A few days ago, while visiting family, I was lucky enough to take a walk through snowy woods and along ice-rimmed streams, enjoying the pristine beauty of the winter landscape. It made me think of Heather Swan’s essay “Keening for the Cailleach,” a meditation about the “miracle” of skating on frozen lakes in the Midwest. The impulse to immerse ourselves in natural spaces is strong (even when it’s freezing out!), and you’ll find it in other pieces in our February issue as well. In “Taking Shelter,” while fishing at a stream with his son, Todd Davis recalls a lifetime of hiking trips with friends and his father. The Readers Write section on “Tents” includes stories about readers connecting to the outdoors, loved ones, and themselves while camping.
In The Sun’s archives there are dozens of selections about the ways people find meaning in nature. We’ve gathered a few favorites below that we hope you’ll enjoy.
Take care and read well,
Nancy Holochwost, Associate Editor
As a child the author went on yearly huckleberry-picking trips with his family, a tradition he’s carried on with his own kids. He writes about how these forays into the woods have led to finding more—“not the berries, exactly, but something that without the berries [we] might never have known was there.”
The most exciting field trip I can remember was a middle-school sleepover at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Kathleen Dean Moore does one better: she takes her college philosophy class camping in the mountains for a week. Her luminous essay—a kind of mini philosophy class itself—asks how we can “bring the values of wild places” with us wherever we go.
Marine biologist, essayist, and poet Eva Saulitis spent twenty-eight years studying orcas in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. In this far-ranging interview about her life’s work, she talks about her deeply personal connection to the whales and the rugged area where they live.
Leath Tonino has contributed numerous prose pieces, poems, and interviews about the natural world to The Sun, all written with characteristic wonder and humor. This essay is a recollection of a month spent alone in an isolated cabin in Montana, complete with field notes, a beer inventory, and the occasional haiku.
In this radiant poem, the author reminds us of how easily we engaged with nature as kids, an age when insects weren’t nuisances or creepy-crawlies but objects of delight and fascination.
Many of us dream of moving to remote, unspoiled places, imagining we’d lead more beautiful and inspired lives. After years of such fantasies, Rob Keast decides to start appreciating the beauty in his own backyard. As he says in his beguiling, self-deprecating essay, “Some people live near national parks or the ocean, or near canyons or in valleys, or on the sides of mountains, and some live south of Detroit.”
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