

1800 Miles of Meditations
In March, I turn 60 years—and this is the 60th blog posting on my website. So, I’m going to take a break from this writing project, at...


Pilgrimage
During my artist’s residency at Guadalupe Mountains National Park in the Chihuahua Desert, I crafted set of daily meditations. These are...


The Locusts Are Coming!
The locusts are coming!!! Well, at least Locust: The Opera (an environmental murder mystery with music by Anne Guzzo, libretto by Jeff...


To Truly See... Look Away
I recently spent two weeks in Grand Teton National Park on a writing retreat. I’d been there before, but this time I adopted a...


Homemaking
Last month, I served as the artist-in-residence at Homestead National Monument outside of Beatrice, Nebraska. Having come to believe...


The Two BLMs: What a Government Agency and Political Movement Have in Common
The following essay was written for my nature/environment column on the Unitarian Universalist World website (https://www.uuworld.org/aut...


Science, Art and Human Universals
We (eight Americans and seven Moroccans, along with a French documentarian and a Japanese funder) pulled off a performance of Locust: The...


When Little Gnomes Have Big Ideas
I like gnomes. The legendary, subterranean dwarfs are fine, but I mean the other sense of “gnome”—a pithy statement of general truth...


How to Write an Opera (Hint: Math Helps!)
The challenge of scientific literacy is communicating knowledge in forms that are evocative, memorable and intelligent. Stories engage...


The Locusts are Coming (Operatically)!
I previously wrote about a collaborative project with Dr. Anne Guzzo—an acclaimed composer in the Department of Music—to produce a...