Winter has arrived. The trees in the little park that I visited frequently and enjoyed all summer long stand naked now, their bare arms stretched out as though they are mourning the colourful leaves that left them. These leaves, after their summer lustre and brilliance of fall, now lie as a soggy mass on the…
On more than one occasion I have remarked to my students, “the hardest part about preaching heaven in Vancouver, is that most people think they are already there!” As we move further into a North American culture where fewer people are born nominally Christian, many are finding their expression of transcendence, beauty and longing in…
Author Nancy White Carlstrom drew inspiration for this charming children’s picture book from living in Alaska with her family for 18 years. In an author’s note, White Carlstrom extends an invitation to children: “Open your wise and wonderful eyes to the natural world around you. Look and see the ways of the wild, their paths…
it grows back fully / Six days after the flames / black bears return for berries. / The restoration / of the world leaks /through a broken dam
We inherited pear and apricot trees when we moved to 15 Marlowe Drive. I was five years old when we began making our home there. As the years went on, our basement shelves were increasingly populated by jars of pear sauce and apricot preserves. The other tree in the backyard was a catalpa, a towering,…
Clear skies greeted the Antigua, a sailing vessel carrying artists into the Arctic Circle. “We were in the right spot for all of these belugas that kept coming around the corner of this little coastline,” Phil Irish describes. Two artists hooked up their underwater sound equipment to speakers. “Belugas are like songbirds,” says Irish. “They’re…
It is an exciting time to be a physicist. There are a lot of puzzles that need investigating about the cosmos God has put us in. We don’t know, for example, what dark matter and energy are, yet they make up the most significant portion of our world. Likewise, the two overarching theoretical frameworks in…
Trimming red lantana I have neglected /
reveals leaves long turned to mulch, /
blackening the ground. I saw my father this morning . . .
About a mile from my childhood home flowed the Onion River, the water turgid with clay, cow manure and urine. Occasional sections were wooded but much of the wetland near to the river was used as heifer pasture. Abused would be a better word. Over the years much of the trampled riparian zone had been…
August brings the Perseids: the nights of shooting stars. We lie on our backs and look up, point and count, drinking in the warm summer light to remember later when the skies get colder and the nights are long. Of course, shooting stars aren’t stars at all but meteor showers made of space dust and…
Imagine a tree species whose range covered roughly 300,000 square miles from southern Ontario to Alabama, from Maine to Georgia, from Wisconsin to Arkansas. Now imagine that this tree species produced superb, straight-grained wood that was extremely resistant to decay. This tree was used to build houses, make split-rail fences, furniture, shingles, paper and telephone…
June is a month for poets, a sun-soaked month of roses and easy rhymes. Soon, moon, croon and all that jazz. It is easy to look at the lush growth and beauty all around and turn to nature poems. I read an article recently about the differences between nature poetry and eco poetry. Eco poetry…
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