Category: Place
Good Work
We hunted for steel along flat-bottom train rails—glass blanketing the gravel track bed like chicken feed, jimson weed between creosote-steeped timbers— picked over buckled trailers and garbage stacks: cracked pump heads, mower blades, band saws rusted mid-cut. The clang of...
The Discipleship of Work
When we moved to our farm several years ago with a toddler and newborn in tow, we mainly had it in mind to experience a bit of the country life: to plant a large garden and perhaps raise a few...
Threnody for a Good Man
Mat Feltner died at a hospital in Lincoln this week. Obviously it wasn’t Feltner himself — he lives nowhere outside of the mind of Wendell Berry, the pages of his novels, and the imaginations of the many thousands of us...
Saturday Night Lights
This piece was originally published in 2015 with Fare Forward. I’m republishing it here ahead of Saturday’s kick off and because it is no longer online elsewhere. Any Nebraskan can describe the scene to you: It’s a fall Saturday in Lincoln,...
Learning to See with Norman Wirzba
Soon after we moved to Australia, my family hiked in a temperate rainforest in the Yarra Ranges, an hour-and-a-half from our house. Southern Victoria is home to several of these rainforests. They challenge my prior knowledge of rainforests as places...
Imperial Migrations
The question I dislike the most is, “Where are you from?” My Eastern-European accent usually gives away the fact that I am not, should I say, local. Now that I live on the East Coast, I am often tempted to...
Concentric Roots
In the twenty-sixth canto of Dante’s Inferno, the pilgrim and his guide come across two figures encased in flame. Virgil reveals to Dante that within this single fire dwells Diomedes and Ulysses, grieving over the horse that penetrated Troy. They...
Our Fugitive Senses and Sensibilities
Throughout the archaeological, biological, and literary records of homo sapiens emerges a common trait: the species best capable of lifting eyes and mind heavenward has not found this earth to be enough. However murkily understood, the great mounds of earth...
Forget “Enchantment”: In Praise of the Spooky
Thomas Merton concretized a sentiment many of us share and have found ourselves unable to articulate: “October is a fine and dangerous season in America. It is dry and cool and the land is wild with red and gold and...
Becoming a Perennial: A Conversation with Grace Olmstead
In Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind (March 2021) Grace tells the story of her hometown of Emmett, Idaho, where her great-grandfather and great-grandmother lived and farmed, and where her grandparents and parents still live. Through...