December 31st. The world agrees this is an ending, though if we paid attention to what the land knows, we’d mark our year’s turning at the winter solstice, or better still, at the spring equinox when life actually returns. This arbitrary midnight is a human fiction. The earth keeps its own calendar.

But for me, today truly is an ending. Fifty-two weeks ago, I made myself a promise. I would write every week for a year. I would step into the landscape surrounding my Colorado home and let it teach me what it knew. I would show up, no matter the weather, no matter my mood, no matter how broken I felt. And today, with these words, I complete that promise. This is my ending.

Someone once told me that you don’t actually lose yourself when life breaks you. You just bury the parts of you that couldn’t be safe in the moment. I’ve carried that truth with me through this entire year of writing. Three years ago, the accident shattered more than my bones. It buried parts of me so deep I thought they were gone forever. The part that trusted my body. The part that felt at home in the world. The part that could sit still without the screaming need to prove I was okay, I was fine, I was handling it.

Healing, I’ve learned, is about uncovering what was buried, even when it still feels unsafe. It’s about creating the conditions where those hidden parts can finally breathe again. The land became that place for me. The wind and open sky and changing seasons slowly coaxing those hidden parts back into the light.

Something in me remembered out there, and stirred my soul. Every week this year, I felt that awakening. My whole being recalibrating. The fractured pieces finding their way back together, not because I was working at it, but because I was finally standing in the place I was designed to be.

I didn’t know this would happen when I started. I thought I was just writing about birds and weather, documenting what I noticed each week in a landscape still new to me. But the land showed herself, and kept teaching. Cold winds that made my cheeks pink taught me I could still feel. Squirrels foraging frantically before the first snow reminded me that survival is active, intentional, beautiful. The bees, tucked deep into their winter cluster, showed me that sometimes the work is to go dormant, to trust the dark months, to know that spring will come even when you cannot imagine it. The land gave me back to myself, week by week, word by word.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped being an observer and became a participant. I realized I wasn’t just watching the deer move through the twilight or the coyote slipping through the grasses at dawn, I was part of the same story they were. Another creature finding her way back home.

When darkness descends and the end stands uncertain, I have learned this year to return to the beginning. To become vast and wild. To become one with the rivers and trees. To remember that I am not separate from the hawks circling above or the rabbits darting below. We are all just living, all just trying to make it through our own winter into spring.

So many people find no cause for wonder. They sit idly instead of going to see what is on view in the great theatre of the world. I have always noticed the world around me. But I’d never committed to this kind of sustained attention and reflection. Never stayed with the land long enough to let it change me. I didn’t know that healing could happen in the witnessing of a single yellow aspen leaf falling. In the way early morning light hits frost. In the sound of wind moving through dry winter grass.

I think more about weathering these days now. How everything in nature is slowly being worn back to the earth. Even the mountains, grain by grain, returning to dust over millennia. The river rocks in the creek below the barn, once jagged and sharp, now smooth as glass from centuries of water. I am being weathered too. My edges softening, my sharpness worn away by time and wind and years of simply being here. I am closer now to the land’s embrace than to my beginning, and there is something honest in that. The land doesn’t fight its weathering, it accepts the slow polishing, the gradual return. I am learning to do the same.

The horses stand in their winter coats, patient with the cold. The geese still gather overhead in great numbers, darkening the skies, not yet ready to leave. Everything in nature knows when to rest, when to wait, when to trust the dark season.

Standing now at this ending I’ve chosen for myself, I feel the weight of what I’ve accomplished and the bittersweetness of what I’m leaving behind. A year of essays. A year of showing up for myself and for this land and for those who have walked alongside me through these words, who might recognize themselves in the breaking and the mending. I am proud of this, and also a little sad it’s over.

But here’s what I’ve learned about endings: they’re not always given to us by circumstance. Sometimes we have to choose them. Sometimes we have to say, “Here. This is where this chapter closes. Not because it has to, but because I’m ready for what comes next.” Because not everything has an ending. Sometimes the only ending is the one we give it.

This year changed me, week by week. With each bird song. Each cherry blossom. Each warm August night. The parts of me I buried, the ones I thought were gone forever, they came back. Not perfectly, not completely, but breathing. Enough to feel whole again. Enough to remember what it means to be wild, to be fully alive in this strange and beautiful world.

I don’t know yet what this new year will bring. But I know I’ll meet it with wind-tangled hair and dirt under my fingernails and the kind of wonder that comes from paying attention. From showing up and knowing that the great theatre of the world is always performing, and all I have to do is step outside and watch.

The year is complete. The circle closed.

Thank you, broken heart that taught me how to mend. The woman who closes this page is not the one who opened it. I am freer, more whole, more myself. The land kept its promise. And so did I.

—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.

Leave a comment

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane

Christmas morning arrives in darkness here, the way it always has. This year the coyotes heralded it, singing their way through the neighborhood in the hours before dawn. Not the scattered calls we usually hear from the ridgelines, but something fuller, more deliberate. A chorus moving through the streets, announcing themselves to the winter dark. Earlier this week, my neighbor called it caroling, and she wasn’t wrong. They were conducting their own ceremony out there, claiming this particular stretch of night as their own.

I wonder what my father heard on his walk home fifty-one years ago this early morning. Not coyotes, the wrong continent, the wrong landscape entirely. But he would have heard something in that frozen British countryside as he made his way back from the hospital. Five miles through empty streets and village lanes because we didn’t have a car and there were no buses running, no taxis to be found. Just him and the Christmas star, the actual planet Venus, bright and unwavering, lighting his way home while his daughter had just been born, and his world rearranged itself with every step.

What must that have been like, letting it all settle into his bones? The joy and the terror and the absolute irrevocability of it. A single night becoming a threshold he’d cross over and over for the rest of his life. Every Christmas morning carrying that same walk home, that same moment when everything changed.

The new moon has been hanging in the evening sky these last nights, a perfect crescent glowing orange against the winter dark. It’s just beginning its journey toward fullness, this thin edge of light that will swell and round and then diminish again, cycling through its ancient rhythm. There’s something about watching that crescent wax toward fullness while I stand at the edge of fifty-one, my year of fifty complete. Mountains climbed both literal and metaphorical, continents crossed, quietness found in unexpected places. The moon beginning its cycle as I begin another. Not an ending, but a marker. A pause to acknowledge the distance traveled before continuing on.

The world around me has been busy with its own preparations. A few days ago I came home to find a Swainson’s hawk mantled over a rabbit on my neighbor’s lawn. The hawk was methodical, purposeful, pulling away tufts of white fur with the precision of someone unwrapping a long-anticipated gift. Fluff drifted across the yellow grass while the neighborhood went about its ordinary business. A Christmas feast for a king, spread out in broad daylight. The hawk paid no attention to the passing cars, to me standing there watching. It had caught what it needed, and it was going to take its time.

This is the calendar the wild world keeps, untroubled by what the date means, attending only to hunger and safety and the night sky’s familiar arc. While we wrestle with what Christmas should feel like, what this threshold asks of us, the natural world simply continues. And here we are, in this complicated season that insists on joy while so many of us are holding weight in our hands, trying to figure out where to put it.

My Mum is across an ocean right now. Friends I love are scattered across continents. There are people who should be at the table who won’t ever be again. Christmas keeps changing its shape, it has been changing for years. And I find myself grieving the versions we’ve left behind while simultaneously grateful for the versions we’re creating. Somewhere along the way I learned that when grief won’t leave, you gather it up and take it with you. You set an extra place for it at the table. You let it follow you like a shadow on your walk. The key isn’t to feel good all the time, it’s to go on living alongside whatever you feel.

And you’re allowed to feel this, all of it. You’re allowed to celebrate quietly, imperfectly, or not at all. You’re allowed to miss people and survive it. You’re allowed to be here, wherever here is, however it looks. Even if this year looks different. Even if life has changed in ways you didn’t expect. Even if Christmas morning finds you somewhere you never imagined you’d be.

My Dad must have understood something about carrying complexity on that long walk home. That everything had changed, that nothing would ever be simple again, and that somehow this was both devastating and miraculous.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to be born on this day. To have your arrival always entangled with celebration and obligation, with other people’s expectations of joy. To carry your birthday inside a holiday, inseparable from it. Fifty-one years of this now, and I still haven’t entirely sorted out what belongs to me and what belongs to the season. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe being born on a day like this means learning to hold multiple things at once: the personal and the collective, the quiet and the cacophonous, the grief and the gratitude. Maybe it’s practice for what we all have to do anyway: show up to our own lives even when the world is busy with something else entirely.

And here it is: Christmas morning, my morning. The sun rising on a world still turning, still singing its ancient songs. The crescent moon will return tonight, a little fuller than before. The wilds will continue their ceremonies, hunting and singing and following the rhythms it has always followed. And I will step into my new year the way that moon moves through its phases: letting it settle into my being, walking through whatever landscape stretches ahead.

So, at this edge we all share, wherever you are, however you’re holding this day:

May you find space for all of it: the celebration and the longing, the people who are here and the ones who aren’t. May you sing in the darkness when you need to, and know when to be quiet. May you take your time with whatever feast is in front of you. May you walk through the frozen streets of your own life with your head up, letting the stars – borrowed, burning, impossibly distant, light your way.

May you gather up what won’t leave and take it with you without apologizing. May you understand that going on living alongside whatever you feel is not resignation but courage, not settling but survival, not giving up but showing up, again and again.

And may you remember, when the darkness feels too long, that even the thinnest sliver of light is already waxing toward fullness. That every ending is also a beginning. That you are here, still here, and that is enough.

—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.

Leave a comment

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane

Today the earth holds its breath. The winter solstice arrived at precisely 4:21 this morning, the moment when our hemisphere tilts furthest from the sun, when darkness claims its longest reign. After tonight, light begins its slow return. Not all at once, not with fanfare, but gradually, stubbornly, like a promise kept in increments too small to see but large enough to trust.

This is the deep turning point, the still pivot where the year tips from deepening to awakening. The ancient ones knew this threshold held power. They marked it with fire and feast, with ritual and reverence. They called it Yule.

For twelve days beginning tonight, Yuletide stretches before us. That old Germanic tradition of honoring the sun through its most vulnerable time. Twelve days, because that’s how long it takes for the light’s return to become visible to human eyes, for the sun’s strengthening to move from faith into sight. Twelve nights when the veil between worlds grows thinnest, each requiring its own tending, its own protection, its own keeping of the flame. The Romans celebrated Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun. The Slavs lit fires and dressed as spirits to walk between worlds. The Norse burned the great Yule log, not just for warmth but for luck, for protection, for glimpsing the future in dancing flames.

In many European traditions, a log was chosen with ceremony: oak for strength, ash for protection, birch for new beginnings. It was brought to the hearth and anointed like something holy: honey for sweetness, salt for preservation, wine for joy. Then it was set to burn through the night. People watched the sparks rise like prayers. A single flame meant good news coming. Two promised new love. Three foretold a birth in spring. The log was meant to burn all through the dark hours, an unbroken chain of flame carrying warmth, blessing, and hope from one year to the next.

This is what our ancestors understood: that we must actively call the light back. That hope is not passive but participatory. That on the darkest night, we tend the hearth. Both the one in our homes and the one in our hearts.

Yule magic surrounds us still, if we know how to look. The wreaths on doors aren’t mere decoration, they’re circles of eternity, evergreen promises that life persists even when everything appears dead. Holly berries shine impossibly red against gray winter skies, drops of blood-bright defiance. Firs stand green and fragrant, refusing to surrender. These aren’t just nature’s beauty, they’re messages, guardians, and promises from the unseen world.

Yesterday, in the snow showers, the elk returned to the hillside by the barn. Not just a few but a great throng of them, perhaps driven together by the wild storms of recent days, perhaps drawn by something older than weather. Their presence is a blessing, a sacred reminder that we’re not alone in this season of darkness and endurance. They carry the same ancient knowledge our ancestors carried: that survival requires gathering close, requires community, requires trusting the wheel will turn.

Through those same hours, a bald eagle rode the winter thermals, that messenger of vision and courage. My beloved geese called to each other across the frost-white fields. At the front window, I counted maybe thirty birds: juncos and chickadees, finches and blue jays, all kinds coming to the seeds and water I’d set out. We must care for our brothers and sisters. In winter, this tending is how we all survive together.

The old traditions teach us that the solstice is a threshold time, when the veil between worlds grows thin. Animals become messengers. Dreams hold prophecy. The ordinary world cracks open just enough to let the extraordinary slip through. This is why people watched the Yule log’s sparks for omens. This is why we still feel something quicken in us on the longest night. Some knowing deeper than thought, that we’re standing in a doorway between what was and what might yet be.

I will walk Finnbar this cold, frosty solstice morning, our breath clouding white, our footsteps crunching in the stillness. Later I’ll make candied oranges, filling the house with that bright citrus scent like captured sunshine. I’ll prepare food for the days ahead, making ready for the slow unfolding of celebration that is Yuletide. Not one day but twelve, not one meal but many, not one flame but a fire tended through the dark season’s heart.

What a gift to experience this time with presence and gratitude. To feel myself settling into these rhythms, into this land, into traditions both ancient and newly made.

And maybe that settling is recognition, that I’m part of an unbroken chain, just like that Yule log’s flame meant to carry hope from one year to the next. My British ancestors who marked midwinter, the spirits of all the lands that have held me and changed me, the indigenous peoples who knew these Colorado mountains and creeks and plains long before I arrived – they’re all part of this chain. Every human who ever stood on the longest night and chose to light a fire against the dark. We’re all connected in this fundamental act of faith that light returns.

The solstice is an invitation. Not just to survive winter but to meet it fully, to recognize that darkness holds its own gifts. That the longest night is when we most clearly see the stars. That descent and ascent are part of the same sacred motion. That the wheel turns whether we acknowledge it or not. But how much richer it is when we mark the turning with intention, with reverence, with our own small fires lit against the dark.

Tonight the earth reaches its deepest tilt away from the sun. Tomorrow the light begins its slow return. This is the promise that has sustained us through every winter, every dark season, every moment when hope seemed impossible: the light will return.

May your hearth stay warm. May you watch for the signs all around you. May you recognize yourself as part of this ancient, ongoing ceremony of calling light back into the world.

The longest night is here. Light the fires. Tend the flame. The turning has begun.

—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.

Leave a comment

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane

My Mum calls these the dark days before Christmas, and I feel the truth of it in my bones. The hours of daylight have shrunk to almost nothing. Mornings arrives late, reluctant, and evening pulls the curtains closed before I’m ready to let go of the day. Soon we’ll reach the solstice, the shortest day, that pivot point when the earth tips furthest from the sun and we live, briefly, in the deepest shadow of the year.

This morning it broke across the sky in fire red, everything burnished. Light reflected bright pink in my dear neighbor’s windows, their house suddenly glowing like a lantern. To the west the foothills turned copper, the bare branches of the trees lit like filaments. It took my breath.

There’s an old saying in the UK: “red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning; red sky at night, shepherd’s delight”. I grew up hearing this, a rhyme that carried weather wisdom across generations. But it doesn’t quite work here in Colorado. The air is different, thinner, drier, clean. Most days we have that relentless Colorado clarity. Big blue skies where everything feels exposed to the light, almost too seen. When red does arrive, though, I’m pulled back across decades and an ocean, my Mum’s voice, those grey British mornings. But here, it’s both gift and surprise. This morning’s brief flame, not warning but wonder, before the day turned clear and bright.

But whether under grey British skies or Colorado’s blue vault, we all arrive at the same threshold: these short days that make you feel the loss of light, that make you notice when it arrives and grieve when it goes. When darkness holds the greater claim on the day, each hour of light becomes something you can count. Something precious you hold in your hands like water.

I find myself calculating differently now. These are the coyotes’ hours. Dawn’s dimness, dusk’s failing light, when they hunt the trail with the most confidence. Should I wait for full daylight to walk my dog, or venture out when we’re both working the margins? Every task now requires this same weighing, this same negotiation with the light. The day has become a container too small for all I want to fit inside it, and so I’m forced to choose. Not everything will get done. Not everything can be seen or tended or witnessed in these handful of lit hours.

This is what the shortest days teach: discernment. Clarity. The ability to see what’s essential when time itself becomes scarce.

I think about what morning means, what it signifies when it finally arrives after these long December nights. Each dawn is the world beginning again. A chance to remake the day. The earth’s patient rotation delivering me back into light, back into the possibility of motion and work and witness. The sun will rise whether I’m awake to see it or not, whether I’m standing at the window watching or whether I’m still buried under blankets. The earth surely doesn’t need my attention to keep turning.

No, it doesn’t need my attention, but I do. I need these moments of noticing, the way light changes everything it touches. Without them, the days would blur together into a wash of getting through, of survival mode, of waiting for spring. And I don’t want to wait. I want to be here, fully, in these short silent days.

There’s something about scarcity that sharpens appreciation. When I had long summer evenings, I could be generous with my attention. Whole afternoons passed observing the sunset over Mount Meeker as it turned the land amber and gold, knowing there would be another evening tomorrow, and another after that. I took it for granted that there would always be more light, more time, more hours to do what needed doing.

But now, in late December, I can’t take anything for granted. Time feels compressed, the year running faster toward its end. Darkness arrives well before dinner. Morning lingers past breakfast. If I want to see the horses, to feed the bees extra sugar syrup sleeping in their winter cluster, to walk miles with my dog, and observe what this season is teaching, I have to do it now. Not later. Not eventually. Now, while there’s light enough to see.

This urgency isn’t frantic. It’s like narrowing the beam on a flashlight, concentrated, directed. It strips away the inessential and shows me what I truly value: being outside in movement, the sounds and sights of this place, the quality of light on snow, on bare branches.

And I am reminded... we are not separate from this tilting planet, this dance of light and dark. I feel it in my blood, my body’s response to the dimming daylight. I want to sleep longer, move slower, spend more time in stillness and reflection. I can fight it, insist on summer’s pace despite winter’s call, or I can simply acknowledge the truth: this is the time for slowing down, for turning inward, for resting.

Not everything requires light. Some things, deep thinking, integration, the processing of a whole year’s worth of experience, actually need darkness to develop properly. Seeds don’t germinate in the sun; they begin their transformation in dark earth. All year I’ve been in motion, observing, writing, documenting what I see. But observation isn’t the same as understanding. Witnessing isn’t the same as knowing. There’s a difference between collecting experiences and letting them settle into wisdom. I can notice everything, write about every shift in the landscape, pay meticulous attention, but that’s only half the journey. The deeper work, the metabolizing of experience into something that changes how I move through the world, that requires different conditions. It needs space. Stillness. The absence of new input. You can’t integrate while you’re still gathering.

When I stop gathering and start digesting, when all those observations of creek and sky and changing season can finally settle. That’s when the real transformation happens. The darkness these last weeks forces me to stop collecting, and start letting it all work on me from the inside. This isn’t about what I’ve learned anymore, it’s about becoming what I’ve learned.

And I’m not the first to need this darkness. These particular darkest days of the year carry generations of northern winters in them. All those people who wondered if the light would return, who lit candles and built fires, and held festivals at the solstice as a kind of encouragement to the sun: come back, we need you, don’t forget us here in the cold and dark.

There’s an old tradition: bringing fir boughs into the house during the darkest weeks, branches of pine and spruce and evergreen that stay alive when everything else has gone bare. Long before Christmas trees became decoration, people brought these branches inside as something more fundamental – a quiet reminder that not everything dies in the dark. Not a promise that winter would end tomorrow, but proof that life persists in the waiting. The evergreen doesn’t fight the darkness. It evolved to live in them.

I need that reminder. Not to rush past these days toward February’s longer light and the steady march toward spring. But to remember what these short, dark days offer that the bright ones cannot. The chance to stop gathering and finally let a whole year settle into my bones.

The light will return. It always does. But these darkest days aren’t something to simply endure or rush through. This is the season for what I’ve been doing: settling into winter’s depths, letting all I’ve witnessed this year work on me from the inside. The integration, the becoming. And when the light lengthens again and I emerge, I won’t be the same person who began this descent. Like any seed that transforms beneath the surface, I’ll have become something I couldn’t see coming.

—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.

Leave a comment

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane

The snow arrived in darkness, as snow often does, laying itself down in the hours when the world holds its breath between night and morning. I woke to that particular quality of silence that only snow can bring. Not an absence of sound, but a presence of quiet so complete it feels almost sacred. No footprints yet. No evidence of human passage. Just the white world remade while we slept, and the occasional disturbance of a hopeful blue jay in the weeping wild cherry, sending small cascades of powder earthward.

This is the latest true recorded snowfall on record for Boulder. We have been waiting, though we didn’t know how much we’d missed it until it arrived. The season stretched itself thin through October and November, all brittle gold and unseasonable warmth, the trees confused, the ground confused, all of us wondering when it would finally arrive. And then, in the early hours of this December morning, it came: the first snow. Everything white and perfect.

There are rabbit prints near the fence line, early risers, braving the elements before light. I study their trail, the delicate impression of hind feet landing ahead of front, that particular hop-skip pattern that speaks of purpose and survival. They were out here while I slept, while the snow was still falling, making their necessary journeys through the transformed landscape. There is something humbling about this, the way life continues its essential work regardless of weather, regardless of human witness.

The sound of snow is the sound of no sound at all. After months of wind in the dry grasses, after the constant rustle and whisper of autumn, this sudden stillness feels almost impossible. Each flake falls without announcement, accumulating in its slow miracle of gathering. Even the traffic on the far off road seems muted, as if the snow swallows not just the landscape but the noise of our living as well. I stand at the window and listen to this particular quality of peace, knowing it won’t last. The plows will come, the day will begin its work. But for now, there is only this: the world made new, made quiet, made whole.

The light on a snow day is like nothing else. It comes from everywhere and nowhere, reflected and refracted until you can’t quite locate its source. The overcast sky presses close, pearl-grey and luminous, while the ground throws brightness upward. Everything glows with a soft, even radiance that feels almost underwater, as if we’re all suspended in some gentler medium than air. Colors that were sharp yesterday, the red of the barn, the brown of winter grass, now appear muted, softened, seen through gauze. The mountain ash berries, brilliant orange against white, seem to pulse with their own light.

There is this push and pull on snow days, this wanting and not wanting to go out. Part of me longs to stay inside, to watch from safety, to keep my tea warm and my feet dry. The fire is built. The house is warm. Why would I venture into the cold and wet when comfort is here? But another part, the part that has learned to pay attention, that has learned that healing happens in the witnessing, knows I must go. Must walk. Must let the snow fall on my upturned face and feel the particular quality of cold air in my lungs. Must see firsthand what this means, this return of winter, this completion of the cycle.

When I finally do go out, dressed in layers, the cold is immediate and clarifying. But there is warmth here too, paradoxically, in the snow itself. The cows understand this. They are lying down in the pasture, great dark shapes against white, their body heat trapped in the layer beneath them. Snow is insulation, I remind myself. It protects what lies dormant underneath. The earth is warmer tonight than it would be without this blanket. Seeds sleep safely beneath. Roots rest in relative warmth. Even in the depth of cold, there is this secret warmth, this hidden protection.

It is impossible to stand in the first snow and not think about the last. The last snow came in April, late spring snow, wet and heavy, clinging to budding branches and new grass. I was different then. My mind was different, my heart too. My relationship to fear was different. I was still learning to trust my own thoughts, still discovering what emotions I could hold and which ones threatened to overwhelm me, still negotiating with a psyche that had been shattered and was slowly, stubbornly, putting itself back together.

Eight months. That’s how long it’s been since snow last fell. Eight months of growth and healing, of summer heat and autumn cooling, of learning and relearning and learning again. Months of writing these essays, of bearing witness to my own recovery through the lens of the natural world. The last time I saw snow, I was still numb, afraid of so many things. Afraid of my own unraveling. Afraid of the dark places in my mind. Afraid that I might never feel whole again. I moved carefully through my days, gingerly, as if I might shatter again at any moment.

But now, now I walk out into the snow with something approaching confidence. Not recklessness, not the thoughtless movement of before the accident, but a new kind of sureness. I know where my feet are. I know how to shift my weight. I know how to catch myself if I start to slip physically – and metaphorically. This is what one full cycle of seasons has given me: not the absence of fear, but the ability to move through it.

The snow continues to fall, pithering through the morning light. Pithering, the way it arrives without fanfare, accumulating flake by flake until suddenly everything has changed. The fir tree branches bend slightly under the weight. The fence posts wear white caps. The world becomes softer, rounder, gentler.

I think about what it means to welcome something back. Snow is not always easy. It requires work, shoveling, scraping, navigating. It brings cold and wet and all the difficulties of winter. And yet, standing here watching it fall, I cannot help but feel that sense of greeting, of welcoming home a friend who has been long away. Perhaps because it signals completion. Because it means I have survived long enough to see this return. Because it represents something more than itself, cycles and continuity. The way the world keeps turning regardless of our own shattering, the possibility of renewal.

There is something profoundly healing about being held in the rhythm of seasons. Spring comes and then summer and then autumn and then winter, and then, miraculously, impossibly – spring comes again. We do not have to make this happen. We do not have to earn it or deserve it. It simply is, this turning wheel, and we are carried along with it whether we’re ready or not. The snow falls whether I am healed or not. The seasons change whether I have learned my lessons or not. The world continues its work, and we are invited to participate, to witness, to allow ourselves to be changed by the changing world.

As I stand here, face tilted upward, letting the flakes catch in my eyelashes, I realize this is what I have been learning all year long: how to be present to return. How to welcome what comes, knowing it will also go. How to hold both the difficulty and the beauty, the cold and the hidden warmth, the wanting and the not wanting. How to say yes to the snow, to the season, to this particular moment of my particular life.

The blue jay calls out, sharp and insistent against the soft falling. The rabbits have moved on to wherever rabbits go. The cows settle deeper into their snow beds. And I stand here, witness to it all, grateful beyond measure for the chance to see this snow, to be in this body, to have come this far.

Welcome back, winter. Welcome back, snow. I have been waiting for you.

—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.

Leave a comment

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane

The creek shows me its winter face this morning, and I cannot look away. Ice has claimed the slow places, the edges where water pools and lingers before the current pulls it onward. But the claiming is not uniform, not complete. The ice reveals itself in textures I hadn’t known to expect. Transparent as window glass in some places, where I can see straight through to the creek bed below, to stones magnified and distorted by their frozen lens. In other places, the ice blooms white as cauliflower, opaque and intricate, a garden of crystals that caught the cold and grew. And everywhere, the surface is angular, geometric, thousands of pieces fitted together like giant snowflakes, each one catching light differently, creating a mosaic of winter’s patient craft.

I watch how it firms around rocks, how it negotiates with the immovable, flowing around what it cannot overcome, finding purchase where it can. The physics of freezing are also the physics of adaptation. Water learning to be something else, something harder, while still, somehow, remaining itself. A leaf skitters across the solid surface of the creek, pushed by a cool breeze that makes my eyes water and my cheeks burn. It dances like a skater, spinning and gliding with an abandon that would have been impossible a month ago. Then, this same leaf would have been pulled into the depths, drawn by current and gravity, taken downstream, traveling onward toward some distant confluence. Now it stays on the surface, performing for no one but me, free in its constraint.

I am drawn to the edge, tempted. For a moment I think about crossing the creek, about walking where water once flowed. The ice looks inviting, solid enough to hold me. I place a toe at the edge of the stream where the ice has thickened. The crack comes immediately. A sharp snap that travels through my foot and into my chest. The ice dissolves into the body of water beneath, and I step back, heart suddenly loud in the stillness.

Not yet. Not thick enough. Not safe.

And here is the thing I’ve been avoiding saying, even to myself: I know this feeling. I know the temptation to test surfaces that look solid but aren’t quite ready. I know the crack, the sudden give, the cold shock of realizing I’ve misread the moment. These three years since the accident have been years of careful testing – toe first, weight distributed, ready to pull back. And I have been doing better. This year has been good, genuinely good. I can catalog its goodnesses if I need to. I know the healing that has taken root, the writing that has sustained me, the return of something I might call joy. Most days feel normal now. Most days I can walk where I need to go, can trust that what looks solid beneath me actually is.

But not always. There are still times when the ice seems thin, when I can’t quite trust myself, or others. The darkness I’ve worn for these three years still shows me it lurks below the surface if I let it in. Some difficult thoughts have been playing in my mind these last days. Is it the approaching new year, the uncertainty of what it will bring? Or is it the end drawing near of this writing practice that has held me, day after day, week after week, for twelve months? What happens when the structure that has kept me going, kept me walking out to meet the world even on the hardest days, simply ends? Will I know how to stay awake without it?

And beneath all of this: will my faith ever fully return, or will I always carry this small hesitation, this muscle memory of breaking through?

Perhaps this is the wrong question. Perhaps faith is not something that returns intact, like a bone that heals perfectly back to what it was. Perhaps what I am learning is that faith reformed is not faith diminished. It is faith that knows the ice can crack, that surfaces can deceive, that solid ground is actually never guaranteed, and chooses to walk forward anyway. Not with the innocence of never having fallen, but with the hard-won knowledge of having stood back up.

I look down at the creek again, at the place where it widens and flattens, encased in ice, where the silence is most profound. Here, all the water moves underneath, hidden, doing its work in darkness. A few feet upstream, the stream babbles over rocks, audible and alive, but in this wide, quiet place there is only stillness. Water remembering how to wait, how to be patient with its own transformation. I can hear the blood pulsing in my ears.

Last week I had stood at Dodd Lake’s edge where the ice had just begun its quiet claim. A thin rim along the eastern side where the water meets the dried grass and the shadows linger longest. The kind of ice that looks temporary, negotiable, like it might retreat by noon if the sun decided to argue back. But the sun hung pale and indifferent, and the ice stayed.

I’ve been watching this lake fill with geese for weeks now. First a few dozen, then hundreds, and now thousands. They arrived gradually as fall deepened, dropping from the sky in ragged formations that dissolved into the water. The ice hadn’t won yet, but I could see what was coming. Each morning the open water shrinking, the geese pressed gradually closer together.

That day they were everywhere, their constant honking and muttering filling the air. Thousands of voices negotiating proximity. They paddled in tight formations, shoulder to shoulder, crowded into the dark channels between the frozen margins. Some had already given up the water entirely and stood on the ice itself, unbothered by the cold beneath their feet.

But today there are no geese, only an eagle soaring high, and I wonder if he’s hungry, if all the mice are huddled warm underground. It’s a day for being inside, and yet. The desire to walk, to listen, has called me out into sub-zero temperatures. I am the only one here. The conditions are such that I could be the only one on earth, standing in this moment, witnessing this particular convergence of ice and light and frozen time. The isolation is both gift and warning. I have learned to be alone with myself this year, learned to stay present even when presence is uncomfortable. But standing here alone, I wonder what I am practicing for.

Is it for the next hard thing, the next fall, the next moment when the ice gives way beneath me? Or is the practice itself the point. This daily choosing to notice, to feel, to stay alert to what is here? Perhaps I am not practicing for anything. Perhaps I am simply practicing being alive, being present to whatever comes, whether it is beauty or breaking or the long stretch of ordinary days between.

The ice is not a metaphor I have chosen. It is simply what this day has given me, what the creek has offered up. But I receive it anyway, this lesson in surfaces and depths, in the temporary nature of every solid thing, in how transformation happens slowly and then all at once.

I turn back toward home, the eagle still circling overhead, the creek still frozen and flowing at once. Behind me, that dancing leaf continues its solitary performance on the ice, spinning and gliding, held aloft by what holds it captive, finding freedom in the very thing that keeps it from moving on.

Not yet, I think. Not ready to cross. But I am here. I showed up. I paid attention once again. Tomorrow I will come back and test the ice again.

—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.

Leave a comment

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane

The sandhill cranes appeared while I was riding this morning, their voices reaching me before I could see them. I stopped, my horse stopping with me, both of us arrested by that ancient sound. They were flying so high, fifty birds, maybe more, that I couldn’t see them until the sun caught their wings and turned them briefly luminous. Their calls tumbled down through the cold air, and I felt my chest open with something I’ve come to recognize as my body’s response to grace.

This is what a year of paying attention has taught me: gratitude isn’t something we summon once annually around a laden table. It’s a muscle we strengthen through daily practice, through choosing again and again to notice what’s here, what’s generous, what’s still singing despite everything.

Later, when I filled the bird bath, I had to break through a quarter-inch film of ice. The surface shattered into geometric pieces that melted back into themselves. Within minutes, scores of birds arrived – juncos, chickadees, finches, bluejays. Each one drinking as if they’d been searching all morning. I stood watching them, these small bodies working so hard to survive the season, and felt grateful for the simplest things: water, the ability to provide it, the front-row seat to their thirst being quenched.

Since moving to America, Thanksgiving has become my favorite of all the holidays. The gathering, the food, the permission to say out loud what we often keep quiet: thank you, I see you, you matter to me. But lately I’ve been wondering how gratitude became something we practice on a single day, as if it’s something we can check off a list rather than a way of inhabiting our lives. As if one day of thanks could possibly contain the magnitude of what we’ve been given.

This year, through my writing and the practice of weekly observation, I’ve learned that gratitude starts with paying attention. We can’t be thankful for what we haven’t truly seen or experienced. It’s about watching the alpenglow paint the foothills in shades of rose and amber. It’s about feeling my horse’s steady heartbeat beneath me during a quiet ride. It’s about standing at my bee hives and recognizing the hum of thousands of bees as a form of conversation. It’s about the unexpected sighting of a fox at dusk, or the way ice forms patterns on the water, or the first snow dusting the peaks while the valley stays green.

Gratitude, I’m learning, is the practice of allowing ourselves to be astonished by what’s already here. Not just the beautiful parts, but all of it.

The key word there is ‘allowing.’ This practice isn’t about forcing ourselves to feel thankful when life is genuinely hard. It’s not about silver linings or forced cheerfulness. Life tests us constantly. Not always with tragedy, but with small daily choices about how we’ll respond to discomfort, to inconvenience, to the things that ask something of us.

My greyhound Finnbar demands his morning walk every single day. Rain, snow, shine, or freezing wind. Some mornings I’d rather stay inside where it’s warm, but there he is, wrapped in his coat, insistent and eager, entirely unbothered by the cold. And when we step outside, his joy is immediate, ears back, tail up, pure delight at being out and moving. Watching him transforms the walk for me. Somewhere in that honest acknowledgment of my own resistance, there’s also room to notice: the way frost clings to dried grasses, the absolute silence of a snow-muffled morning, the gift of witnessing his happiness, the companionship of a creature who teaches me daily about showing up regardless of conditions.

True gratitude doesn’t require us to be grateful for everything. It asks us to remain present to everything, including what’s hard, and to notice what else exists alongside the difficulty. Winter is genuinely harsh. And winter also offers its own stark beauty, its lessons about endurance, its invitation to slow down. Both things are true. Gratitude is the practice of staying awake to the fullness of what is, not just the parts we wish were different.

This kind of gratitude changes how we approach our lives. We learn to receive the gifts we’re given – the people we love, the land that holds us, the moments of unexpected beauty. All with honesty about what they ask of us. We say thank you not as a formality but as a recognition of having received something we didn’t earn and can’t repay, something that includes both grace and effort.

This practice of weekly writing has become my way of cultivating gratitude. The discipline of returning again and again to the earth, to observation, to the work of finding words, creates a deepening. There’s something about committing to show up weekly, about choosing to witness and then articulate what I’ve witnessed, that opens me to what I might otherwise miss. My horse Atlas, growing older now, has taught me about impermanence and the tenderness required when strength begins to fade. The bees have shown me how nothing exists in isolation, how every action ripples through systems larger than we can see. The elk moving through the foothills remind me what wildness looks like, just magnificently themselves. Each one a teacher, but only because I’ve been willing to listen.

On this Thanksgiving, I find myself thinking about what paying attention actually reveals beyond beauty, it also reveals complexity. Today is a day I love, and it’s also a National Day of Mourning for Indigenous peoples, acknowledging the loss and displacement that created the conditions for many of us to be here. The Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute peoples are the original stewards of this land I love in Colorado. Their relationship with these mountains goes back thousands of years. Their gratitude practices, their ceremonies, their knowing of how to live in reciprocity, these far surpass what I’ve been learning in my small way. This is what honest attention asks: that we see the whole picture, hold multiple truths, live with both gratitude and awareness of all that it required.

As I write this final November essay, what I’m most grateful for is this year of moments I could never have predicted. Mornings when light painted the foothills in colors I didn’t know existed. Evenings when coyotes sang so near to the house that I could distinguish individual voices. The day a golden eagle perched on my house, so close I could see every detail of its fierce beauty, reminding me I’m always in the presence of the wild. Each moment an invitation to gratitude, each observation a reminder that I’m surrounded by abundance.

The sandhill cranes I watched this morning are far south by now, following routes encoded in their bones, trusting what they know. May we all learn to trust our own capacity for gratitude that deeply. Not just for today, but every day. Not just in celebration, but in acknowledgment of all that makes our lives possible. Not just in receiving, but in the commitment to tend and protect and honor what we’ve been given.

Thank you for following these essays, for joining me in this practice of paying attention this year. Thank you to the land and all its creatures for teaching me, week after week, how to see more clearly, feel more deeply, and live with greater gratitude for the astonishing gift of being here.

—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.

Leave a comment

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane

A young stag has taken up residence in my neighbor’s front yard. I’ve seen him there, his legs tucked beneath him like a house cat, watching the world pass with dark, velvet eyes that seem to hold centuries of knowing. Cars pass, dogs bark, squirrels run along, yet he remains, unperturbed, as if he has discovered some profound secret about stillness that we’ve forgotten in our human hurrying. He sits there for hours, this wild creature choosing meditation in the midst of our neighborhood, teaching us that sometimes the most radical act is simply to be still, to witness without needing to participate.

His presence feels perfectly timed, for after the wild winds that ushered in the Beaver Moon have calmed, after November announced itself with such fierce certainty, something shifts. The month settles into its deeper rhythm. Not the dramatic entrance but the profound residence. Now comes the hushed exhale, as if the earth, having declared the changing season with such force, finally gives herself permission to rest.

Here in Colorado, this second movement of November feels especially profound. The mountains have drawn their white blankets higher since those first wild days. The aspens that danced so frantically in the early winds now stand naked and still against the sky. The very air has changed its quality. Where once it carried leaves and urgency, it now moves with deliberate slowness, settling into something sharper, cleaner, each breath visible. Each moment held longer in the thinning light, as if autumn has finally exhaled all its restlessness.

Watch how the garden surrenders its posture without protest. The sunflowers that stood so tall and proud now bow their heavy heads to the earth, offering their seeds to whoever might need them. The morning glory vines that climbed with such determination all summer have turned to paper, to whispers, to memories traced against the fence. Even the soil seems to exhale and soften, no longer holding itself quite so firmly, accepting the weight of fallen leaves like a quilt being pulled up, preparing for the deep sleep that’s coming.

The geese understand this lesson. They return now by their thousands, their voices carrying across the cooling air like messages from another world. Each morning and evening, their great Vs write temporary poems across the sky, reminding us that some journeys require the wisdom of community. That there is strength in knowing when to stay and when to go. They settle into the stubbled corn fields with a confidence that speaks of generations of knowing. This place, this time, this necessary pause in their endless conversation between seasons. Nothing is truly wasted in nature’s economy of letting go.

The afternoons are as yet still warm here, a gift of golden hours when the sun remembers summer even as the shadows grow long. And, in the foothills, we wait for snow that has not yet come. A blessing of lingering warmth, but also a worry that grows with each cloudless dawn. This is the new November: beautiful and unsettling in equal measure, these warm days a gift we’re not entirely sure we should accept. We watch the peaks and wonder when the white will finally come.

The hours feel suspended in time. When you can shed your jacket and feel the sun on your skin one moment, then watch your breath cloud the air as the cold finally arrives with evening. And with it, the sky’s most extravagant show. The last week our sunsets have become wild artists, painting the sky in colors that have no names, creating shapes that shift and morph. One moment a dragon, the next a ship, then dissolving into pure color that makes the mountains glow as if lit from within.

These sunset shapes show that November invites us to keep seeing differently. In the growing darkness, in the stripped-bare branches, in the quieting earth, we’re invited to notice what we missed in summer’s abundance. The architecture of trees reveal themselves. The shape of the land emerges from beneath its green disguise. Even sound travels differently - the call of a single raven can fill an entire valley, each note clear and profound in the stillness.

This is what November knows: that rest is not emptiness but fullness of a different kind. The earth isn’t idle; it’s gathering itself, tending its deep fires, preparing for the long dream of winter. Below the surface, roots are storing energy, seeds are holding their secrets close, the very soil is rebuilding itself through the slow alchemy of decay and transformation. What looks like ending is actually beginning, just at a pace our hurried human hearts sometimes struggle to appreciate.

We’re invited into this same rhythm, this same grace, even as we resist it. November can feel like a thief, stealing our light, our warmth, our long days of doing. We dread the darkness, the cold, the months of confinement ahead. And yet. November asks us to tend our own inner embers, to stop adding fuel to every fire, to let some things burn down to coals that can smolder quietly through the dark months ahead. It’s a time for listening to the wisdom that only emerges in stillness. The knowledge that our bodies hold, the truths that whisper rather than shout, the understanding that comes not from doing but from being.

The young stag in the yard knows this. The geese descending on the harvested fields know this. Even the smallest sparrows gleaning the forgotten corners know this. They don’t question the value of rest, the necessity of pause, the wisdom of seasons. They simply embody it, without question or doubt.

As darkness comes earlier each day, as the world pulls its energy inward and downward, we’re reminded that this too is holy work - this letting go, this listening, this patient tending of what matters most. November teaches us that sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is nothing at all. To sit like that young stag, alert but calm, present to the world without needing to change it, trusting that this too is part of the great turning, the endless conversation between light and dark, noise and silence, holding on and letting go.

In this stillness, in this growing quiet, we might just hear what we’ve been too busy to notice all year long - the whisper of our own deep knowing. The quiet voice that knows that rest is not retreat but preparation, that we too need our winter.

—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.

Leave a comment

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane

The ancient Finns called it revontulet, fire fox. Believing that somewhere in the Arctic darkness, a mystical fox races across the tundra. As it runs with wild abandon, its magnificent tail sweeps snowflakes skyward. Each crystal catching moonlight until the heavens themselves ignite. Or perhaps, as other tellings suggest, the fox’s tail brushes against mountaintops, striking sparks that set the night ablaze with color. Standing on my deck in Colorado some nights past, watching ribbons of green and pink unfurl across familiar stars, I understand why our ancestors needed stories to hold such wonder.

I had chased this phenomenon to the edges of the world. Iceland’s black sand beaches, Greenland’s ice-locked fjords – always arriving too late or too early, under skies too cloudy or too calm. The aurora had remained elusive, a ghost story told by luckier travelers, a shimmer always just beyond the horizon of my experience. Yet here it was, finding me at home, transforming the sky above Gunbarrel Hill into something otherworldly. The irony wasn’t lost on me: all those expeditions to the Arctic Circle, and the fire fox had chosen to visit my own backyard.

Earlier that day, I’d heard whispers of possibility – solar storms, magnetic conditions aligning. So before dinner, hope pulled us outside to scan the northern sky. At first, what we saw seemed ordinary. A peculiar cloud formation, perhaps, or the reflection of the distant city lights of Longmont. But then the green began to pulse, to breathe, to dance. “There! Do you see it?” The tentative hope erupting into certainty. Because even when you’re looking for magic, even when you’ve been told it might come, the moment it arrives still takes your breath away.

The aurora that night was liquid light, alive and restless. It moved like water, like silk curtains in wind, like the very breathing of the atmosphere itself. The green dominated, that distinctive, electric shade of oxygen atoms releasing solar energy. Then pink flushed through it in waves, nitrogen’s blush joining the dance.

Standing there, barefoot on cold deck boards, I thought of that Finnish fox, its white fur invisible against snow, only the black tip of its tail marking its passage as it runs through the cold night. In the story, the fox is neither fleeing nor hunting, it simply runs for the joy of running, for the wild freedom of movement across the endless sky. And in that running, in that pure expression of life, it creates beauty that spans continents, that pulls people from their warm houses to stand shivering in wonder.

The science tells us something different but no less magical: solar wind, magnetosphere, charged particles funneling toward the poles along invisible field lines. But knowing the mechanism doesn’t diminish the miracle. If anything, it deepens it. That we live on a planet wrapped in an invisible shield that turns solar storms into art, that raw power becomes instead this celestial theater.

For almost an hour, the lights performed above my home. They shifted from curtains to spirals, from waves to something like calligraphy, writing messages in the November sky. The pinks intensified, then faded, then bloomed again.

My neighbors emerged, drawn by the same ancient pull that has brought humans to look upward during auroral displays for millennia. Across the country we stood in our driveways and yards, strangers made intimate by shared awe. Someone said they’d lived here forty years and never seen anything like it. Another remembered their grandmother in Minnesota talking about the lights from her childhood. We were all children in that moment, the aurora stripping away our careful adult composures, returning us to wonder.

I thought of my nights in Iceland, joining a tour that promised aurora sightings, scanning clouded skies from stopped vehicles on empty roads. Hours spent willing the weather to lift, watching clouds instead of lights, mistaking every break in the overcast for the beginning of the show that never came. And Greenland, dog sledding from hut to hut through Arctic silence. Just the dogs’ breathing, runners whispering on snow. That profound quiet, but no aurora. All those northern expeditions, all that searching in the very lands where the fire fox was said to run, and here it was, painting my Colorado garden with subtle green shadows, reflecting in my own window glass.

There’s something to be said for the gifts that come unbidden, for the wonders that find us when we stop searching.

As the display began to fade, slowly, reluctantly, like theater lights dimming after the final curtain – I remained on my deck, unwilling to break the spell by moving inside. The everyday world was reasserting itself: the familiar outline of fir trees, the sound of cars on distant roads, the ordinary stars resuming their quiet burning. But something had shifted. The sky I thought I knew, the sky that had arched over my home every night, had revealed itself capable of transformation, of magic, of visits from Arctic foxes made of light and legend.

The Sámi people of the Arctic traditionally warned against whistling at the aurora, believing it might sweep you up into its dance, carry you away into the sky. Standing there as the last whispers faded into darkness, I understood the danger they sensed. Not that the lights would literally lift us from Earth, but that having seen them, having been touched by their wild beauty, we would never again be content with ordinary darkness. We would always be listening for the footfalls of the fire fox, watching for the sweep of its magnificent tail across our skies.

In the days that followed, I found myself returning to the deck each evening, scanning the northern horizon with new attention. The aurora didn’t return, fire foxes keep their own counsel, but the watching had changed. Every sunset and sunrise seemed more precious, every star more intentional. The sky had shown me its capacity for surprise, for gift-giving, for bringing the far north to my Colorado home.

Perhaps this is the true power of the aurora, whether we explain it through physics or foxes: it reminds us that we live on a planet alive with wonder, that the extraordinary can arrive without a passport or planning. And, that sometimes the journeys we take to find beauty are less important than the attention we pay to the beauty that finds us. The fire fox runs where it will, its tail painting stories across the sky, reminding us that wonder isn’t something we outgrow, only that our attention wandered.

—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.

Leave a comment

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane

That particular week in August, memory knows it as the time when summer held its breath. When the summer sun hung at its apex, relentless and golden, and everything living seemed to pulse at its maximum. Grasshoppers humming their electric hymn, tomatoes splitting their skins with ripeness, the air itself thick enough to swim through. It was in this crucible of heat and fullness that absence carved its shape into my life, not once but in a trinity of losses that still echo in the chambers of late summer.

Two years have passed since my beloved whippet, Huckleberry died. Almost fifteen years of devotion finally yielding to the greater motion of time. That same day, the horse who had carried me through both flight and fall was loaded onto a trailer, sold to steadier hands than mine had proven to be. And beneath these fresh griefs lay an older sorrow. It was the anniversary of my grandfather’s death. A man who had departed the world the year before I entered it, his absence shaping my entire existence.

How strange that grief should cluster like this, as if loss attracts loss, as if certain days and weeks become charged with departure. Or perhaps it’s simply that in the furnace of late summer, when life burns at its brightest, we see most clearly the shadows it casts.

Hucky knew something that morning. Dogs always do. He had risen slowly, his grey muzzle lifting toward the window where morning light pooled on the floor. A lifetime of mornings, and this one arrived different, softer, as if the universe had gentled its touch for his passage. His ribs, those delicate arches, rose and fell with careful breath. In the end, he simply stopped trying to hold himself here, releasing his grip on this world as naturally as a leaf releases from its branch.

The vet said his heart was giving out. His registered name was Never Ending Love. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say his heart gave everything. Unreserved love poured out until the vessel could hold no more.

That same afternoon, while Hucky’s collar still held the warmth of his neck, I knew the horse trailer was coming. This leaving was different. This one I chose. This one I orchestrated with my own hands. Signing papers with fingers that trembled not from grief alone but from shame. From the knowledge that I was breaking a covenant I had made when I brought him home - that I would care for him, always.

He was a good horse. That’s what makes it inconsolable. Deus wasn’t dangerous or mean or unmanageable. He was simply more horse than I had courage for after the accident rewrote my body’s memory. The fall was my last ride. I never got back on.

I kept him for months after, telling myself I was working up to it, that I just needed time. But I knew, somewhere deeper than thought, that I would never ride him again. It took a long time to finally say out loud what had been true from the moment I hit the ground: I had lost something I couldn’t get back. Not with horses maybe, but with Deus, this beautiful creature who asked for a rider I could no longer be.

The story I told myself was that I was doing what was best for him, that he deserved someone who could actually support him, who could meet him with confidence rather than fear. And that was true. But it was also true that I chose my own safety over my promise to him. That I chose not to fight through the terror that had taken up residence in my bones. That sometimes love means letting go, and sometimes it just means we weren’t brave enough to hold on.

This grief is different from losing Hucky. He died in my arms after fifteen years of unconditional love freely given and received. That grief is clean, even in its depth. But this, this is the grief of betrayal, of broken promises, of love that wasn’t enough. I still mourn not just his absence but my own failure, the woman I couldn’t become, the courage I couldn’t summon when he needed me to.

I think of him often, and pray that the young girl who took him was brave enough for both of them. That they found their dance together, the partnership he deserved. That he’s loved and ridden with joy. I adored him. And I let him go hoping he would find what we couldn’t be together.

And beneath these fresh griefs lay an older sorrow, the fiftieth anniversary of my grandfather’s death, falling on this same impossible day. A man I knew only through the space of his absence. He died the year before my birth, taking with him stories I would never hear firsthand, a voice I would never recognize, hands that would never teach me any of the hundred small wisdoms grandfathers pass down.

My mother would grow quiet every year as this week approached. Even from far away, I could sense it - the shift in her voice on the phone, the way certain silences held more weight than words. The pull of remembrance. He was a gardener who loved the natural world, growing the most beautiful roses, winning prizes for his chrysanthemums. She tells me he would have been proud to see how his love of growing things lives on in me - the bees I keep, the land I tend, the way I notice every shift in the season. How strange to carry the genetics of someone you’ve never met, to be living proof of a life that ended before yours began.

The summer heat that week was unrelenting. It pressed against windows, rose in waves from the earth, turned the simple act of breathing into conscious effort. The world felt oversaturated, as if someone had turned up the intensity dial past comfort, past endurance, to some place where life and death blurred at their edges.

Memory is a strange curator. It preserves some moments in amber while letting others dissolve. From that week, I remember the particular quality of light, heavy and golden, like honey poured through air. I remember the vet’s kind hands on Hucky’s still form. I remember the silence of the barn after Deus was gone. I remember my Mum, heavy with her own grief for a man whose death we were marking again. What memory holds is not just loss, but love’s refusal to end, how it continues beyond presence, how we carry those we’ve loved not as weight but as wings

This time returns again each year with its freight of summer heat and remembrance, and each year I understand a little more. That we are all moving through time at the pace of our heartbeats, accumulating loves and losses, learning to hold both in the same breath. That love persists, and that absence can be another form of connection. Perhaps the highest honor we can offer what we’ve lost is to carry it forward transformed, not as wounds but as the shape of what continues.

—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.

Leave a comment

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane

Each night this past week, I was drawn to watch her swelling. Commanded, it seemed, by some ancient pull I couldn’t name. This November moon was growing pregnant with light, heavy with promise. The Beaver Moon, they call her, and this year she would be the largest supermoon we’ve seen in years, pulling at the tides within us as surely as she pulls at the ocean. Night by night, her presence grew stronger.

Then came November 5th, and the wind arrived like a wild herald announcing her approach. All day, the air churned and thrashed, sending the leaves into frenzied flight. They scattered across the ground like small creatures fleeing some unseen predator, skittering and racing in desperate sprints across pavements and grass. The wind stripped branches bare with an urgency that felt almost violent, as if nature herself was in a hurry to clear the stage for winter’s arrival.

Driving home that late windy afternoon, I watched the sky transform into an artist’s palette. Pink bleeding into blue, purple emerging from the spaces between. The light had that particular quality that comes when seasons collide, when autumn’s golden warmth meets winter’s cool clarity. Through my windshield, the world seemed caught between two states of being, neither fully one thing nor another, but something altogether more magical in its transition.

The leaves, oh, the leaves. They didn’t simply fall; they danced and spiraled and fled. The wind orchestrated their movement into mini cyclones that spun across the road, and for brief moments I felt transported to Dorothy’s Kansas, waiting for the tornado to lift me into another realm. These whirlwinds of golden and rust-colored leaves created their own small dramas of motion and sound. The noise they made, that particular dry rustle and scrape of late autumn leaves, filled the air with nature’s percussion, a symphony of endings that somehow felt like beginnings too.

As I pulled into my driveway, the moon was already beginning her ascent, still pale against the painted sky but growing more substantial with each passing moment. From my deck, I watched her rise in all her swollen glory. She climbed through the branches of now naked trees, their bare arms reaching up as if to catch her, to hold this radiant mass that seemed almost too heavy for the sky to bear.

The wind continued its wild dance, and I stood there feeling the way it pulled at my hair, my clothes, my very sense of groundedness. Everything felt in motion. The last leaves clinging to branches, the clouds racing across the moon’s face, even the shadows shifting and flowing like water across the deck. This was nature in transition, raw and unfiltered, stripping away what was no longer needed with a fierce efficiency that left no room for sentiment.

By the next morning, the transformation was complete. A profound silence had settled over everything. A reverence, almost, as if the world needed to catch its breath after yesterday’s wild dance. The trees stood naked in this stillness, their intricate architecture revealed. Where yesterday had been chaos and fury, now there was only quiet contemplation. Winter had arrived not with snow or ice but with this act of unveiling, this forced surrender of autumn’s last holding. She had presided over this stripping away, watching from her height as the wind did its work, and now in the morning’s hush, we could truly see what had been revealed.

And here I find myself, near the end of this year-long exploration of healing through nature, witnessing this dramatic turning. “In Her Nature” began as a journey to rekindle joy, to repair a heart through careful attention to the seasonal shifts of my neighborhood, its plants and birds and creatures. Week by week, I’ve documented the subtle and not-so-subtle changes, finding in nature’s cycles a mirror for my own transformation.

This beaver moon feels like a punctuation mark in that journey. Not an ending but a deepening. The pregnant fullness of the moon speaks to what has been gestating within me through spring’s tender beginnings, summer’s lush abundance, and autumn’s letting go. The wild wind that stripped the trees bare feels like my own process of releasing what no longer serves, making space for whatever winter will bring.

There’s something about the fierce intensity of that wind, the urgency of it, that resonates with where I find myself now. Healing isn’t always gentle. Sometimes it arrives like a November gale, demanding that we release our last clutched leaves, insisting that we stand bare-branched under the watching moon. Those mini tornadoes of leaves were external manifestations of internal whirlwinds, the spinning reorganization that happens when we’re truly changing.

Approaching the close of this year’s journey, this November moon illuminates what has shifted. The broken heart I brought to this journey has become one that finds meaning everywhere. The soul seeking rebirth has found it not in some dramatic moment of transformation but in the noticing of small miracles, in the thousand tiny revelations that come from simply paying attention.

Winter is here now. But I know something now that I didn’t know a year ago: emptiness is not absence but preparation. The trees aren’t lesser for having lost their leaves, they’re revealed, their essential structure clear against the sky. And perhaps that’s what this year of watching has done for me too: stripped away the unnecessary, revealed the essential architecture of a life learning to find joy again.

The moon is waning now, taking with her autumn’s last light. She’ll return next month with a different name, a different story. For now, the quiet holds everything.

—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.

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As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane

As we descended, Kauai looked like a place that had escaped time altogether. The mountains wore green like velvet, and those famous Na Pali cliffs rose straight up from the ocean, dramatic as anything I’d ever seen. Through the plane’s small window, I watched the island take shape - not just another dot of land in the Pacific, but something wilder. This was what happened when volcanoes and rain had millions of years to work together, creating more shades of green than I knew existed.

Leaving the airport, the air itself became presence, thick with storm promise and the perfume of tropical blooms, wrapping around your skin like silk soaked in rain. This was not the dry heat of other places but something alive, breathing with the island’s own rhythm, air that tasted of growing things and wet earth.

We wound our way south toward Poipu, windows down, letting the island in. Each mile seemed to reveal something new. Along the roadside, fountain grass bent in golden waves, each wet blade catching light like a blessing. But it was the canopy that spoke the deepest, rainbow eucalyptus so tall they formed a living tunnel above us, their crowns meshed together in an unbroken arch. Through gaps in this green vault, glimpses of the island’s true nature. Ferns unfurled from every crevice. Philodendrons climbed toward any promise of light. Life upon life, green upon green - as if this is what taught the human tongue to shape the sound of paradise.

The beach, when we finally reached it, held its own revelations. Driftwood scattered along the tide line like the bones of some ancient sea creature, bleached white by salt and sun. Above, ironwood trees drew delicate calligraphy against the sky, their needle-thin leaves whispering in the trade winds.

But it was late afternoon when the true magic began. First one dark dome broke the surface, then another, until the ocean itself seemed to be offering up its treasures. The turtles came in waves of their own making, at one point thirty, perhaps more. Each one ancient and unhurried, wearing the weight of centuries in their measured movements through the surf. They hauled themselves onto the warm sand with such a deliberate grace, as if each gesture had been rehearsed since time began.

We sat among them as the sun began its descent, these creatures who had navigated by stars before humans ever dreamed of ships. Only feet away, they settled into sand still holding the day’s heat, their shells catching the last light like polished jade. The boundary between their world and ours dissolved in that honey-colored hour, when even the ocean seemed to hold its breath.

The sunset painted everything. Turtle shells, wet sand, our own watching faces in shades of amber and rose. Here were beings who knew nothing of our human urgencies, who moved between elements as if land and sea were merely different rooms in the same vast house. Their presence transformed the beach from mere landscape into sanctuary, each turtle deep in its own timeless meditation.

That evening, even the crickets sang differently than they do in Colorado. Their chorus fainter here, as if the island’s abundance required only whispers where the high desert demands something louder. Everything spoke in this softer tongue: the rustle of palm fronds, the silk-soft lap of waves, the quiet scrape of shell against sand.

The days that followed wove themselves into a rhythm I’d forgotten existed. Morning coffee on the lanai while birds I couldn’t name called from trees I’d never seen. Afternoons when time pooled like water in tide pools, going nowhere, needing nothing. Evenings when we’d return to watch for turtles, though they never again came in such numbers as that first night. Still, each evening brought its own gathering, sometimes a dozen, sometimes more, these creatures who asked nothing of us but distance and quiet wonder.

The island worked on me in ways I hadn’t expected. Each dawn arrived soft and certain. Rain came and went like a conversation, never the violent storms of home but something gentler, almost playful. I found myself moving slower, breathing deeper, as if my body was learning the island’s own rhythm.

The journey home began in darkness. Below us, Kauai’s few lights flickered and vanished, the island returning to the vast black of the Pacific. There was something fitting about leaving this way. Not watching it shrink in daylight but feeling it fall away in the dark, already becoming a memory.

Landing in Colorado was like stepping from a greenhouse into a charcoal drawing. Where Kauai had draped itself in every shade of green imagination could conjure, here the world had stripped itself to essentials. The mountains stood naked against a metal sky, their forests mere suggestions of gray and brown. Along the highway, cut fields stretched like parchment, corn stubble and hay remnants writing November’s sparse alphabet across the land.

This monochrome world, all pale yellow and ash, bone white and shadow, struck like cold water after Kauai’s tropical bath. Yet there was honesty in this bareness, truth in the way winter reveals the architecture beneath summer’s disguise. The cottonwoods along the creek stood naked as anatomy lessons, every branch visible, nothing hidden.

Perhaps this is what islands do. Not just surround us with beauty, but shake us loose from our usual ways of seeing. You leave, you return, and suddenly your familiar world looks foreign. The eye that grew accustomed to Kauai’s excess now notices things it skipped before. The delicate frost patterns on grass, the way afternoon light turns bare aspens to copper, how silence here has a different quality than island quiet. Sharper, cleaner, carved from winter air.

The turtles, I think, would understand this movement between worlds. They who breathe in both water and air, who carry their homes wherever they travel, who know that arrival is always temporary and departure always certain. They teach without teaching that paradise isn’t a place we find but a way of seeing - whether in Kauai’s green cathedral or Colorado’s winter chapel, where different prayers are offered to the same vast glorious sky.

—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.

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As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane

The darkness had just settled over our yard when we returned from dinner, that particular October dark that comes earlier each evening, catching us off guard with its sudden depth. I opened the door for our greyhound, and watched his silhouette disappear into the shadows of the garden. In those first moments, there was only the ordinary ritual of coming home: keys on the counter, coats hung by the door, kettle for tea boiling. The comfortable routine of evening’s end.

Then he appeared at the back door, a shadow holding a trembling form.

In the half-light spilling from the kitchen window, I struggled to understand what I was seeing. His tail wagged with pride, eyes bright with accomplishment. And dangling from his mouth, held with the precision of generations, was a rabbit. Her small legs moving in desperate, fading arcs against the air.

For a split second, I froze, caught in that peculiar paralysis that comes when the ordinary world suddenly reveals its teeth. My dog stood patient at the threshold, waiting to be let in, waiting to be praised, waiting with the innocent expectation of one who has done exactly what he was made to do.

Then I jumped into action, my body moving before my mind could catch up. I reached for the rabbit, trying to loosen his grip without causing more damage. But even as my hands moved with purpose, I knew. Some knowledge arrives complete, needing no explanation. The rabbit’s body went limp as I cradled her, and she fell to the deck with a soft finality. Perfectly asleep, it seemed, except for her eyes that caught the kitchen light like two dark pools holding stars.

Her leg was clearly broken, bent at an impossible angle. I knelt beside her on the cool deck, my hands finding the warmth that was already beginning to fade from her small body. In death, she seemed even smaller. A handful of fur and delicate bones, a life that moments before had been nibbling grass or grooming in the safety of what she thought was just another evening.

The new moon hung above us, just a sliver of bright light, not enough to see by, but perfect in its thin crescent. Still, I couldn’t wait for morning. There was something necessary about attending to her immediately, about not letting the night take her without ceremony. I carried her with both hands to the pollinator garden. That patch of earth I’d carefully tended all summer, where bees had drowsed in the lavender and butterflies had danced among the coneflowers. It seemed right that she should rest there, among the roots of plants that fed so many small lives.

In the darkness, I began with a spade, but soon found myself digging with my hands, needing that closer connection. The soil was dry and cold at the surface, we’ve had no rain for so long, but underneath it still held summer’s warmth. The shallow grave took shape slowly, each handful of earth and leaves a small meditation on the strange intimacy of burial. When it was deep enough, I placed her gently on her side, with all the care I could offer. There are no fresh flowers left in the garden, but I gathered what this fall offered, the seed heads of Queen Anne’s Lace, which I arranged as a delicate crown around her. From the hyssop growing right beside her resting place, I broke a single stalk, its purple flowers long faded, and placed it atop the grave, a small way to mark her place in the earth.

In those moments, I said a prayer, not to any particular god, but to the great mystery that allows rabbits and dogs and humans to share this earth in all our complicated ways. And begged her forgiveness, though I knew she was beyond forgiving or condemning, beyond anything but the great return to soil and root. My words disappeared into the darkness, small offerings that seemed both necessary and insufficient.

When I returned to the house, Finn was waiting by the door, tail still wagging hopefully. I gazed into his eyes, searching for what? Remorse? Jubilation? Shame? But I found only the clear, uncomplicated gaze of a dog who loves me, who wants nothing more than to please, whose deepest programming had simply expressed itself in the way his breed has done for centuries.

This is the paradox of the rescued greyhound: We save them from the track, from the relentless pursuit of mechanical rabbits, from a life measured only in speed and profit. We bring them into our homes, teach them about warm beds and stairs, introduce them to the foreign concept of play. But we cannot erase what they are. The instinct to chase, to catch, these things run deeper than our love can reach.

He had killed a rabbit once before, a year ago, but had left it where it fell. This time was different. This time, he brought his prize to me, laid it at the threshold like an offering, and in that moment I felt the weight of something I couldn’t name. Did he bring it for me, this terrible gift? The thought filled me with a confusing mix of horror and something else, not quite elation, but a strange recognition of being seen, being provided for in the most primal way.

Dawn barely broken, the rabbit haunts me already. Not as a ghost or a source of guilt, but as an ache that teaches without words. In her death, she showed me something essential about the wildness that persists at the edges of our domestic lives. She reminded me that beneath our carefully tended gardens, beyond our windows lit against the dark, the ancient dance of predator and prey continues, endless and unchanged.

I walked to her grave this morning, the disturbed earth is still visible, dark against the frost-touched ground. The hyssop stalk I placed there still lies where I left it, keeping watch. By spring, I know she’ll have fed the soil that feeds the plants, that feed the bees and butterflies. But for now, the grave is raw, fresh, a disruption in the garden’s order.

And my greyhound? He sleeps beside me as I write this, his breathing deep and untroubled. His legs twitch, perhaps he runs again in dreams, forever chasing something just beyond reach. I rest my hand on his smooth flank and feel the warmth of him, this complicated creature who is both my gentle companion and still, somehow, a hunter. In saving him from the track, I did not make him less of what he is. I simply gave him space to be it all.

Last night, the rabbit gave her life to remind me of this truth: We are all of us caught between worlds, carrying within us histories we didn’t choose and instincts we cannot fully tame. The best we can do is hold space for the complexity, honor what is lost, and love what remains – even when it shows us what we’d rather not see.

—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.

Leave a comment

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane

The Autumn Purple ash outside my bedroom window stands as both a timekeeper and teacher. I named him Maximus during those long days of my recovery, when I lay in bed with little to do but study his magnificent form. His Latin name, *Fraxinus americana*, carries the weight of science, but the name I gave him speaks to who he became to me: a gentle giant keeping watch, a philosopher robed in bark and leaf, reaching sixty feet into the Colorado sky.

During those weeks of healing, we developed an intimate rhythm. Each morning, I would check his progress, noting the subtle shifts in his canopy. The Autumn Purple ash, true to his cultivar’s promise, began his annual performance with leaves shifting from summer’s green into that deep, unmistakable purple. The color of bruises healing, of twilight deepening, of mysteries unfolding. He wore his purple crown with dignity, as befitting his stature, but he wasn’t finished. As autumn progressed, those purple leaves burned into fire reds and molten yellows, each day bringing new variations on the theme of change.

I remember watching in quiet wonder as particularly spectacular combinations of color emerged. In my immobility, this tree became my entertainment, my calendar, my proof that transformation was possible even when standing still. We were both rooted in place that autumn. He in soil, me in sheets. Both proving that the deepest changes happen when we cannot run from them.

Then came that day of high winds, when nature choreographed its own version of Dorothy’s Kansas tornado. I watched from my window as my companion was stripped bare, his leaves torn away and sent spiraling across my neighbor’s lawn, pooling in corners where houses met gardens, mixing with leaves from all the neighborhood trees in a swirling autumn confetti. It felt personal, watching this undressing. There was an intensity to it, yes, but also grace. Each leaf releasing its hold, surrendering to forces larger than itself. The howling wind created a symphony around his trunk, and when it finally stilled, the silence that followed felt sacred. He stood there, dignified even in his nakedness, only a few determined leaves clinging to branches like final thoughts before sleep.

What struck me most profoundly was how different it felt this time. With the crown bare, the Flatirons returned to my window frame. Those ancient sandstone formations I knew would reappear, yet seeing them again while lying in recovery made them feel newly significant. My tree, in his annual gesture, had stepped aside to remind me of something else: stone and sky, distance and permanence, the bones of the earth itself. The same view I’d seen every winter now spoke differently, of endurance, of what stands firm beneath all our transformations.

The seasonal undressing has become a marker in my own calendar of healing. By some strange synchronicity, the leaves always begin their final descent a few weeks after the anniversary of my own fall. The tree, in its wisdom, offers me a continual reminder that falling is not failure but transformation. That being stripped bare can reveal new vistas, and that vulnerability can be its own strength.

This week, as high winds once again pulled at those familiar branches, I found myself thinking about the inverse of what I’d observed in spring. Not the tender clothing of new growth, but the courage required for undressing. If spring is about trust in becoming, perhaps autumn is about trust in release. Watching more closely, I realized this isn’t destruction but collaboration: the tree and wind dancing together in their timeless exchange. Neither force nor surrender, but something more nuanced. The wind taking only what the tree is ready to release, the tree bending but not breaking, both partners in this necessary unburdening. The ash seems to know this in its heartwood, that letting go isn’t loss but conversation, a dialogue between what holds and what yields, between the rooted and the restless. Each leaf that flies knows something about timing, when holding becomes a burden rather than a blessing.

Earlier this week, the world offered another kind of wisdom. Golden light slanted low across the autumn sky, that particular quality of light that only comes when Earth tilts away from sun. And in this luminous hour, across the open fields beyond my neighborhood, a murmuration of birds appeared. They might have been starlings or grackles, I couldn’t tell in the darkening air. But their identity mattered less than their movement, their iridescent bodies writing and rewriting themselves against the sky.

I watched, transfixed, as hundreds of individual birds became one fluid organism, swooping and banking in perfect synchrony. No leader directed their movements; instead, each bird seemed to know only the bird beside it. Yet together they painted something impossible on the evening sky. They occupied what felt like a liminal space, suspended between heaven and earth.

The murmuration reminded me that nature teaches in many ways. During my recovery, I had only Maximus to watch, his steady presence outside my window marking time while my body slowly mended. We were strange companions then – both of us changing in our own necessary ways.

Now, years later, the diamond patterns on his bark seem familiar. Those crisscrossing ridges and furrows mapping years of growth, adaptation, survival. In our quiet conversations, I’ve traced those patterns with my eyes, reading history like braille. This ash has weathered decades of these cycles. He knows the difference between what matters and what doesn’t.

As I write this, preparing for another winter with Maximus standing sentinel outside my window, I find comfort in his familiar wisdom. The quiet months ahead are not empty but are pregnant with possibility. Beneath bark and soil, in the invisible realm of dormancy, next year’s leaves are already being imagined.

Sometimes I wonder if trees can sense the weight of human attention, the quality of desperate hope projected onto their branches. I like to think Maximus knew he was helping, that his steady presence was intentional, a kind of arboreal compassion. When the wind moves through his bare branches now, it sounds like whispers, like encouragement, like a friend saying: “See? We made it through another season. Keep going!”

So, in this time when leaves fall and light grows precious, I’m a grateful student learning to read the world differently again. The annual undressing no longer speaks only of loss, but of courage. The courage to let go, to stand naked before winter, to trust that revelation and renewal come wrapped in honesty.

Next spring, when the tree clothes itself again in green, I’ll greet each new leaf as a small resurrection. But for now, in this season of beautiful bareness, we will stand together, two friends who understand how much sky there is when the leaves are gone.

—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.

Leave a comment

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane

Two days ago was the anniversary, three years since my accident. Three years since something broke that I thought might never mend. Not just bone and vertebrae, though those too. Something more essential, the sense that my body was a place I could trust, that the world was a place I could move through freely, that tomorrow would reliably resemble today in the ways that matter.

I’ve learned to meet these anniversaries by doing what I always do. Driving to the barn, tending the horses, moving through my morning ritual. There’s something about keeping my hands busy, about being with animals who don’t know anything about anniversaries or the weight certain dates carry.

This time, driving to the barn in the cold Colorado dawn, the world offered me everything it had.

The geese announced themselves before I saw them, their unmistakable honking cutting through the truck’s heater hum. A whole gaggle loitering by the roadside, their gossip rising like steam in the cold air. They barely shifted as I passed, just tracked me with their dark eyes, unbothered, at home in their bodies in a way I remember envying. In a way I’m becoming again.

Their calls faded as the road curved toward the cornfields, and that’s when the morning revealed its next gift: the elk again. A bull and his cow, massive and deliberate, their breath making the same mist as the geese but heavier, more substantial. Great plumes rising from their nostrils as they crossed the mowed stubble. I slowed to watch, and for a moment we breathed the same air, shared the same impossible fact of continuing.

The cold had sharpened everything - edges, colors, sounds. Even the mountains seemed closer, their peaks catching first light while clouds rolled over like slow thoughts. As I pulled up to the barn, movement overhead drew my gaze: two bald eagles circling on thermals I couldn’t see but knew were there, their white heads and tails brilliant against all that blue.

Yesterday it had been sandhill cranes that stopped me mid-step. First their calls, that prehistoric rolling purr that makes you look up no matter what you’re doing. Then I saw them, a long line scribing their ancient path south, their bodies improbably graceful for something so large. Such a rare sight here, such a gift to witness their migration. I stood in the pasture watching until they disappeared, feeling that particular joy that comes from encountering something wild and unplanned.

These days I notice I’m excited by things again. Not just moved or grateful, but genuinely excited. That bright anticipation I thought might have broken along with everything else three years ago. A big part of happiness, I’m learning, is being excited. It’s been so long since I woke up curious about what the day might bring, eager to see how it will unfold. Not just wondering what might fly overhead or bloom unexpectedly, but feeling that old familiar pull toward the hours ahead. The conversations, the small discoveries, the ordinary moments that might surprise me. That feeling of possibility that makes you want to get out of bed, not because you have to, but because you want to see what happens next.

Even the crickets know something about holding on to joy while you can. Their evening chorus has quieted now that the cold has come closer. No longer the full-throated summer symphony but something more tentative, precious. When I come home after dark, their trill is softer, slower, like they’re counting out their last days note by note. I stand on the porch listening, knowing this they will be gone soon, replaced by winter’s deeper silence. But for now they’re still here, still singing. They make me smile.

This is my reality, I thought. This moment, this body, this morning, this life. Theirs. Mine.

But threaded through the joy: I still think of Deus, my old horse. Especially on these anniversaries. The way grief doesn’t fade just because time passes or new joys arrive. The cold morning made me think of him. How this time of year his coat would thicken for winter, how he’d stand with his rump to the wind, how he’d call to me across the frozen ground. How we couldn’t find our way back to each other after that day. I don’t know what pasture he grazes now, whose hands touch that growing winter coat.

I said a prayer for him there between the circling eagles and the horses below. Mostly for him - that someone sees his worth, and keeps him warm. But also for myself, for this particular kind of sorrow that comes from loving something you can’t protect forever.

Even a year ago, feeling excited about anything seemed impossible. Not the grief, the grief felt permanent, etched into me like the date itself. But this? This brightness, this anticipation of what each morning might bring? That seemed like a story other people got to tell.

Writing this journal has been part of it, these weekly returnings to the page. Some weeks about the aspens and aging, about bearing witness. Other weeks about the way grief and joy braid together, inseparable. About the geometry of healing, how it’s never the straight line you expect. About learning that showing up is sometimes all we can do, and sometimes everything.

What I didn’t expect was how the writing would work alongside the landscape to unlock something I thought was gone. How watching geese gossip and cranes trace their ancient paths would slowly teach me about freedom again. Real freedom. Not the kind I had before, when I didn’t know how quickly a life could change, but something deeper. The freedom that comes from knowing exactly how fragile everything is and choosing to love it anyway.

I think I feel more unshackled now than I did before the fall. It’s a paradox I’m still learning to understand. Having been caged, by pain, by fear, by the sudden smallness of my world. I know what it means to wake up already defeated, to move through days like walking through deep water. Which makes this new lightness extraordinary.

Sometimes I wonder: will this last? Will I keep waking up happy? Will the excitement hold? But maybe that’s the wrong question. Maybe the gift isn’t in the lasting but in the knowing. Knowing that if I once found my way back here, I can find it again.

Three years ago, everything broke. Today, I’m not fixed - I’m transformed. Not despite the breaking, but because of it. Because I learned that showing up each morning is its own kind of prayer. Because the Colorado landscape became my teacher. Because even in grief for what’s lost, there’s room for this wild anticipation of what’s next.

The crickets are still singing tonight. And so am I.

—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.

Leave a comment

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane

The hummingbirds have turned frantic, where they once drifted through the garden. Now they attack the salvias with an urgency that borders on desperation. They guard the blooms like small jeweled warriors, their territorial battles escalating as August deepens toward its end.

One moment of stillness, a male perched on the fence post, throat flashing ruby in the late summer light, and then the dive-bombing begins again. Chase and counter-chase, the high-pitched chittering of tiny missiles protecting what will soon mean nothing to them at all.

They are preparing to leave everything: these salvias they’ve claimed and fought over and returned to a hundred times this summer, they will abandon them without backward glances. The bee balm that sustained them in June, the specific branch of the blue spruce where the female rests between feeding runs, all of it will become geography they’ll never see again.

Some will fly nonstop across the Gulf of Mexico, their wings beating impossible rhythms through darkness over open water. They will trade this known world for the faith that somewhere south, there will be flowers.

I watch them from my deck and can’t quite fathom it... we are creatures who make homes and make them the center of everything. We choose paint colors and arrange furniture and hang pictures on walls until these spaces become their own small gravity, holding our lives in place. We know which floorboard creaks, which window sticks, where the afternoon light falls on Tuesdays. We fill these spaces with the accumulated evidence of our staying: books we might reread, dishes inherited from grandmothers, tools we’ll need someday. We build not just shelter but significance. We make ourselves belong.

And here are these birds, no bigger than my thumb, weighing less than a penny, who will leave it all on instinct.

There’s no weighing of options happening in my garden. No careful tallying of what might be lost against what might be kept. No late-night wondering if the journey is worth it. If home might be enough. They simply know. When the day length shifts and their internal clocks trigger, they go. The garden that fed them all summer becomes instantly irrelevant. The flowers are just something that used to be important.

They carry nothing with them but their own small bodies, a trust that has kept them alive for millions of years. A certainty deeper than thought: leave, and the world will provide what’s needed. We’ve lost that kind of faith, if we ever had it. We can leave places easily enough. We pack bags and lock doors and drive away. But we never leave with just ourselves. We bring our whole lives with us, carrying our certainties in suitcases

The hummingbirds practice a different kind of departure. One that chooses instinct, that abandons the carefully constructed center of everything because something deeper says it’s time. Maybe that’s the difference between us. Their wisdom is in wings. Ours is in walls.

Nothing they make here will last. No nests at this latitude will survive the winter that’s coming. Even those tiny cups woven from spider silk and plant fibers in May, architectural miracles, will be torn apart by wind and weather. Next spring, if they return, they will start over completely, as though this place holds no memory. They invest everything in their own bodies, their own wings, their own capacity to move. Their home is not a place. It’s a direction.

Watching them, I think about the weight of what I carry. Not just the furniture and framed photos, but the belief that staying equals stability, that roots must go deep to matter. Maybe there’s another way to be held by the world? Alas, I know, even as I wonder, that I don’t think I could ever trust the way they do, with my whole body, with nothing but instinct and the beat of my own wings. I’m invested too much in permanence, and in the comfort of my familiar rooms. But perhaps I can learn to hold things a little more lightly. To build my nests and tend them, knowing nothing stays exactly as it is. To root deep while welcoming what each season brings.

Soon the hummingbirds will leave, and I will stay. I marvel at these tiny impossible creatures with no maps, no backup plans, no way to know if this year’s route will be safe. And yet they will all go. Three grams of determined life, launching themselves into the unknown because the season says it’s time.

I do wonder, if something that small can trust that deeply, maybe my own leaps don’t require as much certainty as I think.

—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.

Leave a comment

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane

Last week I wrote about learning to burn with the aspens, about finding the courage to blaze without apology. About embracing peak as performance, as honesty, as the fullest expression of what we are. I meant every word. But this week, standing at the mirror in unforgiving morning light, I’m confronted with a different truth about peak. One the aspens don’t have to reckon with.

Their glory and their ending arrive together, perfectly timed. But here I stand, and the mirror tells a different story than the fire in my chest.

I trace the lines that bracket my mouth. They weren’t there five years ago. Or perhaps they were, but faint enough to be deniable, to be erased with the right expression or the right light or the simple act of looking away. Now they stay. They deepen. The skin at my jawline has begun its slow migration south, obeying gravity’s patient insistence. The texture has changed too. No longer that smooth drum-tightness but something softer, more giving. More honest, maybe. More like surrender. Aging does this to beauty. Not all at once, but in increments you can track with your fingertips.

This is the top, I think. The crest of the hill. Not the summit I imagined. No moment of arrival, no sense of triumph. But simply the place where the path stops climbing and begins, imperceptibly at first, to descend. The aspens turn gold and then release. But I turned fifty in December, and there will be no spring reversal. Only more lines, more softening, more loosening. Only what comes next, which I can’t see yet around the corner.

The cottonwoods along Lefthand Creek are dropping their leaves now, the gold fading to brown, the branches revealing themselves. I see them when I go to the horses, this small copse in its quietening, and I feel a kinship that has nothing to do with burning bright. The aspens in the mountains had their moment. The traffic came, the cameras clicked, the wonder was witnessed. Now the cottonwoods by the creek stand in their own essential quiet, preparing for winter. And I stand at my mirror, watching my face prepare for its own kind of bareness. The stripping away of what was, the exposure of what remains.

I have said all the right things to myself. That aging is a privilege denied to many. That these lines are evidence of laughter, of fifty years of squinting into sunlight and crying and recovering and living fully. That beauty culture is a trap, that youth worship is patriarchal harm, that I contain multitudes beyond the architecture of my face. I believe these things. I do. And yet.

And yet when I look in the mirror, I see more of a stranger housing my familiar consciousness. I am still me inside. Still the girl who was twenty, thirty, forty, but the face that meets the world has shifted, has changed the terms of engagement. There’s a grief in this that I wasn’t prepared for. A grief that isn’t about loss but about transformation. The grief of becoming unrecognizable to yourself.

Near the creek, the grasses stand in shades of gold and rust, already half-asleep. I pass them each early morning where I ride my horse in October’s chill. They catch the light differently now, not green and vital but burnished, papery, done. I have flowers at home still, a few late bloomers I’m tending. But the wild grasses know better. They’ve already let go.

The world sees me differently now. I watch it happen in small increments: the invisibility that creeps in at the edges, the way certain kinds of attention have evaporated like morning dew. This too is supposedly something I should celebrate. Freedom from the male gaze, liberation from objectification. And perhaps it is. But right now, standing here in this threshold moment, I feel only the loss. I know what I’m supposed to feel, that grace and acceptance everyone writes about, the courage of letting go. But what I actually feel is harder: the creeping suspicion that I’ve tipped over the edge. That the blaze might be behind me and I missed it somehow, didn’t recognize it for what it was. That I’m watching the beginning of something I can’t reverse.

And here’s what makes it harder: we don’t talk about this. Not really. Not honestly. Women my age are supposed to have this figured out by now, to have found that grace, that wisdom. So we smile and say the right things and suffer this particular grief alone, each of us at our own mirror, each of us thinking we’re the only one who hasn’t learned to accept it yet. The silence around this particular grief is its own kind of invisibility.

The geese are gathering over Dodds lake, their haunting calls filling the crisp air. At the creek crossing, the cottonwoods stand quieter each day, their leaves scattered on the ground. Everything knows what to do with the changing season. The ancient instructions, the internal compass. But I have no map for this particular territory. No wisdom that feels true in my body. Only platitudes that bounce off the surface of my struggle.

Is there grace in this? Everyone says there must be. Grace in aging, grace in accepting, grace in surrendering to time’s inevitable work. But I right now I cannot find it yet. I am still in the witnessing, the daily confrontation with change. I am still standing at the mirror, tracing the deepening grooves beside my mouth, watching my face reveal time’s passage,

Maybe the grace comes later. Maybe it comes after months or years of standing here, of bearing witness. Or maybe grace isn’t the point at all. Maybe the point is simply this: I am here. Still riding out to the horses. Still standing at the mirror. Still feeling the full weight of this transformation without looking away. That’s not peace. But it’s not running away. And perhaps that’s where something begins. Not yet in finding the answer, but in the willingness to stay.

—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.

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As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane

It happened while I wasn’t paying attention, the way the most significant shifts always seem to. I thought I was watching carefully, noting each gradual shift as autumn moved through its paces. One day the aspens were holding their color close, wearing just touches of gold at their edges. Then suddenly, though it couldn’t have been sudden, though it must have taken days I somehow missed. The mountains were ablaze.

This is what catches me off guard again and again about living here, how quickly things move in the Colorado high country. Where autumn elsewhere might linger and meander through October like a conversation with nowhere urgent to be, here it sprints. The window between first blush and full blaze feels impossibly narrow, measured in days rather than weeks. Part of me wants to slow it down, to ask the aspens to hold their brilliance just a little longer. To let me adjust to each shade before rushing toward the next. But the aspens aren’t waiting for permission.

There’s something almost violent about peak foliage when you’re not expecting it, something that can disrupt rather than decorate. Those perfect early autumn days I’d been so enjoying, with their honey light and quiet mornings. Their invitation to settle in and pay attention, suddenly feel like a prelude to something far more demanding. Peak simply arrives, whether you’re prepared or not. It doesn’t whisper patient questions into willing ears; it shouts declarations that leave no room for response. A chorus of color so loud it stops traffic on the mountain roads.

And people do stop. They flood the high passes with cameras and wonder, creating pilgrimages to witness what the aspens have decided to reveal. It’s both beautiful and slightly desperate, this collective human rush to see the spectacle before it passes. We know even as we’re looking that we’re witnessing something already dying, that the very intensity we’re chasing is the tree’s last urgent act before surrender.

I find myself torn. Part of me resents the disruption, misses those gentler days when fall was still unfolding in whispers. After months of relentless summer heat, those early autumn days felt like relief. Cool mornings, softer light, air you could finally breathe deeply. There was something manageable about that early autumn rhythm. Sustainable, generous with time, allowing space for reflection between each small change. That gentleness is something you can inhabit. You can build a life around gradual change, arrange your days around its measured presence.

But peak? Peak is performance. It’s maximum intensity compressed into an impossibly brief window. You can’t settle into peak; you can only witness it, chase it, try to catch it before it vanishes. Where early autumn invited me to linger, peak creates urgency. Where those quiet days felt like a meandering conversation, peak feels like last words before a door closes.

From my window, I can see how the gold creeps down the mountainside each day, moving from the high peaks toward the valley floor like a slow-motion wave. It follows the cold, this transformation, responding to night temperatures with the precision of ancient code. There’s intelligence in the timing even if there’s excess in the display. The trees somehow know collectively, mysteriously when to let go, when to stop holding on to what summer gave them and commit fully to what autumn demands.

Yet watching the aspens blaze against the evergreen backdrop of Clear Creek County, I have to ask: what if this isn’t disruption but honesty? What if this is simply what trees actually are when nothing is held in reserve? All those weeks of careful transformation leading to this: the unguarded truth. This explosion of gold and scarlet. Nothing held back, full expression before the end, complete commitment to being seen.

There’s a kind of courage in this. Not just about patience and letting go, but about boldness. About being seen without apology. Maybe the most honest thing you can do is abandon restraint entirely. To be loud when you have something to say, to blaze when you have fire in your belly, trusting that intensity and truth matter more than comfort or duration.

And in this season of my life I’m learning I can do both. The gentleness that wants to hold on carefully, to notice particular shapes and colors - and the fire that’s willing to be seen, to speak up, to burn bright when it matters. Maybe they’re not opposites. Maybe paying attention this closely is its own kind of strength.

I am indeed he person who catches falling leaves, who brings home interesting rocks and dried flowers, who arranges natural treasures on windowsills. But lately I’ve heard a call that has made a home in my chest, teaching me what the aspens know: there’s a time for holding carefully, and a time to burn without apology.

The aspens will hold this gold for maybe two more weeks, maybe less. Then the leaves will fall, the branches will stand bare, the mountains quiet again, the roads empty. For now, though, the mountains are on fire. And I’m learning to burn with them. To let the work matter enough to risk the intensity. To trust the season knows its time.

—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.

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As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane

No one warned me about the summers.

Almost six years ago, when we flew from California to consider Boulder as our new home, I spent the entire visit mentally preparing myself for winter. Could I handle real cold? Would I survive actual snow?

We deliberately chose to visit in November, we needed to know what winter actually felt like before we committed to this place. We walked the neighborhoods in the morning chill, breath visible in the air, testing ourselves. The cold had a serious nip to it, real cold that made my then California lungs catch. The kind of cold that reminded me of Europe, a place we’d left far behind us. But then the sun came out. That relentless Colorado sunshine changed everything, and by lunchtime we’d peeled off our coats and were walking in shirtsleeves. Boulder gets over 300 days of sunshine a year, someone told us proudly, and I could see why they bragged about it. Even in late November, the light was generous, powerful, warming everything it touched.

The locals just smiled when I asked about winter. “You’ll be fine,” they said. “It’s not what you think.”

They were right about that. Winter here is a revelation - bright, blue, manageable. The snow melts quickly between storms. The sun is powerful even in December, even in January. I can walk outside on a winter morning without my California bones protesting, sometimes without even needing a coat. Yes, February and March can be brutal. The cold that lingers, the snow and ice that won’t quit, but even those months have their bright days, their sudden thaws, their moments of unexpected warmth.

But August? No one mentioned August.

No one told me about the days when the thermometer pushes past 100°F and the air turns to something solid you have to push through. No one explained that the nights would stay hot. Truly hot, so there’s no reprieve, no cool morning to water the garden before the sun climbs high. The heat doesn’t break. It accumulates, day after day, until everything and everyone is simply enduring.

I’m learning, though. I’m adapting. Maybe I’m becoming more native.

The garden certainly is. Or rather, the plants that were always native are showing me how it’s done, while the ones I brought with foolish hopes are teaching me hard lessons about belonging.

The Russian sage doesn’t even seem to notice the heat. Its silver-gray leaves, covered in fine hairs that I used to think were just decorative, are actually tiny parasols. Each hair creating shade, trapping a thin layer of cooler air against the leaf surface. The plant looks like it’s been dusted with frost even in 100-degree heat. Its deep taproot, the one I cursed when I tried to plant it because I had to dig so far down, is somewhere cool and damp while everything at the surface bakes.

The lavender has curled its leaves into tight scrolls, reducing the surface area exposed to the punishing sun. When I first saw this, I panicked. Was it dying? But no. It’s conserving. It’s waiting. It knows something I’m becoming more accustomed to: that survival sometimes means getting smaller, doing less, holding on until conditions improve.

The penstemons, those true Colorado natives, have already set their seed and gone dormant. They flowered in June when I wasn’t paying close enough attention, too excited about the lushness of late spring. Now they’re just brown stalks. I used to think plants that went dormant in summer were giving up. Now I understand they’re succeeding. They’ve completed their whole life cycle before the worst of the heat arrives. They’re not dying. They’re done. They’ll be back next spring while I’m still shaking off winter, ready to go again.

I understand this now, in my body. I’ve stopped trying to work in the garden during the heat of the day, learned to stay inside between noon and six the way everyone here does in August. I move through the morning in slow motion, doing only what’s essential.

I water deeply when I do, slow soaks that reach down to where the roots actually live. Even the native plants need this in August. I’ve learned that “native” doesn’t mean “no care” - it just means they’re playing the same game as me, adapted to the same impossible conditions, speaking the same language of survival. They still need help. We all do.

The bees know too.

When I checked the hives last week, as early in the day as possible; the only bearable time, I expected to find them full of honey. August should be a time of abundance, the final big nectar flow before fall. But the frames were lighter than they should be. Not empty, but not full either. And the hive was loud with the sound of thousands of wings beating in unison.

They weren’t out foraging. They were working together to cool the hive.

Worker bees stood at the entrance, fanning frantically with their wings. Others were making trip after trip to my neighbors pond for water, bringing it back to spread droplets through the hive. The temperature inside a hive needs to stay around 95°F for the brood to develop properly. Outside, it was already approaching that by mid-morning, and the real heat of the day hadn’t even begun.

Every bee that spent the day cooling the hive was a bee that couldn’t gather nectar. Every drop of water they carried back was a trip that didn’t bring pollen. Survival first. Abundance later. I hope.

I’ve been doing the same thing, I realized, standing there in the early light watching my bees work so hard just to maintain. I’ve been in survival mode all month. The creative projects have stalled. The long walks with my dog which I love have shortened to quick loops before breakfast. I’m not gathering much either - not experiences, not inspiration, not even tomatoes from the garden because I forgot to water them deeply enough and they split in the heat.

I’m just trying to keep everything cool enough to make it through.

There’s something humbling about this. Something honest. When I moved here, I thought adaptation meant toughening up, learning to love the cold, becoming a skier or a snowshoer. I didn’t realize it would mean learning to go dormant. To do less. To stop fighting against conditions I can’t change and instead just... wait.

The landscape here itself seems to understand this - the whole Front Range holds its breath in August, waiting for September’s relief, for the golden light of fall, for the first snow that will reset everything.

Each summer I continue learning this language - that a brown garden in August is a realistic garden, an honest garden. That some years, keeping the hive alive matters more than filling the supers with honey.

But for now, we’re all just surviving. Maybe this is what becoming native means. Not thriving in every season, but knowing which season is for thriving and which is just for enduring. Knowing when to push and when to curl inward. Knowing that survival itself, in conditions like these, is a kind of flourishing.

The Russian sage could have told me this on day one. But I suppose I had to learn it the way everything here learns it - by living through an August. By feeling what 100-degree days really mean. By understanding in my bones that sometimes the most sophisticated response to difficulty is simply to wait it out.

—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.

Leave a comment

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane

There is a moment each year when the earth exhales, releasing the held breath of summer’s intensity into something deeper, more contemplative. It arrives not with fanfare but with subtlety. A coolness in the morning air that carries scents you’d forgotten, and a quality of light that seems to remember things the blazing summer sun had burned away. This year, it came precisely with the equinox, as if nature herself were keeping promises made to the turning earth.

I felt it first in that predawn drive, when mist hung over the hay fields like dreams made visible. The cows stood as dark shapes in that ethereal gray, nearly ghosts themselves, while somewhere beyond the veil the sun prepared its daily resurrection. When it finally broke through, the light wasn’t summer’s harsh insistence but something gentler - honey-colored, forgiving, painting the world in watercolors rather than oils. There’s a quality to autumn light that makes philosophers of us all, as if the angle of the sun somehow tilts our perspective toward deeper truths.

But it was the elk that truly announced fall’s arrival, appearing like ancient messengers returning from some far country. Thirty strong, they materialized near my barn again where the horses graze, as if they’d always been there, as if summer had been merely an intermission in their eternal presence. The sight stopped my breath. These magnificent creatures who carry wilderness in their very bearing, who remind us that we share this land with beings far more attuned to its rhythms than we.

Days later, their bull crossed my path with the nonchalance of royalty. Through the seven-foot corn, that golden maze still waiting for harvest, he moved like a living embodiment of autumn’s power. His antlers, impossibly massive, caught the light like branching cathedrals. How does he carry such weight? Not just the physical burden of that crown, but the deeper weight of leadership, of protection, of responsibility to his herd. There’s something profound in watching him bugle toward his family, that primal call echoing across fields that have heard such sounds for millennia. He carries forward something ancient, something that connects this moment to every autumn that has ever been.

The robin, too, has returned, though where these red-breasted wanderers disappear during Colorado’s blazing summers remains one of nature’s quiet mysteries. Do they retreat to higher elevations, seeking coolness in mountain meadows? Do they follow some internal compass to places we’ll never know? Their return feels like a small miracle, a reminder that not all departures are permanent, that some absences are merely preparations for more meaningful homecomings.

From my window, Mount Meeker stands transformed, wearing its first blanket of snow like robes of ceremony. It rises with the dignity of Mount Fuji, that perfect cone suggesting permanence in a world of constant change. The snow signals winter’s approach. A thought that brings both anticipation and a curious reluctance. Part of me wants to hold onto these perfect autumn days, this golden pause between summer’s intensity and winter’s demands. Yet there’s beauty in the inexorable march of seasons, in knowing that each has its gifts and purpose.

The geese understand this. They gather now in gentle waves, their numbers swelling each day as if responding to some celestial summons. Soon their formations will darken the sky, their honking calls a soundtrack to migration that stirs something primitive in the human heart. There’s profound comfort in their predictable return, these creatures who navigate by stars and magnetic fields and instincts honed across countless generations. They ground me in the certainty that some things endure, that patterns persist even as individual moments slip away.

And what of my own transitions in this season of change? I find myself wondering what I’m releasing as autumn asks me to examine what I carry. The past weeks have brought an unexpected lightness, an engagement with the world that had been absent for so many years, as if something essential had finally stirred awake. Perhaps it’s nature working her quiet magic, the way cooler air seems to clear not just the summer haze but something in my own spirit. Or maybe it’s simply that autumn invites introspection in ways the demanding seasons cannot.

This awakening feels connected to fall’s particular way of marking time. There’s something about this season that makes us conscious of time’s passage. Not in the frantic way of spring’s urgent becoming or summer’s relentless growth, but with a contemplative awareness that allows for both gratitude and gentle release. All around me, the trees begin their slow surrender, their edges just touched with the colors that were there all along, hidden beneath summer’s green insistence. Scarlets and golds are beginning to show themselves like secrets on the verge of being told, reminding us that sometimes beauty requires letting go.

Watching this transformation, I’m reminded of my own circling patterns. In this season of return, where the elk and geese and robins are all finding their way back - I too feel called back to deeper currents when the surface heat subsides. But this year, something has shifted. There’s a willingness in me now that wasn’t there before, an openness to what the world might offer. Where once I might have pulled inward with the shortening days, I find myself leaning toward connection, toward participating in the season’s quiet invitations.

Maybe this is what wild creatures understand in their bones, that some seasons call us not to retreat but to show up differently, to inhabit our place in the larger story with new intention. The geese don’t hesitate at the vast distances they must travel; they simply answer what calls them. In autumn’s measured pace, in its patient unfolding, I’m rediscovering my own readiness to answer, to step forward into whatever conversation this season wants to have.

—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.

Leave a comment

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane