Take time to see dandelions at sunset -- feel nature

Feel Nature: Get Outside Often

We need to get outside, to breathe fresh air, to see the sun, to feel nature. There was a time, when I worked at Microsoft near Seattle, where I never saw the sun. Even now, memories of sitting in a closet-like room with no windows, where I had to walk out a door and look […]

Scents The Fog Reveals – Free Verse

As the sun sets through oak and hickory trees, the cold fog brings a new set of smells, rich and deep, as though you could stick out a butter knife and cut a little square of the air and pop it into your mouth and let it dissolve into rich, earthy flavors: Fresh mown hay, […]

Finding Wonderful Hidden Wildflowers: Haiku

It is often so/ that when we clear dross and junk,/ we find wonderful. Using a loping shears to clear underbrush and non-native privet from around the hardwood trees in my back yard reveals an undergrowth of black-eyed susans and other hidden wildflowers. Sometimes you have to burn the grasses and weeds from large fields, […]

Coon Hunt On The Chickamauga – Haibun

The old coon hunter drove his pickup truck out to my place. Ever since I’d told him that Farmer Sims planted field corn in our meadow, he’d been excited about the possibilities of a coon hunt in my corn field. I’d picked up the phone earlier in the evening: “HELLO, BROTHER!” He practically yelled. “Do […]

My Thoreau-ly Walden-esque Experiment: Is This Lifestyle Sustainable?

Is Nature’s Guys nature-focused lifestyle sustainable? It is a question I’ve asked myself a lot, perhaps no more than yesterday when, with an allergy-induced fever, I worked myself into a sweat clearing away privet bushes, planting an elderberry plant and a yellow squash by the creek, cleaned out the ditch of old, disgarded tires; and […]