JEFFREY A. LOCKWOOD

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 least for a while. Until I return, I’d like to leave you with some thoughts from my artist-in-residence ventures in 2019 at Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Homestead National Monument, and Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. At each location, I wrote daily meditations using some creative constraints. I won’t bother you with my “rules” (

During my artist’s residency at Guadalupe Mountains National Park in the Chihuahua Desert, I crafted set of daily meditations. These are catalyzed by the sources of religious inspiration adopted by Unitarian Universalism: Spiritual teachings of Earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature. Savoring Guadalupe Mountains National Park means harmonizing with daily and seasonal patterns: the cool

The locusts are coming!!! Well, at least Locust: The Opera (an environmental murder mystery with music by Anne Guzzo, libretto by Jeff Lockwood, and set/costumes by Ashley Carlisle) is coming to Laramie. And bringing an opera to the high plains of Wyoming raises some eyebrows and questions. Laramie—really? Well, yes. For centuries opera was the performance art of the people, rather than the wealthy elites. The nobility was often satirized, resulting in some wonderfully u

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 contrarian perspective. My project became finding the most iconic views—and then looking away to truly see this marvelous place. Then, the question became one of writing constraints. Sticking with the iconoclastic tactic of focusing on what one is not supposed to be observing, I chose death. To described the anti-sights, I decided to use exactly

Last month, I served as the artist-in-residence at Homestead National Monument outside of Beatrice, Nebraska. Having come to believe that constraints catalyze creativity, I chose the number 160 to shape my writing—the number of acres that a pioneer could claim under the Homestead Act of 1862. Some days I worked with schoolchildren and every day I took a walk equivalent to circumambulating the border of a homestead through the restored tall-grass prairie while contemplating

The following essay was written for my nature/environment column on the Unitarian Universalist World website (https://www.uuworld.org/authors/jeffreylockwood). However, the editors decided that the content was too politically sensitive, that even the most liberal of religions was too politically polarized, and that too many readers would engage the work uncharitably and be offended. Censorship? Not really (I respect the editors’ judgment). But a heartbreaking state of aff

We (eight Americans and seven Moroccans, along with a French documentarian and a Japanese funder) pulled off a performance of Locust: The Opera in Agadir, Morocco, at the 13th International Congress of Orthopterology (the scientists who study crickets, katydids, grasshoppers and, of course, locusts). Everything went just as expected, meaning that almost nothing went as planned. My years of international ecological research paid off in terms of anticipating surprises and emb

I like gnomes. The legendary, subterranean dwarfs are fine, but I mean the other sense of “gnome”—a pithy statement of general truth (gnō-, being the root of knowledge). The more common terms include aphorisms, maxims and apothegms, with all of their subtle and imprecise distinctions. Sages have long distilled essential teachings into proverbial expressions. Jesus admonished: “Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the swor

The challenge of scientific literacy is communicating knowledge in forms that are evocative, memorable and intelligent. Stories engage people—and this approach drove a collaborative venture to convey an ecological epic. Locust: The Opera is an environmental murder mystery in which solving the century-old extinction of an iconic species provides lessons for the modern world. The ghost of the locust haunts a scientist until he can figure out how a creature that once blackene

I previously wrote about a collaborative project with Dr. Anne Guzzo—an acclaimed composer in the Department of Music—to produce a chamber opera (How Science OPERAtes). We are excited to announce that LOCUST: THE OPERA will premiere at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, Wyoming, on September 28th at 7:00 pm, with a matinee performance the next day at 1:00 pm. This is the story of the Rocky Mountain locust, whose swarms blackened the skies of North America until