beauty. The entire area evoked in me a continuing sense of awe, the kind I’ve felt when staring up at the night sky sensing my small place in the cosmos. Open landscapes nourish us and help us regain our souls.

In a recent conversation with Bebo Franklin, author of The Harbinger of Elemdale about about the creative process of authoring a book Franklin writes, “The deeper I went into creating characters and understanding why they might behave as they did, the harder it became to reduce people to simply good, bad, broken, etc. They became much more complicated.” Writers create worlds in their books that help us look at the worlds we live in more closely. We might not be authors, but we’re living the stories we write with our lives. We’re flawed people trying to create the story we want to live in together, a life we want to inhabit as well as pass on. Wherever you live and whoever you are, we’re part of the creative process of life on this planet. Our character manifests itself in the place we live and the history we create. What we do ripples out through time to touch the world around us both now and in the future.

We can choose to be intentional about the transformation we bring about within ourselves and the world. We can make a practice of taking time to purposefully notice the natural world and its contribution to our lives. Go into your back yard and spend time with your favorite flower, stroll through a city park listening for birds, drive, bike or walk in some open space your heart calls you to and let that place speak to you. Try one of these fifty seasonal meditations from Emergence Magazine. “What if our metrics for well-being included birdsong, the crescendo of crickets on a summer evening, and neighbors calling to each other across the road?” writes Robin Wall Kimmerer. That’s the kind of world I want to live in.

Uncategorized

On the Road

July 30, 2026 annacitrino

“To be honest, I view all stories as journeys. Journeys are the essential text of the human experience—the journey from birth to death, from innocence to wisdom, from ignorance to knowledge, from where we start to where we end. There is almost no piece of important writing—the Bible, the Odyssey, Chaucer, Ulysses—that isn’t explicitly or implicitly the story of a journey. Even when I don’t actually go anywhere for a particular story, the way I report is to immerse myself in something I usually know very little about, and what I experience is the journey toward a grasp of what I’ve seen.”–Susan Orlean, Introduction to My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who’s Been Everywhere. Random House, 2004

I love the way travel enlarges us, makes us asks questions about ourselves, our habits, values, and what we take for granted in the world we travel from. When we travel, we enter unfamiliar landscapes and places unlike our home. Travel helps us become more aware that there are many ways of being, many ways of organizing life. Our way isn’t the only way. Isn’t one of the reasons we travel because we recognize we want to enter a world unlike the one we’re used to? We want to hear different ways of speaking, discover new scenery, explore a bit, learn some new things about people or the world around us, and see life through a different lens.

On my journey last month through Wyoming, South Dakota, and Nebraska, over and over road signs indicated fossils could be found in the area. Museums throughout the region had numerous fossils on display. Fossil beds aren’t common in the area where I live, but to drive through the landscape in these states is to repeatedly be reminded that of the long, evolutionary process of life on Earth. Existence is rolled out on such a vast scale of time. It’s challenging to conceive of a time stretching over such immense periods as the era long ago where dinosaurs lived. Life forms on this planet were so different then from those found on Earth today.

I viewed dinosaur bones in museums I visited. I read the information about them and the plants they ate. I learned somethings about the climates that previously existed in the region and how very different they were from what we experience today. The visit to the area and the museums there reminded me that human presence and consciousness is a recent occurrence in the enormous developmental cosmic process we live inside. Things have been changing on Earth since its beginning. The planet is constantly in transformation, ceaselessly remaking and renewing itself.

As I drove through Wyoming’s long stretches of open sky and wide, sandy plains filled with sedges, I noticed how the landscape continued to hold the impression of its history eons previous to our current time when much of the state rested beneath enormous ancient seas. The Western Interior Seaway in the late Cretaceous period 100 million to 60 million years ago divided the North American continent between the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic Ocean. Previously, in the Jurassic period, 165 to 120 million years ago, a portion of the Arctic Ocean spread down in a shallow sea named Sundance from western Canada into what is now the US that includes portions of Wyoming. Above the Sundance Formation near present day Thermopolis (also a geothermal site) lies a sedimentary layer that holds one of the world’s richest areas in dinosaur fossils. The dinosaurs walked along the shorelines of the ancient sea. It’s possible to see their tracks at Red Gulch Dinosaur Tracksite. Native people of the area have known about Wyoming’s fossils for thousands of years and those who first came across them must have been astonished. I’m still astonished by them.

World Fossil Finder Museum, Hot Springs, South Dakota

Two other sites on my trip, Worland, Wyoming, and Hot Springs, South Dakota also are sites abundant with fossils. Fossil sites can give us new understanding about how the ecosystem responded to climate change previously in Earth’s history so we can better understand how changes to climate are happening now and how to better make wise choices about our future way of living. Carlo Levi wrote, “The future has an ancient heart.” When thinking of Wyoming and South Dakota, in the future, we can also bring to mind the ancient, primordial past held in the dinosaur bones buried there that were part of the process that brought us into the life we have today.

Travel isn’t only about where we take ourselves to on a holiday. It’s also about our travel through time on the journey of understanding about ourselves and the world we inhabit. A new territory we’re traveling into now is the growing information people are gaining about plants. Zoë Schlanger, author of The Light Eaters tells us in her interview with Romany Williams in Atmos magazine, plants don’t have a central nervous system like humans, nevertheless, science is showing us plants have language, family structures, and make allies with enemies. They also have preferences, plan ahead and can remember. Plants have been doing these things all along, but humans weren’t aware of it. We thought only humans did these things based on the way we typically have categorized information.

As we reexamine what we think we knew about plants, we now have questions to ask about how we relate to the world around us. “Science indeed has no agreed-upon definition for life, death, intelligence, nor consciousness,” says Schlanger. Travel often raises questions in our minds that we didn’t have before and this new territory of information about plants is creating fresh debates about consciousness. The new information about plants encourages us to open the boxes that previously contained our thinking and to look at our relationship with the world of plants in a larger, more complete map. New inquires arise about our connection to the world around us and how we the environment is something greater than background scenery. Vegetables and fruit are used for mass consumption but Native cultures have long thought of plants as sacred. “I understood them to be relatives and living beings with emotions and lives of their own. I learned that they are part of my life as well and that I should always care for them,” writes anthropologist and ethnobiologist from the Rarámuri culture, Enrique Salmón. “Cultural perception, language, and thought are related to both the land and cultural histories…Beliefs help people recognize their links to the natural world and their responsibility to ensure its survival…There is little distinction between our world and that of nonhumans.” New understandings about plants can give us new ways of speaking about the natural world that influences our thoughts and actions as we travel into the future, and perhaps will connect us in new ways to old understandings about the land we walk on and the vegetation growing there. “You come to understand yourself as just one product of the unending, riotous, messy experiment that is evolution,” Schlanger says. “We’re all trying to find a way to make it in this environment. It’s not a spiritual concept but it comes close to recognizing this unifying truth that evolution is not a hierarchical process.”

Travel places us in a kind of liminal space between worlds–we’re frequently arriving somewhere new but are also soon to depart. Journeys are circular. In between those two points, we gain new understandings, find new words to explain our experience, and we’re changed. But we also circle back to old understandings, old pathways with the ability to see them from a different angle with new light. A further fairly recent significant discovery is the pathways of the interstitium, the spaces between the body’s tissues and cells that’s filled with fluid. This fluid moves nutrients and waste around. It also connects and cushions cells. This fluid route in the body has always been there, but people didn’t notice it because they weren’t looking at the body’s interconnected parts. “There are very specific laboratory reasons why the interstitium was not discovered until a few years ago – the histological method was hiding the canals. But there are also psychological reasons we could not ’see’ the fascial system or the interstitium because we tend to think in parts, not wholes,” explains Tom Myers author of Anatomy Trains. “We’ve known about interstitial fluid for years; we just didn’t know about its ‘organized” nature until we could 1) see in vivo, and 2) think in terms of whole systems instead of discrete ‘organs’… systems are not simply a sum of all their objective parts. Systems are also the rules that govern the relational behavior.” (Read more here.) This pathway of fluids supporting and moving between the body’s organs seems to be a metaphor for the journey of the era we’re traveling through at this time. We’re in the midst of a shift between an old way of thinking that viewed the world as filled with separate objects to be managed and brought under control, and are moving into new world connected in thinking to an ancient one that recognized the world is built of relationships where people sought to acknowledge and respect them.

Opening of spring water at Thermopolis, Wyoming

The road Earth has journeyed from the primordial past is still present with us, even if not always visible or obvious. Traveling down new roads, new ways of thinking can motivate us, like Galileo, to think in new ways. What we observe can be confusing, difficult, and uncomfortable, but we learn things that change us. The presence of fossils, recently expanded understandings about plants, and the discovery of the interstitium–all help us see that we are part of an enormous net of interwoven realities. The world is full of wonders and we live inside of mysteries wrapped around further mysteries. Traveling into these unfamiliar territories provokes interesting queries about how we’re connected to the larger whole of life and who we are as humans in the midst of that expansive unfolding existence.

Travel writer Susan Orlean suggests that travel is always a journey. When traveling, she immerses herself in something she doesn’t know much about then journeys toward grasping what she’s seen. There’s a whole lot humans don’t understand. We’re all on this journey traveling through time together. Things can be painfully difficult if we miss a flight when traveling or if our vehicle slides around on a road threatening our safety because it’s snowing unexpectedly. Things can be challenging when you thought you understood the way things worked, where you were going, what was true and real, only to discover something that wasn’t on the road map you were using and you end up in an unexpected situation. Sometimes that unexpected situation turns out to be a delightful one, one that changes your life for the better. Whatever the experience, it’s often eye opening and allows us to see ourselves and the world from a different stance.

“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, / ché la diritta via era smarrita,” writes Dante, “In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.” It feels like humanity has arrived at a new place, one that’s asking us to confront our ways of living and thinking that are preventing us from living together well. The planet along with the bulk of humanity is struggling for survival and to live together peacefully while others have far more than would be needed in a thousand lifetimes and are creating enormous disruption to human cooperation and thriving, exponentially exacerbating people’s emotional pain, and needlessly causing death for entire groups of people, along with a plethora of other griefs and losses. We won’t be on this road forever. Everything changes. People in Galileo’s era thought his theories were incorrect, but new understandings and time proved differently. Our present culture is caught in division over many things. We often reject what our minds can’t comprehend or that are outside of our habitual way of seeing things. But if we’re realistic, we can recognize that though we try our best based on the knowledge we have, our reasoning can be faulty. What is the meaning of the whole trajectory of life on earth and the cosmos itself? It’s a complex mystery.

Whether embarking on travel that takes us to a new location in the world or traveling into new understandings brought about through scientific or personal inquiry, the questions we hold as we travel will move us into new territory. What if we purposely assumed the mindset of a traveler and sought a transformation of mind as we move through this unpredictable time we’re living in? Rather than clinging to ideas that keep us stuck, what if we recognized we can’t reason our way through to make sense of everything and valued the journey, even the painful bits? What if we let what provokes and discomforts us become our adventure, if we allow what disorients us to be our exploration, our encounter with something that calls us further into the depth of our being?

On the road in June over Powderhorn Pass, Wyoming, 9,660 feet elevation

Ada Limón in her poem “Salvage” writes about a madrone tree that’s half-burned from the fires. Half of the tree is ashen and burned, the other half green. She writes,

…I have
been staring at the tree for a long time now.
I am reminded of the righteousness I had
before the scorch of time. I miss who I was.
I miss who we all were, before we were this: half
alive to the brightening sky, half dead already.
I place my hand on the unscarred bark that is cool
and unsullied, and because I cannot apologize
to the tree, to my own self I say, I am sorry.
I am sorry I have been so reckless with your life.

We’ve been journeying on this road of sorrow for what feels like a very long time now. I don’t know how much more disappointment grief we can bear. My hope is that the sorrow takes us on a journey where we hear the ripples of Wyoming’s ancient ghostly seas telling us, yes there was terrible ice flows, great droughts, and fire. The waters receded. But the plants went on talking amongst themselves. The world flowered, moved through the eons building mountains, creating icebergs and rivers, plants and animals, gave birth to humans and histories. Sands shift across the ancient shore where the dinosaurs once walked. You wonder how it’s all going to go. But the truth is, even now a spring flows through the interstitum pathways between Earth and humanity, working to bring life out of the recklessness. Together, we can make a different life possible.

Let this poem of Anthony Machado encourage you on your journey “Last Night As I Was Sleeping.“

Nature, poetry, Uncategorized

A Way to Endure

December 12, 2025 annacitrino

Today I was out wandering the coastal path along Bodega Bay here in Sonoma County. The sky was as blue as dream, the light clear as cut glass. My eyes stretched across the bay about 35 miles to the Point Reyes headlands while above me sea gulls careened through the air in drifts of white. I always look forward to visiting Bodega Bay to walk along the cliffs. It’s the landscape that convinced me I could move away from Santa Cruz County. Here in Sonoma County I could still be near sea and trees and beauty. My soul would be well.

Perhaps you, too, have landscapes that have spoken to you or fed your soul. I remember standing years ago on the red earth outside of Wheatland, Wyoming. I climbed up on a piece of red sandstone and looked far across dry horizontal landscape to the distant horizon. Not a person or building in sight. Dark clouds hovered above and it began to rain. Thick drops splatted hard against the stone and earth. Everything around me felt absolutely elemental. I thought of my mother whose hair was red like the earth around me, and how durable a person’s body and spirit would have to be to hold up in such an environment, how resilient. Standing there on that land I understood my mother in a way I had never had before.

The land can teach us things when we listen attentively. Recently, I learned that researchers have noticed that birdsong seems to reduce stress-related hormones in the tree. Additionally, recent studies hypothesize that birdsong “acts as a natural “sonic bloom,” providing acoustic stimulation that enhances plant physiology.” Just as we affect the natural world, the natural world affects us.

When people settled the West in America, they plowed up about half of its native grasses, approximately 5.2 million acres in the Great Plains and effectively destroyed the soil, leading to the Dust Bowl. Our interactions as Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee states in his talk, “Enraptured with Earth,” “…union is the state in which the world really functions.” People in the past may not have understood the land they were living on, how it needed to be treated and whether or not it was capable of providing people with the nurturance and productivity settlers of the era sought. In our day, however, we have an abundance of information to help us understand what creates a healthy relationship with the environment. We know now that time spent in nature can improve our physical and mental health, as well as our thinking, creativity. This is encouraging and affirming news for human well-being.

For the character Adah in Stories We Didn’t Tell the land is a steady friend that helps her endure through difficulties and trauma.

During Drought
Beaver Creek, Weston, Wyoming
Adah, 1908
(age 19)

Earth crackled underfoot, hot winds
peeled the skin, crops shriveled
and collapsed, banks floundered,
farmers sold their livestock.

Some lost their farms, others their homes.
Then, on the brink of famine at the end
of a decade of drought,
I was born.

The ghosts of the world that came before
and what was coming next
rose from the soil to the fever-weary air.

Parched earth’s despair eventually passed,
but a new drought arrived when I got pregnant.
Barely past childhood,
I was living in one world,

then woke to realize
I was living in another.

Arid wind evaporated my life,
withered thoughts of any restful future.

Heat exhausts.
Lack of water alters the mind.
We need rain, streams, lakes.
We need rivers’ soft arms to hold us.

I understood little about anything.
Except thirst.

So, I went to the fields and meadows,
days and months walking alone
through wave-thick grass, green and gold pastures
under gentle skies strewn with clouds.
Flowing forth as if a spring, crested penstemon
and desert buckbean grew out of cracks in rocks.

Shadows shifting and lifting in crests across the prairie,
I journeyed into fields, the earth’s wordless voice
entering slowly through my feet and eyes,
seeping through the silence, whispering within
the perseverance of its expansive presence
that I was more than the hurt and harm I felt,
larger than what had happened to me,
and that like the earth, I, too,
would find a way to endure.

I wish for you a relationship with the natural world that allows you to absorb through your eyes, or skin, or to feel beneath your feet the earth’s expansive presence. Even if your connection is simply attentively noticing the color of leaves through your morning window, the architecture of a tree’s branches in your neighborhood, or the weight of your cat resting on your lap, spend some time with the natural world. As you listen attentively over time to that connection, you’ll find how without words it speaks to you and works to support you, assists in allowing hurts or harms you may have experienced or are experiencing now to move through you. Like Adah, I hope you will find in that connection what you need to endure.

This coming Tuesday, 16 December, I’ll be giving a reading from Stories We Didn’t Tell on Zoom in connection with North Bay Poetics. I invite you to attend. The time listed below is Pacific Time.

(You can find the poem above, “During Drought” in Stories We Didn’t Tell, published by Shanti Arts.)

Uncategorized

Among The Trees

October 13, 2025October 14, 2025 annacitrino

Recently, I visited Colorado where I gave a reading in friends’ backyard from my recently published book, Stories We Didn’t Tell. Leaving Denver’s airport, my friend drove me through the mountains where we viewed the aspen quilting the hillsides in gold between patches of green. Walking amongst the aspen, I felt I was wandering inside the glittering gold of a Klimt painting. Such astonishment of color! What life autumn brings. Clouds filled the sky as we drove and lighting let loose its ecstatic bolts of electricity, but the hills overflowed with vibrant yellow, leaves fluttering and swiveling in the brisk air. What a gift to be alive.

I’m grateful to live near trees. As I write, I look across an empty field. At the far end rests a line of redwoods. My great aunt, the central character in my new book, was raised on the prairies with its ocean of grass. Like her, I didn’t grow up with trees, but am grateful for their presence. Daily, they add beauty to my life. Landscapes shape our way of seeing the world. A walk in the woods can literally affect our sense of happiness, health, and wellbeing.

September 29 would have been my great aunt’s 135 birthday. Here’s a piece from Stories We Didn’t Tell in honor of her.

THE TREES
North Little Rock, Arkansas,
1946 Adah, age 57

A short time ago this town held four thousand
German prisoners of war. Things are calmer now,
thankfully, so this morning Litton and I
drove around Little Rock to explore Autumn.

Sweet gums at the capitol dressed themselves
in topaz and copper. Maples on riverbanks
huddled together beneath red and amber blankets.
Up north, oaks wore suits of rust.

The cold that brings these gifts of color is a sign
the trees soon will lose all they hold.
Seems I should feel sorrow standing beneath
their branches, knowing their loss grows daily,
but the War is over, and it’s my birthday.
Mostly, I feel embraced.

I’m a woman of the prairies and open skies.
When I speak, my accent tells the story:
I’m an outsider here.
Sugar maples, hickory, dogwood, and gum—
trees in general are foreign to me.
My history is from a different world, one made of grass.

Life here has comforts I enjoy.
Same as for others who live nearby,
Litton and I have electricity, indoor toilets,
heat, a toaster, refrigerator, and a radio.
Now and then, though, I take off my shoes,
walk barefoot to remember what it feels like.

Every place has something important it wants to tell us.
In spring, Little Rock’s magnolias lift
their flowers like cups to gather the afternoon’s
blue, and redbuds grow blossoms on their trunks.
In fall we ride roads curling through trees aflame
with brilliant color. Still, sometimes I wish
to hear the fields of prairie grass sigh
when the wind moves through.
I long for its voice
whispering in my ear.

Arkansas isn’t my forever home, but likely
I’ll miss people’s accents, sweet tea,
and the city’s abundant trees when I leave.

All of us in the family, including Mama, Father,
their parents and great grandparents too—everyone
left the land they were born on, and I have too.
Don’t know if I’ll ever return to Nebraska
or will want to.
For now, I carry my home with me,
choose the parts to keep.

Today I stood beside the river
in the afternoon’s gold light, opened
my arms to a maple’s leafy blaze,
and made my birthday wish:
to be like these trees—
the way they allow their beauty to burn
and burn and yet don’t die, even after
losing all that allowed them
to live into their fullness,
even as every colorful leaf
drifts down to earth.

May this autumn season bring you beauty, a deep sense of wellbeing, and an awareness life’s fullness meeting you as you savor color wherever you meet it.

Uncategorized

Returning to Solid Earth

July 7, 2025July 18, 2025 annacitrino

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”—Albert Einstein

Fascinated by their colors, shapes and textures, my attraction to the mineral world began as a child. My family lived in a house where the driveway’s earth contained an abundance of mica. I loved its sparkle, the glints of light shining up from the ground and found it wondrous. “It’s fools gold my older siblings informed me,” as if to explain away its marvel. But I went on finding it magical. Real gold, wouldn’t have made it more fantastic. In my five year old eyes, the glints in the sand were marvel enough as they were.

Throughout my life I’ve loved looking for stones that call to me to notice them. I scanned the landscape for rock crystals in the Saudi desert, searched the ground for amethyst in Thunder Bay, Canada, and hunted for rose quartz on my grandmother’s property in South Dakota’s Black Hills. The gift of rock salt from Colombia and pebbles from the beach in the town in Calabria, Italy where family ancestors were born, these are precious treasures connected to a larger story reaching far back through time.

The beginning of my childhood rock collection

Living amidst the world’s current disruptions, fear expanding in explosions like July fourth fireworks from news headlines, recently I’ve been thinking again about rock hunting and the quiet pursuit of the beauty’s solid expressions that have been forming and residing in the earth since its foundation.

Foundational writings in historical US documents has promoted the idea of pursuing happiness, felicity achieved by independent effort and the belief in “pulling one’s self up by the bootstraps,” as the saying goes. Happiness for some is food on the table, water to drink and bathe in, clothes to wear, and heat when the day is cold, and the rent paid. For others the pursuit of happiness includes the comforts of fine dining, vacation time in far off places, brand name clothing and the newest gadgets and the ceaseless busy pursuit to pay for it all. People have different definitions and expectations for happiness.

Meanwhile, amidst the endless chase to live happily, U.S. institutions that provided public good such as schools, consumer protection agencies, and emergency assistance programs, are being dismantled. The world U.S. citizens once lived in is crumbling. Chunks of stability and support people once counted on are falling away. What’s needed now for the long term social good and happiness is something far greater than fine food at a restaurant or a week or two holiday. We need a new way of being together that promotes the flourishing of all lives. Whether we want to or not, it’s important now to swim across the river of change we’re in the midst of, and to imagine into being the different shore we want waiting there to receive us.

Imagining that other shore, the quality of its shape, texture is important. What does it look like to reconcile our nation’s inherited past with a vision of one where reparations are made for injustices and the common person doesn’t have to live in fear of not being able to sustain their own lives. How would we live differently if we consciously saw the natural world as wondrous, not just when gazing at a waterfall or a super bloom of wildflowers in spring, but as a daily foundational awareness as we went about our everyday lives?

To imagine that world, what it means for us personally to embody the world we want to live into it, it’s valuable to step away from cultural mandates that encourage us to be continuously productive and to do something different. In my book Stories We Didn’t Tell coming out later this year with Shanti Arts, the character Avery goes rock hunting in the Wyoming outback with his brother Leith. The ending portion of the poem reads:

After miles of flatland and shrubs, we climb

from the car to inhale the earth’s rich scent.
The ground stuffed with stones like chips
in a cookie, buckets in hand, we comb the earth
looking for agates’ lacy plumes, snail-shaped
fossils, red jasper, and petrified wood.

No specific purpose needed when rock hunting.
No timeline or agenda to fulfill, just walking
the land with the possibility of reaching
into the soil to find something formed
several million years before we touched it—
something solid, beautiful
and unrelated to any need
for productivity.

Productivity isn’t the measure of life. As Mary Oliver writes, “Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?” Finding moments in our day and our week where we disengage from productivity, where we wander out into the desert, forest, lake shore, or prairie without a particular goal is important. It restores us, brings us back to our bodies and our connection to the life that both births and sustains us.

from top left to right: rose quartz, Colombian rock salt,
amethyst, pudding stone, gypsum rose

Rocks and stone are both solid and the physical result of great change. They are, so to speak, the physical embodiment of the earth’s imagining. Like rocks, we are people of this earth. Maybe it’s time to go out rock hunting to find the rock you can carry in your pocket as a reminder of solidity amidst change. As Byrd Baylor writes in her children’s book, Everybody Needs a Rock. You want to be able to look your rock right in the eye and chose a rock that fits comfortably in your hand.

Quiet spaces, such as one might find while rock hunting are valuable to our inner lives. I hope you find a place where you might see the wind turn the leaves of trees, watch the ocean waves’ ceaseless motion, sit and savor the flavor of fresh peach, or just plain sit and stare off into space. Wherever it is you can sense your life is part of the earth’s great body, let that place hold you. Be present with it.

Imagination takes time to form. It might take time to hear what it has to say, like it takes time for a stone to form. Listen for what rises there.

Uncategorized

Fruits From Other Worlds

May 28, 2025 annacitrino

“Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world.”― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

An absolute plethora of fruits grow in the country of Colombia. In a recent trip to Bogota I visited a local produce market and explored a different world of fruits and vegetables from those familiar to me in the temperate climate where I currently live. Colombia’s fruits are unique to many other tropical countries because they are native to the Andes mountains.

At the market, my friends and I wandered slowly through the aisles examining the fruits’ textures and inhaled their distinct fragrances. Here’s some of what we found:

The enormous and spikey guanabana, also known as soursop, paw paw, or graviola.
Chuguas, a type of tuber that has been cultivated for thousands of years by indigenous people of the Andes.
Pepino guiso, a kind of vegetable used in stews or sauces.
Cubios, another indigenous tuber of the northern Andes with a similar taste to a potato.
The Colombian zapote comes from the Amazon rainforest.
Granadilla, similar to a passion fruit.
Lulo, a citrus-flavored fruit native to the Andean region,
Tomato arbol rojo, eaten raw, as a juice, or cooked in hot sauces.
Ciruela roja, the word translates into English as “red plum,” but this fruit is a tropical fruit that actually belongs to the cashew family.
Curuba, also known as a cloud passion fruit since it is grown in high elevation cloud forests.
Platanos, bananas specifically used for frying.
Star fruit.

We also found some fruits more commonly known in the US such as pomelo, mora or mulberry, feijoa, a pineapple guava, dragon fruit, and maracuya, and passion fruit.

As Ed Yong describes, the world abounds with an enormous variety but we “tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness.” The small fraction of reality that my California yard holds of Earth’s enormous variety are a lemon, lime, mandarin, pomegranate, sour cherry, plum, apple, loquat, kumquat, and fig tree. In addition we grow a variety of berries: strawberry, boysenberry, blackberry, blueberry, as well as a currant shrub, and two grape vines. Throughout the year I observe the plants’ growth, and in summer look forward to tasting their fruit, and sharing them with neighbors and friends. Without exposure to other worlds, I might think my world and what it holds is the whole world.

As Yong points out, “By giving in to our preconceptions, we miss what might be right in front of us. And sometimes what we miss is breathtaking.” We’re mostly unaware in our day to day lives of the astounding amount of life around us everywhere that contributes to the life-force that sustains us. According to the Seed Collection site, a single handful of soil “(about 200g) suitable for growing crops can contain a staggering number of organisms: 50km of fungal filaments, about 5000 individual insects, spiders, worms and molluscs, 100,000 protozoa, 10,000 nematodes, and 100,000 million bacteria (that’s 100,000,000,000 individual single-celled organisms!)” We likely don’t typically think about that when stepping into a garden.

I think of the fruits in my yard as native because I’ve grown up with them and they are familiar. In reality, though, these fruits originated in other lands. The peach, for example came from China, and spread through Asia and Europe before being brought to the new world by Spanish explorers. The pomegranate, according to the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens, is one of the oldest fruits known to humans and is thought to have originated in Iran, southwest Pakistan, and portions of Afghanistan. (Surprisingly, the pomegranate is technically a berry.) Black currants are native to northern Eurasia. The sour cherry likely has its origin somewhere between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea according to Science Direct. The fig (related to the mulberry) is native to an extensive area ranging from Asiatic Turkey to northern India.

The association between apples and US culture has had such a strong connection since WW2 that there’s a common saying, “As American as apple pie.” Apples, however, came from Kazakhstan, in central Asia east of the Caspian Sea. In fact, the former capital of Kazakhstan, Alma Ata, means “full of apples.” Wild blueberries are one of the few fruits in my garden that originated in North America. After the glaciers receded approximately 10,000 years ago, they began to appear in the area known as The Barrens of Maine, and in Eastern Canada, and Quebec. My life is thoroughly enriched because of what has been brought to me from worlds beyond the borders of where I live.

Travel to a different part of the world to walk around in a different biome or culture, and one right away becomes more alert to the differences of landscape, climate, unique ways of organizing reality and ways of interacting with it.

It’s human to like what is comfortable and known. In a world where much feels uncertain, where countries and people are pulling into themselves, fearful of what’s to come. People generally want to avoid situations that provoke fear. The natural world, however, wants to offer its abundance irregardless of the challenging environment it finds itself in. Wandering through the Bogota neighborhood market was a window into the natural world’s extravagant diversity, not just to see and touch it, but also to taste it. What an enlivening experience that can be!

The plant world opens, and opens into a universe of wondrous fecundity of 400,000 plant species. We are part of the natural world that created the cornucopia of thousands upon thousands of fruits found worldwide. Even in the most ordinary of days, to walk on this earth is an extraordinary thing. It took eons upon eons to create the world as we know it in all its rich variety. Like each of us, I’m here to allow myself to participate in that life flow–to let it in, immerse myself in it, and share it with others. Humans are meant to share the fruits of our lives as season after season we re-vision who we are and give back to life. As Kate Baer writes,

Idea

I will enjoy this life. I will open it
like a peach in season, suck the juice
from every finger, run my tongue over
my chin. I will not worry about clichés
or uninvited guests peering in my windows.
I will love and be loved. Save and be saved
a thousand times. I will let the want into
my body, bless the heat under my skin.
My life, I will not waste it. I will enjoy this life.

Uncategorized, Walking

The World That Awaits

April 18, 2025 annacitrino

Overlook of Pomo Canyon, Sonoma County, California

So many voices are clamoring for attention these days. I’ve felt the need to go into my garden pull weeds all day, go out on long walks and long bike rides to be in the green world, the world that is growing, generous and lifting from heavy earth in wondrous color and life. Recently, I attended an online poetry reading with Shanti Arts. At the end of the reading one person asked. “What are people taking from poetry or going to poetry for in the environment…we’re living in. What can poetry do for us?” One of the central values of reading poetry for me at this time is the reminder that there’s a larger world than the circles of fear that want to take hold in the mind. Life that has been waiting for months and months is pushing up from the earth. There is pain, oppression, loss, grief, yes, so much grief in this world. Let them be acknowledged and known. But notice also green life is there pushing through into the light of day. Earth’s continuous effort is to sustain life. Including ours.

I like to go walking most any time. But when my heart feels heavy, I especially appreciate getting out for a hike in the hills. I need to be in the natural world to remind myself that the experience of being alive, and life itself is larger than the things that work to remove the structures that enable the world’s flourishing. Looking out across the ocean or gazing up into the sky, I can literally see the universe is vast. My understanding will always be limited. We may have maps of the world’s geographic landscape but there are worlds within worlds we don’t understand.

A number of years ago when visiting St. Petersburg, Russia, I remember a Russian man at a restaurant we were eating at ask where my husband and I were from. When we said “The U.S.,” he told us, “You can go where you want. You have no idea what it’s like to not have that freedom.” He was right. To some extent I could imagine the limitation of movement, but the emotional and psychological impact of that is an entirely different thing. Choosing to stay in a particular place versus knowing you’re not allowed to move beyond an authority’s set boundary is different.

Back in the mid 90’s I was speaking with a student’s mother in the hallway at a school in Kuwait where I was teaching at the time. The family had came to Kuwait from Bosnia and Herzegovina to escape the war that was going on there. My students were collecting oral histories and traditional tales from family and community members from the cultures the students were connected to and sharing them with Inuit students in Alaska and high schoolers in Sandy, Utah. I don’t now remember what my student’s mother and I were specifically speaking of, but suddenly the mother choked-up and said, “You have no idea what it’s like in my country right now, what is going on there, what is happening.”

She was right. I didn’t know. The Bosnian War “was characterised by bitter fighting, indiscriminate shelling of cities and towns, ethnic cleansing, and systematic mass rape,” I read in Wikipedia. “The massacre of over 8,000 Bosniak males by Serb forces in Srebrenica is the only incident in Europe to have been recognized as a genocide since World War II.”

“Estimates suggest over 100,000 people were killed during the war. Over 2.2 million people were displaced, making it, at the time, the most violent conflict in Europe since the end of World War II. In addition, an estimated 12,000–50,000 women were raped, mainly carried out by Serb forces, with most of the victims being Bosniak women.” (source: Wikipedia) How could a person find the strength to speak of such atrocities or to ever absorb the emotional trauma and horror behind those statistics?

When I think of the conversation with my former student’s mother as I consider the growing ways people in my country are now being dehumanized and deprived of rights, the fear people around me express for their sense of safety, it’s extremely sobering. What seeds and sun inside our collective social structures need to be watered and nurtured so we can clearly see and care about each other’s humanity, build on common values, and begin to trust, respect and appreciate each other more?

It feels particularly important to find ways to enter the quiet spaces within us so we can consciously, purposefully listen to not only the truth our own inner voice wants to tell us, but to the voices of with those we interact with. We need to listen for the words and the life that wants to come forward underneath what is spoken and aim to hear and see the humanity in each person we interact with. I’m reminded of Sherman Alexie’s recent poem, “Bad Back” (March 16, 2025, Rattle) where he writes,

I know, as a writer and an Indian
and an Indian writer that I am

expected to offer advice. But
I have nothing but this consolation:
Everything you’re feeling now

is what I’ve always felt
as a reservation-raised Indian.

What is currently happening in the US with the disrespect for the rule of law, the mistreatment of fellow humans, the reckless unconcern for the abuses of the natural world–our forests, oceans, natural habitats, and our very air is a reflection of the stories we hold about the world inherited from the past. The stories we carry with us affect the way we treat each other and the way we treat the earth. The two are connected. Every country has their histories to confront. Transformation is a continuous process. We all benefit from allowing ourselves to grow into new ways of thinking and being. Alexie ends his poem “Bad Back” saying, “I’m going to press / my bad back against the earth / and wait for everybody’s rebirth.” Rebirth is, indeed, what we need right now.

The stories we hold ripple through our actions and way of speaking. If we listen beneath the chatter in the daily news and the chatter in our minds, what new story and new life wants to come forth? We can purposefully pursue to renew our minds and actions. Pascha, Passover, Ramadan, Easter. These ancient traditions remind us there is life beyond slavery, and that we can be renewed. We have the opportunity to teach ourselves what it’s like for others to go without basic necessities such as food and clean water. In doing so, we can water seeds of empathy and grow toward deeper recognition of all people’s need for social justice.

We’re not meant to stay on the very same path we were born onto. Just as the earth renews itself and the cells of our bodies renew, we too are meant to transform our minds, renew our stories. What better time than spring to start? I appreciate the way Billy Collins emphasizes this willful act of spring renewal in his poem, “Today.”

Today

BY BILLY COLLINS

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary’s cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.

Source: Poetry (April 2000)

Spring is calling you outside. The earth reaches out to renews you! Check out the ways! If you can, go for a walk, a swim, or a bike ride.

If you can’t do any of those things, find someone whose hand you can hold while staring up into the forever sky. In the midst of despair life is there, present, waiting to give itself to us. We can turn toward it at any time.

Uncategorized

Wasting Our Hearts On Fear No More

March 13, 2025March 13, 2025 annacitrino

I went for a brisk walk in the wind today before the rain began. Branches twisting and turning wildly, I wondered if the redwood tree in a neighbor’s yard would continue to hold fast to its roots. Palm trees flailed their long limbs. Grasses bended and waved. Here and there, lichen covered branches that fell from the oaks above lay along the path. Gray light covered the sky. No sun in sight, and everything was astir. Though the morning news was bleak, walking in such air felt utterly invigorating, and made me consciously aware of the aliveness of everything around me.

The flood of current changes in the US have consequences for neighboring countries and countries throughout the world. Many have lost their jobs, and many others have died as a consequence of the current government administration’s activities. The natural world is suffering as well. It’s ugly and utterly heartbreaking. What can be said that doesn’t further emphasize the devastation and add to the information stress? What might bring insight or release?

Reflecting on these questions, Barry Lopez‘s essay, “Drought,” found in his book River Notes came to mind. Lopez tells the story of during a time of severe drought where a man dreams of a large fish that had fed himself too much and grew too large to escape the pool as the river receded around it. The river is slowly dying and the large fish stuck a shrinking pool in the river is dying as a consequence. The man wakes from his dream, goes to the spot in the river the dream depicted, and rescues the fish. The man doesn’t know if the river will return to life or if the drought will continue and cause the river will go completely dry. But he believes his relationship to the river is important and that responding to the dying fish’s needs is necessary.

“There’s power to dying,” writes Lopez, “and it should be done with grace.” After releasing the fish, the remaining larger stream of water in the river, because it was the most beautiful thing he could offer the river, the man does a dance like that of long-legged birds on the river’s shore. “A person cannot be afraid of being foolish. For everything, every gesture is sacred.” Though the dance seems an absurd, irrational act, he does it anyway. Doing something selfless, perhaps even silly so that we remember how to live is important.

Gradually, the river returns to fullness. Reporters talk about the change, offer factual information about the river’s return, and people carry on their former way of living. But the dance the man did by the river sticks in the mind and changes the way we see not only the river but our way of living. When so many things we may have cherished and held dear are dying, Lopez reminds us of the importance of recognizing our relationship to the world around us. “Everyone has to learn how to die, that song, that dance, alone and in time. … To stick your hands in the river is to feel the cords that bind the earth together in one piece,” writes Lopez. Despite our ignoring the natural world’s ongoing generosity, despite differences in culture, values or beliefs we hold, we share this world together.

When we feel we’re going through a severe drought, when everything around us feels as if it is falling apart or appears in decline, it’s important to pay attention to dreams that call us to remember our connection to what brings life and to respond. When we see ourselves in a connected living relationship with the world, we respond to the world differently. The world is no longer an object to be used solely for utilitarian purposes.

Relationships are reciprocal. We take care of what we love and listen to those we love so that we can respond with care. How might I listen to the quality of my relationship with the world? Following Lopez’s narrative as an example, what beautiful thing might I offer the life around me today that will help me recognize my relationship to all that is and my responsibility toward it, even though it might seem silly? Making an offering, to the lives that sustain us might come in the form of a dance, a flower, a letter, a song, art, or a variety of other possibilities. It might feel awkward or silly, but such an offering is a way to remind ourselves that we’re in relationship with a world wider than our human effort, and that the choices we make ripple out to affect everyone, including the more than human world.

John O’Donohue writes in his poem, “Morning Offering,”

May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites me to new frontiers,
To break the dead shell of yesterdays,
To risk being disturbed and changed.

May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.

In the midst of storms where winter feels it will never end, I wish for you to listen to the dreams of your heart, to go out on walks, to sit outside, or somewhere where you can simply stare at the sky, and listen for how you might respond with some gesture toward what is dying that you’ve long loved. Let us have the courage to risk being disturbed and changed, so that in the words of O’Donohue “we waste our hearts on fear no more.”

You can listen to a moving recording of Lopez reading his piece, “Drought” with David Darling playing the cello in the background here.

community, place, trees, Uncategorized

Our Many Homes

August 1, 2024 annacitrino

When researching for my book A Space Between, I learned histories, geographies, and perspectives I was previously unaware of. Though born an American citizen, there are many histories I am unaware of even in my own place of birth. Locations we inhabit today are the crossroads of many histories and people. As Italo Calvino showed in his book, Invisible Cities, the place we live contains many worlds.

Recently, I visited Sturgeon’s Mill in Sonoma County where I observed the mill, in operation a only few days a year, that cut redwoods that provided the lumber for rebuilding houses after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and subsequent great fire where over 3,000 people died and 80% of the city was destroyed. To date, that quake remains the deadliest in US history. According to Redwood Ed: A Guide To The Coast Redwoods For Learners and Teachers, in 1905 85-90% of the redwood forests were not yet logged. (You can view several astonishing historical photos of loggers cutting redwoods on this site when scrolling down.) The mill is steam powered, and still operates four weekends a year run by a group of volunteers.

A visit to Sturgeon’s Mill allows observers a glimpse of how redwood was processed into lumber used for building during the era before and after the 1906 San Francisco quake and fire. Old-growth redwood forests store at least three times more carbon above ground than any other forest on earth,” says Altea George. When traveling through San Francisco’s neighborhoods today, however, the disappearance of much of California’s redwoods in the effort to rebuild the city after the quake isn’t something we often think about.

Though the value of preserving forests is better understood now than it was in the last century, following WW2 between 1945 and 1948, sawmills around the Bay Area more than tripled. A further housing boom in the 1960s added to the demand for redwood and fir lumber. “Today over 95% of the original redwood forest area has been logged at least once.”

Redwood stump at Armstrong Woods State Park, California

Our homes today are the result of ideas and products from many origins we’re often not conscious of. As Kamala Harris has stated, “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” Wherever we go, we carry our histories with us. Our ancestors’ histories and modes of thinking have shaped our lives and way of being in the world. Those living in California’s wider Bay Area still inhabit many houses constructed with redwood taken from forests after the 1906 quake. The quake led to changes in the way commercial buildings are made. Previous to the quake, concrete buildings were thought ugly. Because concrete is an inflexible material, people didn’t want to use it in an earthquake zone. One building that didn’t fall during the quake, the Bekins building , was made of steel reinforced concrete. This observation led to a change in building codes in 1908 influencing the way urban structures are built in cities today.

A California native, I grew up on a hillside strewn with granite boulders and covered with yellow grass. Evenings, I listened to cricket throb and coyotes calling across the valley. Soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause tells us, “Every soundscape that springs from a wild habitat generates its own unique signature, one that contains incredible amounts of information.” Not only does the built environment help us understand where we are, the land itself speaks in a way that helps us recognize where we are, and I’ve loved the way the land I was born on has sung its shape into my heart.

I’ve also stood on a red rock resting outside the small town of Wheatland, Wyoming where my mother was born, the plain stretching far into the distance, and sensed its solid presence rise through my feet. Outside Chugwater, Wyoming where my great grandparents and great aunts and uncles lived and worked, I’ve stood in a field between the thick grassy strands of wheat and felt its welcome, touching vicariously the land of my origin though I’ve never lived there.

Driving down roadways, we move with the traffic’s flow, all those around us carrying their own histories and stories. Whitman wrote, “(I am large, I contain multitudes.)” We don’t have to have lived in a place to sense a connection to it. Many homes coexist in us. There’s the home of our native tongue, the home of our way of seeing and thinking, and the home of particular clothes we wear that allow us to feel relaxed. There’s the home of foods that comfort us such as spaghetti, or tom kha gai soup, the home of routines with morning tea or coffee, for example, and the home of habits we follow such as reading the morning news, sitting for a morning meditation, or taking an evening stroll.

We rely on resources from around the world to create homes we live in. What is the value of knowing the history and origins of our way of life that have come together to create a place we call home? I’ve lived in six different countries outside of the US. Each one has left its imprint and came to feel like a kind of home. We can move across the world, to live in or visit a place that has entirely different protocols for how to eat food or negotiate and still can find connections to those around us, to the city, or the natural world. In Vietnam I’ve stood with hundreds of others in Tien Son Cave who lifted their arms with hands outstretched hoping drops of sacred water. In Saudi I’ve shared iftar after Maghrib prayer, and have stood in an empty lot with students in Kuwait, waiting to be cleared after a bomb threat. I’ve worked with fellow divers and a Cambodian family to build house, celebrated the Mid-Autumn Lantern Festival with friends in Singapore, and endured torrential rains in the forests on Mt. Kinabalu. I’ve attended weddings in New Delhi, and funerals in the US. I’ve ridden calmly to my destination with thousands of strangers on subways in London and St. Petersburg, been swept along by undersea currents near Palau. I’ve walked through Columbia’s Catedral de Sal de Zipaquirá carved by miners beginning in the fifth century BC, and have stood on the African continent’s southernmost edge and thought of the many ships that sailed past its windy coast whose voyages changed the shape of history. Each experience and countless others have helped me understand that though I was born in a particular place, my actions are part of a greater stream of life. All that has come before me as well as the variety of ways people interact with the world shape what I experience at any one point in time. What we call home is a collective making. Each of us are part of a greater whole. As Whitman writes in Leaves of Grass, “Past and present and future are not disjointed but joined.” Each of us is a continuation of the past, an embodiment of the present. We hold the future in the way we pass on our thoughts and carryout our actions and intentions.

William Stafford, in his poem, “Being a Person,” writes,

Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here make its own
call. After that sound goes away, wait.
A slow bubble rises through the earth
and begins to include sky, stars, all space,
even the outracing, expanding thought.
Come back and hear the little sound again.
Suddenly this dream you are having matches
everyone’s dream, and the result is the world.
If a different call came there wouldn’t be any
world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.
How you stand here is important. How you
listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.

Though we are born into a particular place in time and way of thinking, we benefit from expanding our awareness of the worlds and people that create the place we call home. We can renew our lives through choosing to be hospitable to new ideas and ways of being, even seemingly foreign ones. Here’s a few possibilities: Ask relatives about the stories of their lives and the experiences that shaped them. Try taking a new route home or tasting a new food. Listen to a type of music you’re not familiar with. Practice a few phrases in a language you don’t know. Visit an art gallery and read about how that art connects to the thinking of a particular era. Read about the history of your city. Find out the names of plants on your street, which are native to your area and which aren’t. Learn the story of a bridge or building in your area. Have a conversation with someone of a different background, age, or ability level from you. Listen to what they tell you about their lives. Look for new insights and connections. There are many ways to renew and expand our experience of home and to be at home with those around us.

Every day we make use of ideas or rely on inventions passed on to us from elsewhere and previous times. The wheel, the battery, and the telephone–we rely on myriad things that weren’t part of our original human home. Languages borrow words from other languages when there’s no equivalent in one’s own language. For example, the Turkish language has borrowed the word asansör from the French ascenceur (elevator in English) and the Japanese language has borrowed arubaito アルバイトfrom the German word for part-time job arbeit. None of us are the product of a single, unified story. Embracing new words, ideas, and even worlds can enable us to thrive and grow whole.

Lumber mills like Sturgeon’s here in Sonoma County that cut the redwoods that rebuilt San Francisco after the 1906 quake changed California’s environment. Ancient redwood forests once occupied 2 million acres. After visiting redwoods near Eureka, California, John Reid in his opinion article “Thinking Long-Term: Why We Should Bring Back Redwood Forests” published on the Yale School of the Environment‘s website writes, “The beginning of the old growth is like a threshold between beauty and magic. The giants make time visible. Which makes me think a thousand years forward. If an entire landscape of this should exist in the year 3023, students of our culture may be tempted to conclude that, in our time, forests were sacred.” We share the world together with our neighbors as well as those across the world. What are your dreams for the kind of home you want to inhabit? Most of us would like to live in a world that is both beautiful and kind. As Stafford says, “this dream you are having matches/ everyone’s dream, and the result is the world…/ How you stand here is important…How you breathe.”

Beauty, poetry, Uncategorized

In Praise of the Ordinary

March 27, 2024 annacitrino

“Never once in my life did I ask God for success or wisdom or power or fame. I asked for wonder, and he gave it to me.” –Abraham Joshua Heschel

Spring has arrived in the Northern Hemisphere, the calendar says. It’s raining outside today but two days ago the world was full of sun and wildflowers. Walking in a field of wildflowers isn’t like walking in the Queen’s Garden at Regents Park, a world redolent with roses, stuffed with enormous, full blossoms filled with color, rich with light.

Wildflowers, on the other hand, are generally small, their forms simple. One might even call their appearance ordinary. But these ordinary flower folk spread across a hillside delight the heart. People long for their appearance, often travel miles to see them, and walk across hillsides for hours in hopes for a glimpse at their ordinary faces. Milkmaids, Douglas iris, buttercups, sun cups, shooting stars, though their forms are ordinary, come spring we long to greet them.

We long for the newness and color spring brings. We want to breathe it in, surround ourselves with swaths of landscape tinted with blossoms–the pale pink blush cherry trees wear, plum blossom’s gowns of white lace, and azalea’s soft pastels. We want to swim in rivers of bluebells, dance through fields of poppies’ brilliant red skirts swirled around their narrow stems. “Colours are the wounds of light,” said Blake. Indeed, as if smitten with Cupid’s dart, springs’ flowers can make us swoon. Though these spring blossoms are small, they can be myriad, their bodies singing in a great chorus their love of being alive, their wish to give more life. Wildflowers come to us of their own accord, not because of something we do. They are an unspoken embodiment of grace, a reminder of all the earth bestows on us, a love letter soaked through with color, wound with light, written in the language of pollen and petals.

There’s nothing a person can do to impress a wildflower, yet in the wonder of their ordinary forms their beauty repeatedly impresses us. In his poem, “The River of Ordinary Moments,” Max Reif writes,

I am stunned by the beauty of the ordinary,
so that sometimes the ordinary seems mis-named, and yet
it is ordinary because it is quiet with no fanfare
…
No one is famous to the ordinary,
you can’t impress it.

If one stops to think about it, the most ordinary of moments in life are also simultaneously filled with the extraordinary. Wildflowers, for all their appearing simplicity in their forms, nevertheless support entire ecosystems. They don’t need pampering. They just want to grow. As Ire’ne Laura Silva writes in her post “Where Wildflowers Bloom,” on the Texas Highways site, “Wildflowers are not just pretty spots of roadside color or willful weeds; wildflowers are a reminder that where life ends, it will return. That beauty endures. That the stubborn and glorious earth harbors and nourishes and compels life to bloom again and again.” Life is in continuous rebirth. What an extraordinary thing to consider as we think about our own life’s revolutions.

When you look more closely at what wildflowers do, it turns out that wildflowers aren’t exactly ordinary. Flowers have an electrical charge to attract pollinators. Our life sustenance depends on those who depend on the pollinators. One of every three mouthfuls of food depend on pollinators. Insects need flowers, and we need flowers too.

Most of us live what we likely consider ordinary lives. We rise each day and do our work. We make plans with family members or friends, experience loss and pain. We learn what we love and celebrate with neighbors. We grow, we change. Humans share the collective knowledge across millennia. If we consider the trajectory of history and the struggles everyday people have faced over time, human experience isn’t particularly ordinary. Leymah Gbowee, who had a significant part to play in ending Liberia’s ongoing civil war, says: “Everyone has a role to play in changing the tide in our world. It has nothing to do with your academic background or your social status. It has to do with your tenacity, your strength and your willpower to want to make change.” Even our own personal struggles to adjust to ongoing change, adapt to new roles and successes, or to cope with our particular illnesses, ongoing pain, or griefs–all of these things require courage, even bravery in the most ordinary of days.

Our lives are made up mostly of these ordinary days. Each of them are full of wonder. It’s wondrous to have rolled topsy turvy across the grass as a child, to have tasted the spark of snowy cold on my tongue, to have jumped through my own arms, felt ocean waves pull against my calves, smelled the sweat from a horse I rode after racing across a meadow, and to have sung with my mother at the piano. It’s wondrous to sense the warmth of my partner’s hand in mine, and to feel my cat’s calm presence beside me. Wonder abounds.

Emily Dickinson wrote “I am Nobody! Who are you?” It’s perhaps out of fashion to be Nobody. These days voices clamber everywhere to be heard. Everybody seems to want to be Somebody. As does all of nature, wildflowers simply want to just go on being what they are. What they are in all their ordinary wonder is needed. They are part of a greater interbeing. Reif goes on to say in his poem,

I do not want to be
taken from the flow of the ordinary
to any pinnacle or promontory from which
I will only have to climb, or fall, down again,
I do not want to be special in that way,
I want the tick of thoughts in my mind to run out
and the storehouse of thoughts to be emptied
and not replaced by any others,
I want to disappear, disappear
and become that current
that all distinct drops are lost in, and then
the ocean into which all rivers go to die.

Flowers bring us together and share their beauty. They fill us with hope. Whether you are able to see wildflowers in person or view photos of them, or simply stand in an open space remembering them and wishing for their presence, may you sense their lives fill you with joy and carry you into a place of gratitude and wonder, and give praise the ordinary.

I leave you with this short film Gratitude with Louis Schwartzberg’s time-lapse photography and words from Benedictine monk Brother David Steindl-Rast. I’ve watched it many times and the beauty it reveals still fills me with gratitude for the wonder of being alive.