Wyoming – Anna Citrino—Poetry, Place, Pilgrimage

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.“

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The Extraordinary Lives of Ordinary People

August 11, 2025August 11, 2025 annacitrino

Stories shape our lives, yet sometimes people hold their stories inside and never tell them, perhaps because they are too painful, they fear might bring shame, or words simply can’t be found to tell them. Sometimes the dominant culture we live in doesn’t allow certain stories to be told or heard. When we hear them at last, those stories can be transformative.

Born in California, I had little contact with relatives living where my parents were born and raised on the Great Plains and in South Dakota. Curious about my origins, I wrote to relatives and traveled to interview them. Those interviews, together with further research of US history deepened my understanding of what it means to be a descendant of settlers, as well as the difficult social expectations and restrictions women of my ancestor’s era confronted as they worked to create lives they wanted to live. My new book, Stories We Didn’t Tell, released in September is the result of this research. Told in the voices of a family living on the Great Plains, Stories We Didn’t Tell begins when the US wars with Wyoming and Nebraska’s Native people have ended and concludes in the mid 1980s.

Spanning an era of extraordinary change, people on the Great Plains played a significant role in creating the America we live in today. Told in interconnected narrative poems, Stories We Didn’t Tell explores stories that reside inside and beneath the surface of our country’s history. The book opens during a time when women were expected to be wives and mothers and where the working world held few options for women. Farm women were to be mothers and housewives, President Theodore Roosevelt told the public in 1907, “whose prime function it is to bear and rear a sufficient number of healthy children.” While not suffragettes or feminists, the book’s female characters are perseverant and resilient as they seek to create the lives they want within the constraints of the time they live in.

“A masterful book with sweeping scope and depth, Stories expresses the courage, daring and despair of Americans settling the west. The themes in this book are as relevant today as ever. I can’t imagine a more wide-ranging history of western expansion with its undercurrents and repercussions… Stories is an important and powerful book that offers hope to the human spirit.” —Susan G. Wooldridge, author of poemcrazy: freeing your life with words.

Join me to celebrate the publication of my new book, Stories We Didn’t Tell, Saturday 27 September, at 1000 Gravenstein Hwy N, Sebastopol, CA 95472 Fellowship Hall 3:30 to 5:30 for readings from the book, music, food, and book signing.

Living on what was previously called the Great American Desert, Adah’s family of homesteaders and ranchers seek to eke out a life on the Great Plains amidst the effects droughts, economic depression, two World Wars the mechanization of farming, and the forging of modern America. Confronting the many challenges, Adah, seeks to define a life for herself larger than the confining one she was born into.

Books will be available beginning September 2 on the Shanti Arts website as well as other common locations for finding books.

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Contributing Our Gifts

June 12, 2025June 30, 2025 annacitrino

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

–Rilke, from “Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower”

While Nebraska and Wyoming are often areas people in the US dismiss as boring, I think my new book coming out later this year, Stories We Didn’t Tell (to be published by Shanti Arts) will change your mind about that. A tale with prairie landscape, blue skies, tremendous storms, and endless wind tides, there’s more to Nebraska and Wyoming than first meets the eye. The horizontal lines of the grasslands landscape are but the surface. Stories We Didn’t Tell will take you into the depths of life’s hardships yet instill you with heart and spirit that offers a vision for ways to live inside the challenges of our own era. As my 10^th grade world history teacher Mr. Pegas, quoting Voltaire used to say, “Common sense isn’t so common.” Neither are the lives of ordinary people.

The book’s main character, Adah, a feisty female, is born into a family of homesteaders in Nebraska during a century of immense change. As in our own times, the characters in Stories We Didn’t Tell inhabit an era of environmental and social uncertainty. Adah and her family live through repeated droughts, economic depression, a pandemic, two World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam war, the development of mechanized farming and agribusiness, the rise of mega churches, and the arrival of birth control and arguments over women’s rights–concerns that continue to resonate today.

Currently in the US, government officials have approved the sale of thousands of acres of public land to private entities that “could destroy some of America’s most treasured places and imperiled wildlife habitat,” says Randi Spivak, public lands policy director at the Center for Biodiversity. US federal agents are pulling citizens off the streets without being told the charges against them. The US government has laid off hundreds of staff members at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, including employees of the National Weather Service, responsible for weather forecasts and alerts across the country. Donald Trump signed an executive order to abolish the US Department of Education, meaning “less resources for our most vulnerable students, larger class sizes, fewer special education services for students with disabilities, and less civil rights protections,” says National Education Association President Becky Pringle. Each of these things affects future lives in dramatic and disturbing ways.

Things we thought were solid are falling apart.

It’s true that everything changes and we’re meant to change too. The question is what do we want to change into and who do we want to become? Our lives are interconnected with each other. All beings want to be treated with care and kindness, including animals and the whole of the natural world. The thoughts we nurture and choices we make create effects that ripple through our lives, our communities, and across the world.

It takes time to learn how to leave behind the world we came from, and to create the world we want to live in, as this short piece shows from Stories We Didn’t Tell where early on in her marriage Adah describes the world she wants to live inside.

Speaking of Desire
Adah, 1911
Des Moines, Iowa

We’ve moved to Des Moines.
Gerard is learning carpentry and making cabinets.
His father wanted his help at his shop.

Like my father, Gerard’s father is a religious
man with demanding expectations.
Unlike my father, he is kind.

As before marriage when living at Lenore
and Jed’s house, I wash clothes, cook,
keep house. There’s a lot I don’t
understand about relationships and living
with a man, but I do know I want to be more
than simply useful to Gerard, more than
a helpful assistant, chosen because I happen
to be there, the way a paintbrush
might be selected for a needed task.

I want to be valuable.
Not for what I can do,
or who I remind him of:
his sister who shares my same name,
his first wife who died in childbirth,
a woman he joins in bed,
or some role I fill,
but for myself.

Gerard works at the shop all day.
Evenings he labors at the desk
over the business’s books he keeps
for his father. We both work long hours.

Setting work aside to wander down a road
hoping to discover something unexpected—
that is what I long for. A spring afternoon
beside the river, our voices mingled with
water and a cedar waxwing’s whistle,
or us walking under a cottonwood’s flame
that burns into a cloudless sky—these
are what I wish for—life full with possibility,
open like the plains.

I want Gerard to reach for my hand,
gather me to him in a smile that says
I matter more than the role
given me, more than all the rules
about clean houses in paradise,
ledgers between us balanced.

(Originally published on Beate Sigriddaughter’s site, Writing a Woman’s Voice)

How we speak about and treat others is vitally important in creating the world we will end up living in. As Charles Eisenstein writes in The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible, “We are all here to contribute our gifts toward something greater than ourselves, and will never be content unless we are.” Let our words and actions be gifts of life.

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Histories of Home

October 28, 2023October 29, 2023 annacitrino

“Our work is to call each other home, to call to one another’s spirits and say, “This is for you. This is what it means to be human, to love and be loved. Let’s learn from one another as we go.”
Kaitlin B. Curtice, Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day

Recently, I travelled to Cheyenne, Wyoming via Fort Collins, Colorado. Though I never lived in Wyoming, I have ancestors who once did, and I wanted to experience what it felt like standing on that earth and to absorb some of the history of this part of the US through being there. Traveling across the landscape to get to Cheyenne, I felt the wide embrace of the grassy plain, and a calm, deep presence of the earth’s steadfastness. The sky holds you inside its rich, blue center and presents you with its expansive heart. There’s a sense of oneness between earth and sky, as when looking out over the ocean where the sea meets the sky.

In Cheyenne, I could sense a part of American history still alive there that one is less aware of when living far from that part of the US. Wyoming’s history plays an important part in the creation of present day US. After the US Civil War, the US government wanted people to move into Wyoming and Nebraska and settle there. The Homestead Act gave people 160 acres of land for a small fee if the independent farmer would live on the land and cultivate it for five years. Building the railroads was fundamental to that effort. Homesteaders needed supplies, and the railroads brought supplies to them. The US government gave extensive grants of land to the railroads in order to encourage settlement, 175,000,000 acres, an area greater than one tenth of the whole of the US. Building the railroads decimated the bison that roamed the plains. Buffalo Bill was hired by the Kansas Pacific Railroad Company, and is reported to have killed more than 4,000 buffalo. Former trappers, turned to hunting the buffalo as well. 200,000 buffalo were killed annually, nearly annihilating the population. Native tribes depended on the buffalo for sustenance. As Gilbert King’s Smithsonian article “Where the Buffalo No Longer Roamed,” states, “By the end of the 19th century, only 300 buffalo were left in the wild.” The decimation of the buffalo in turn decimated the way of life for the plains Indians.

Driving in the final stake of transcontinental railroad drove a stake into the heart of Native Americans’ ability to sustain their way of life. As King’s article states, “Sheridan acknowledged the role of the railroad in changing the face of the American West, and in his Annual Report of the General of the U.S. Army in 1878, he acknowledged that the Native Americans were scuttled to reservations with no compensation beyond the promise of religious instruction and basic supplies of food and clothing—promises, he wrote, which were never fulfilled.” Native people were stripped of their culture, forced to assimilate for survival, in turn this resulted in the US winning its war against Native Americans and their possession of the land.

Cheyenne is known as one of America’s windiest cities. It’s perhaps less well known that in 1882 Cheyenne was the wealthiest city per capita in the world. Wyoming was a lucrative location in those early days, where cattle barons sunk millions of dollars into their deep pockets with the extensive herds they owned. Electric lights brightened streets, and the city had an opera house and a men’s club serving fine food, liquor, and fancy cigars. In 1886 and 1887, however, subzero temperatures and blizzards killed thousands of cattle at one stroke, an event referred to as the Great-Die Up, bringing an end to cattle drives across free range.

What we become isn’t usually the result of a single story. We live in an interconnected world. We inherit layered histories and stories as well as layered silences. Our understanding of who we are and how we connect with the world around us is lifelong work. While bison and Native American populations were being exterminated and crushed the women’s suffrage movement was also occurring. In 1869 women in Wyoming were the first in the US to receive the right to vote.

As Potawatomi American writer Kaitlin B. Curtice points out, in Simian Jeet Singh’s interview with her on “Anti-Racism as a Spiritual Practice,” America is “a settler colonial state and it’s difficult to reckon with.” Coming to terms with our past is and what it suggests is challenging. Nevertheless, in recognition of the difficult and problematic history regarding how America came into being, I want to better understand and respond to the place I inhabit in American culture and what that means for how I should live.

Coming home to ourselves means in part to understand what our home is and the forces and people that came together to create it. As May Sarton writes in her poem, “Now I Become Myself,” it takes “Time, years, and many places;” perhaps one will be “dissolved and shaken,” as she describes as well. History is complex, our own, and that of a nation or a culture. We are many worlds in one body. Louise Dunlop, in her book, Inherited Silence, writing about how the difficult and uncomfortable history of how America came into being writes, “Settler people experienced a different wounding in this terrible history. We, too, need healing practices to transform the shame and trauma we carry and continue to pass on. That shame is the root of our silence. We need songs poems, inspiration, spiritual practices, and affirmation that make it positive to acknowledge our history.”

Our very existence depends on the support the natural world offers us, as well as the support of people all around us and what we’ve inherited from those who came before us though we may not even know their names or be aware of their actions. I come from a line of settlers, though much of their personal stories I don’t know and have only learned from reading about the history of the time period, the area, people’s histories, and oral stories. Because I know little of my ancestors’ stories, and because they didn’t tell their stories, as a way to try and understand their lives and their challenges, I’m imagining what those stories might be and am writing them. I’m calling to the spirits of my ancestors, so to speak, saying, “This is for you. I’m reaching to understand more of what it means to be human. I want to learn from you.” Recently published in Waterwheel Review, “Remembering Adella,” is written in the voice of a great aunt imagining the voice of her mother, a woman of the grasslands.

Your story may not connect to a grassy plain or rich blue sky. Your story might be rooted in the tropics, a cityscape, snowy mountain or desert, but all stories touch each other on our great web of interbeing of life on this planet. Whatever your story, I wish for you to find a way to be at home, that all wounding from your past be healed, that you find peace with yourself and with those around you. I leave you with this 1888 Antonio de Torres guitar piece, “Home,” played by Andrew York, and a photo from my home in California.