wildflower photography

Be astonished. Tell about it.

The ability to center ourselves among the beauties of this challenging, whirling world is one of the greatest gifts of Earth. This is not superficial beauty, as pleasant as that is, especially for flowers. This is the beauty lying deep in the heart of creation. Beauty as energy, generativity, as the endless cycle of life, death, rebirth. Beauty as the slow evolutionary dance of function and form. As healing, exaltation, and inspiration.

A wild love for the world

Wild geranium (Geranium erianthum) Wynn Nature Center, Homer, Alaska by Betsey Crawford

In this moment, is it still possible to face the gathering darkness, and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?  ~ Barry Lopez ~ My youngest nephew is standing at the gates of adulthood appalled by …

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Memories

Mount Redoubt from Kenai, Alaska by Betsey Crawford

After reading my last essay, A Year of Love and Death, on the losses of 2020, both personal and worldwide, my brother-in-law sent me a poem by John O’Donohue called For Grief. My partner George’s Irishness was a wild and wonderful force in his life. In the years before his death, he explored Celtic spirituality with …

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Eostre and the Universe Story

Milk maids (Cardamine California) King Mountain Loop, Larkspur, California by Betsey Crawford

Humans are story-making animals. We have a story for everything, and many, many stories for the same things, depending on where and with whom we found ourselves when we arrived in this life. Our tales explain where we came from, how we got here, why we’re here at all, how to behave now that we …

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Songlines 2017: widening circles

California poppy (Eschscholzia californica) El Soprante, California by Betsey Crawford

I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world These words, from Rainer Maria Rilke’s exquisite Book of Hours, are slightly paradoxical because this year we traveled less than any of the other years since we set off on our journey in 2011.  My partner George’s health isn’t up to life …

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