My calendar for the next two weeks has written all across it in big block letters, “KEEP FREE FOR OUTSIDE.” I was expecting peak color this week, but the trees are stubbornly clinging to green. I think I might have to add a week to my blocked-off schedule. Hike, bike, kayak: this is a priority…
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Bigger Than Me
Sometimes, I just need to get away. No matter how much work is hanging over my head, I know I need to make the time to hike, or bike, or kayak—and always, to find a quiet, beautiful spot to sit and be still. It’s necessary for my mental health. Sometimes I get a twinge of…
Read MoreAnxiety 2.0
Years ago, when I was in my first bout of full-blown anxiety, Christian passed on to me a book he’d been given called Telling Yourself the Truth. The point of it was that the words we use in describing to ourselves our reality have the power to shape our emotional state for good for for…
Read MoreButting Heads With Siri
Siri stopped talking to us when we crossed the Michigan border. Christian had been worried the entire day about running out of battery, because he’d forgotten his car charger. Now he was even more uptight. Perhaps it will not come as a surprise to most of you to hear that I was not particularly sympathetic…
Read MoreThings I’m Loving Right Now
Books: A Marginal Jew. This is a series of four books, actually, and I’m on the second. They are dense reading, with the end notes to each chapter taking more space than the text, and it is ponderous and takes real mental effort to get through. Yet the level of detail in Meier’s analysis brings…
Read MoreEarly Spring in the Woods
I could swear I can hear the earth breathing in and out around me. The tiny sounds that I would attribute to rustling leaves, except there aren’t any leaves in the trees. Or to the drip of water from rock to rock, except it isn’t water dripping. It’s as if the thick carpet of dry…
Read MoreFavorite Places: The Pinnacles
All of a sudden, it decided to be spring. And on day one, I went out to commune with God in nature in one of my favorite places in the whole world. I came here as a teenager with a youth group. I came here with my husband when we were first dating, and I…
Read MoreI Got Nothin’
I had two ideas for blog posts to enlighten and enrich your Monday morning, but one of them fell apart as I tried to pull the ideas together, and the other turned out to be so banal I recognized it even before I started writing. So I thought I’d skim through the most recent batch…
Read MoreMoon-set
In the quiet of early morning, I bundled up against the newly-arrived winter temperatures and slipped out the front door for a 5:30 a.m. walk. Above, the stars gleamed as they only can when the humidity and temperature drop, and as I stepped off the porch my breath caught to see Venus, radiant and huge,…
Read MoreA Farm Story
Growing up on the farm is on a short list of things that define who I am. My memories are filled with gigantic, buttery harvest moons rising through the jagged tips of cornstalks, of leaf piles reduced to pulsing embers that mirrored the night sky, of glittering frosty dawns and mist hanging over the woods,…
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Kathleen M. Basi 