Morel a la Magritte

The French bureaucracy foiled my depature for Paris, but I made the most of the unexpected delay. I took the train to Milwaukee and caught a ride with my commuting friend John Woerthenheimer back toward Minneapolis. We met his partner Jim Buchta at their farm in Wisconsin, and spend two days hunting morels. As symbols of the heart-crushing ephemera of spring, the Japanese have cherry blossoms; Midwesterners have these most succulent mushrooms. We found dozens sprouting through the leaves at the roots of dead elms, and ate them fried in butter and ladled over broasted halibut.

A dog musher with a ministry

During my career as a journalist, I've been lucky enough to meet some of my heroes, and also to write about people who became heroes to me. Arleigh Jorgenson, the subject of this profile in St. Olaf magazine is one of the latter. He has a divinity degree, and was ordained to be a Lutheran pastor, but when the moment came to put on the collar, he realized his true calling was as a dog musher. He has raced dogs in the Northwest Territories of Canada, Montana, and in Minnesota's Beargrease Dog Sled Marathon. While he probably never had the kind of mind that could abide a lot of rigidity and bureaucracy, he has been able to inspire others toward a spiritual path with his love of the wilderness and his dogs. Arleigh lives a modest life in a rustic cabin on 40 acres near the Canadian border. He has little material wealth, but he's lived his beliefs while retaining humility and a beautifully opened mind. After the article was done, he found out he had a cancerous tumor in his colon, and underwent surgery last week to have it removed. The surgery went well and it looks like he's in the clear.

My New Year tree

St. Olaf magazine was looking for a photo that would illustrate the idea of philosophy and nature. Originally I'd hoped to photograph a scene of night stars, with a building of some sort tiny and low on the horizon in the foreground. I wanted to indicate a human presence, small and fragile, under the vastness of the ever-spinning cosmos. Unfortunately, the call for the image came during a long stretch of cloud cover. I went to Wild River State Park on the day of the winter solstice, hoping for some kind of inspiration, and found this lovely burr oak on one of the park's large tallgrass prairie meadows. At dusk, when the light spectrum shifts to blue, I tried a variety of several-minute-long exposures, framing myself in the image as a silhouette, above, and moving through the image with my flashlight, below. I don't know yet if either made the cut, but I loved the experiment.

Climate change vs. the rhythm of change

A couple of weeks ago I received an e-mail from Dawn Adrian, a senior scientist with the non-profit Tapestry Institute and a member of the Choctaw Nation. She provided a link to her essay on the nature of the debate on climate change. She points out that the two factions arguing the loudest are both laboring under an assumption that is fallacious.

"Their arguments are based on an unspoken but crucial assumption that isn’t about present or past climate either one. It’s about future climate instead — that it should normally be expected to stay roughly the same as it is now."

Adrian goes on to show that a constant rhythm of fluctuation is the normal state of the Earth's atmosphere. Extended droughts, extended monsoons, ice-ages and hot spells come and go, retreating and advancing, one always balanced by another — eventually.

Adrian isn't arguing that we should ignore human-made climate change or that we shouldn't act to minimize the damage, but that we need to consider our place within this ebb and flow. To my mind, her essay calls on us to live with smaller footprints, less consumption and a more humble attitude toward our home.