On the last Wednesday of every month, I serve up a potpourri of advice, inspiration and other tidbits I've come across in recent weeks. This month -- this week, in fact -- finds us commemorating both Earth Day and Arbor Day. In the spirit of those two observances, here's a collection of quotes about nature and the planet on which we live.

As a bonus, I'm including at the end of this post, some of my favorite nature shots from our recent visit to the Southwest.

Love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need -- if only we had the eyes to see.
-- Edward Abbey

Find your place on the planet, dig in, and take responsibility from there.
​-- Gary Snyder

The Earth was small, light blue, and so touchingly alone, our home that must be defended like a holy relic. The Earth was absolutely round. I believe I never knew what the word round meant until I saw Earth from space.
-- Alexey Leonov, Russian cosmonaut

The universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not objects to be exploited. Everything has its own voice. Thunder and lightning and stars and planets, flowers, birds, animals, trees -- all of these have voices, and they constitute a community of existence that is profoundly related.
​-- Thomas Berry

The earth is a living thing. Mountains speak, trees sing, lakes can think, pebbles have a soul, rocks have power.
-- Henry Crow Dog

When I get sick of what men do, I have only to walk a few steps in another direction to see what spiders do.  Or what weather does. This sustains me very well indeed.
-- E.B. White, One Man's Meat

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature -- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter.
​-- Rachel Carson

Nature repairs her ravages -- but not all. The uptorn trees are not rooted again; the parted hills are left scarred; if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same as the old, and the hills underneath their green vesture bear the marks of the past rending. To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair.
-- George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

What is the use of a house if you  haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?
-- Henry David Thoreau

Loyd: "It has to do with keeping things in balance . . . It's like the spirits have made a deal with us . . . The spirits have been good enough to let us live here and use the utilities, and we're saying: . . . We appreciate the rain, we appreciate the sun, we appreciate the deer we took . . . You've gone to a lot of trouble, and we'll try to be good guests."

Codi: "Like a note you'd send somebody after you stayed in their house?"

Loyd: "Exactly like that. 'Thanks for letting me sleep on your couch. I took some beer out of the refrigerator, and I broke a coffee cup. Sorry. I hope it wasn't your favorite one.' "
-- Barbara Kingsolver, ​Animal Dreams

And now, for a little more nature appreciation . . . 

It's National Poetry Month! You didn't think I'd let that slip by unnoticed, did you? What better way to pass the time while waiting for spring's late arrival than to read—or write—a bit of poetry? Short on inspiration? Look no further than the things you encounter every day.

​That's the advice of this week's guest, Cristina Trapani-Scott. I first met Cristina fourteen years ago at Bear River Writers' Conference. After the conference, we formed a writers' group with another writer we'd met there. The result was the Sister Scribes, an Ann Arbor-based group that eventually added three more members and became a source of support and motivation for all of us.

​​An author, educator, and former journalist, Cristina now lives and writes in Northern Colorado. Her debut chapbook collection of poems, The Persistence of a Bathing Suit, published in 2017 by Finishing Line Press, explores the moments that fill the space between surviving a breast cancer diagnosis and accepting the inevitability of change and uncertainty. Cristina's work has appeared in the Patterson Literary Review, Hip Mama Magazine, the Driftwood, Bigger Than They Appear: An Anthology of Very Short Poems, and Sweet Lemons 2: International Writings with a Sicilian Accent. She holds an MFA in poetry and fiction from Spalding University and currently teaches creative writing and composition online.

​April is National Poetry Month and each year it marks a whole month of celebrating this little thing that I found myself drawn to quite by accident more than 20 years ago. 

​I am not one of those poets that knew from a young age that I would be writing poetry. I don’t recall ever being thoroughly introduced to poetry as a kid beyond the handful of jingles I read in Shel Silverstein’s books and perhaps a Shakespeare sonnet. I don’t recall writing a poem until well after I completed my first round of undergrad studies. Still, even before I put marks on paper with the intention of calling them poems, I believe on some level I was aware of the poetry in ordinary things. 

​My mother, of course, made me hyper-aware of the ordinary world around me. She is an artist, and she always finds beauty in the most ordinary things. Her collection of garlic skins scattered on the top ledge of her china cabinet is a testament to this. I don’t have a physical collection of ordinary things like she does. I work in words. She works in paint. I do, in large part because of her, see the poetry in ordinary things.

​ I am aware of the poetry in a baby bird that had fallen from its nest in our backyard when I was a child. I am aware of the poetry in how my mom, my siblings, and I nurtured it by feeding it through a dropper with a solution a nearby vet had suggested. I am aware of the poetry in how the bird grew feathers and flew and perched on a curtain rod in our living room while our Brittany Spaniel, resorting to his instinct, stood on point.

​I am aware of the poetry in the way my Nonno so attentively showed my brother and me how to play ground darts in the backyard on Father’s Day not long before Nonno died from a heart attack. I am aware of poetry in the way my brother and I used to turn bricks over in our walkway to collect roly poly bugs and watch them curl into tiny balls as we touched them. 

​I teach creative writing at a college where students primarily are headed into business, technology, or health fields. They take my class as an elective. Many of my students have very little, if any, background in creative writing, let alone poetry (much like me when I first became curious about this thing called poetry). The first half of the class is focused on fiction, which inevitably more of the students are comfortable with. Halfway through the eight-week course, though, we shift to poetry. Many of the students admit early that they just never understood poetry, that they just never thought about writing poetry. My goal as their instructor isn’t to get them to know everything there is to know about poetry in four weeks. My goal in that four weeks is to get them to see, like my mother helped me see, that poetry has been with them their whole lives, that poetry is in the everyday things they do and see.  

​Poet Stephen Dunn said in an NPR interview, “We live with the little things much more than the large things.” I believe that to the core. I believe that has always been where I have found poetry. Even with the poetry I read, I am drawn most to the way a poet works the small things like a sculptor works clay, pushes at them until they breathe those large things on the page.

​Sometimes, it’s easy to forget that those small things are the most important things. In their book The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry, Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux write, “And what are the ‘great’ poems about? The big subjects: death, desire, the nature of existence. They ask the big questions: Who are we? Why are we here? Where are we going? We find it difficult to believe those subjects, those questions, can be explored and contained in a poem about working at a fast food restaurant, a poem about our best friend, a poem about washing the dishes, tarring the roof, or taking a bus across town.” This is precisely where those questions are answered. This is precisely where I tell my students to search for the big things. We talk about poems that do this. 

One that has stuck with me for a long time is Sandra M. Gilbert’s poem “Remnant” from her collection Belongings, a title that in and of itself suggests small, ordinary things. In the poem Gilbert writes of a carpet remnant in her office.

Remember the leftover
square of carpet you
unfolded in my office thirteen
years ago, two years before
the deadly surgery? Remember
​

​The “you” the speaker refers to is a spouse who died unexpectedly in surgery. The carpet represents not just a physical remnant here. It points to the memory as a remnant. It points to how the spouse, too, is but a series of remnants anymore. This small, ordinary thing, the remnant, leaps into the big thing, loss.

​ U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins does a similar thing in a much lighter tongue and cheek moment with his poem “The Lanyard.” I use this example in my classes because I find humor to be a great way to break down preconceived notions my students inevitably come to class with about what they believe poetry has to be, and I know that many of my students have memories of twisting and tying little ribbons of plastic as gifts for parents. Of course, the poem isn’t simply about the ordinary act of tying a lanyard at camp. It’s about the big idea of how we love our mothers. 

​ So, during this National Poetry Month (and after) celebrate the poetry in the small, ordinary things, in the colors that swirl in the soap bubbles on the dishes stacked in the kitchen sink, in the child that lies on the couch with one leg dangling off the edge, in the ordinary banter between partners on a weekday evening. There is poetic treasure in the ordinary, and it’s waiting to be mined. 

​Find the poems that do this in books at your local bookstore, your local library, or at websites like www.poetryfoundation.org. Explore how they connect the ordinary to the extraordinary. Finally, make your own connections and see that poetry is most definitely not about the extraordinary but about the ordinary made extraordinary.

Where do you find art in the ordinary?

For a daily dose of inspiration, subscribe to the Academy of American Poets' Poem A Day email at https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem-day​.

​Sometimes the roads we travel take us back to crossroads that were pivotal in our past.  Sometimes they show us the way forward. 

​Both happened on our recent trip through the Southwest. Ray and I spent most of our time in the Tucson area, a place that has lingered, dreamlike, in a cranny of my memory for decades. Though I've made a couple of quick visits to Tucson in recent years, I hadn't spent any wandering-around time there since an unforgettable visit in my twenties. 

​It was 1976, and I was on a meandering road trip with my boyfriend. We'd driven from northern California to Los Angeles to visit his parents, then struck out across Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas before heading north to Oklahoma to see my family, venturing on to Kansas, and returning to California by way of Colorado. The stated purpose of the trip was to check out graduate schools in Arizona, Texas, and Kansas, but we planned the route to take in as many national parks, monuments and other nature-y points of interest as possible: Joshua Tree National Park, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Saguaro National Park, Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Mount Lemmon, Chiricahua National Monument, Cave Creek Canyon, White Sands National Monument, Carlsbad Caverns National Park, Big Bend National Park, Oklahoma's Great Salt Plains State Park, Rocky Mountain National Park, Dinosaur National Monument. 

​We spent our days hiking through cactus forests, bizarre rock formations, lush oases, meadows and more, stopping to raise binoculars or crawl on the ground in search of unusual insects. The assortment of critters boggled my mind—from the javelina that trotted across our campsite to the jewel-like cuckoo wasps and furry velvet ants that flitted and scurried around us.

​We slept out in the open—no tent—where we could watch the moon and stars and hear the night creatures. (Lucky for us, it wasn't the height of monsoon season.) Enthralled with the writings of Carlos Castaneda, I saw our surroundings as steeped in mystical power. As I contemplated the future I was heading into, I was sure it would include frequent visits to these enchanted places—as a scientist studying the flora and fauna, but also as a spiritual seeker. 

​Somehow, life took me in other directions. Or I should say, I made decisions that took me in other directions. And though I often thought of those places and their hold on me, I never found my way back. Until last month.

​​On this latest trip, Ray and I trekked through some of the places that had made such an impression on me more than forty years ago: Saguaro National Park, the Desert Museum, and Chiricahua National Monument, in addition to visiting sites where neither of us had been before--Sabino Canyon and Bisbee, to name a couple. 

​I expected to be wowed again by the landscape, with its unique array of plants and animals, and I was. What I didn't expect was the flash flood of memories and emotions that swept through me. I remembered the connection I'd once felt to the desert and how firmly I'd believed it would be an ongoing part of my life. I thought about the decisions I'd made that took me away from that vision, the places I wound up instead, and how easy it is for years to slip by while you're thinking, "Someday, I'll . . . "

​My musings could have been an exercise in regret; instead I made a conscious decision to use those memories as a tool to explore my feelings about the paths I've traveled, where they've led me, and where I still want to go. (I'm not just talking about geography here, you understand.)

​Putting myself back in my twenty-seven-year-old mind, I asked myself what excited me about the prospects ahead. What did I value in my vision of the future? Returning to my sixty-nine-year-old mind, I asked myself how much of that excitement and those values I still possess—even though I took a different route to them—and what I might still make space for in my life.

​My conclusions: At twenty-six, I prized my freedom: freedom to explore whatever captured my interest, freedom to live where I wanted, freedom to spend my days doing something rewarding. I took it as a given that my explorations would keep me close to nature. That's the part I lost for a time, when I spent long days cooped up in an office, in a big city.

​Now I'm living a close-to-nature existence again—not in the desert, but in another place that teems with wildlife, wildflowers, and woods—and I have my freedom back. When I think about where I want to go next, it's out to discover more wondrous places, not just to see and photograph them (though you can bet I'll do that), but also to linger long enough to experience the mystery of these places and let my spirit connect with theirs. 

​We’re back from our travels with loads of impressions and images to share in coming weeks.

​

​Today's topic: the Tucson Festival of Books, our first stop on the trip. I wrote at length about last year's festival, and I won't repeat all the details here. (But if you're curious, you're welcome to look back at that post.)

​​This was my third visit to the festival, but Ray's first. In previous years, I scurried from one end of the University of Arizona Mall to the other, trying to catch as many talks on writing and publishing as I could. It was almost like being back in college (without the exams, thank goodness). This time, I took a different tack, hoping to make the weekend fun for both of us rather than dragging Ray along to talks on topics that would make his eyes glaze over. (Besides, how many more Moleskin notebooks do I really need to fill with conference scribblings?)

​I scrolled through the long list of presentations and found several by mystery authors Ray enjoys, and because I'm always interested in other writers' insights, I knew I'd find their talks informative. 

​The festival's presentations are all free, but some require advance reservations—and those go quickly. We were lucky to snag tickets to "Setting the Bar in Mystery" by New York Times bestselling authors Greg Iles and Scott Turow. It was just plain fun to witness the interaction between the two authors, good friends who traded jibes as well as compliments. I was fascinated, too, to hear them describe their writing processes. Turow is methodical, treating writing like a day job. Iles, on the other hand, goes long stretches without writing—occupying himself with music and other interests—and then writes his books in marathon sessions, fueled by granola bars and Tab. (I hope he makes up for that with healthier habits during his non-writing periods!)

​We also made sure not to miss Michael Perry, described on his website as "New York Times Bestselling Author, Humorist, Singer/Songwriter, Intermittent Pig Farmer." I first discovered Michael's writing at the 2015 Tucson Festival of Books. I had only enough room in my luggage to bring back one book, and I also wanted find a gift for Ray. When I saw Michael's memoir, Truck: A Love Story, I knew I needed to look no further. After all, memoir is my favorite genre, and Ray's all in for anything automotive. 

​Perry's humorous—and heartfelt—accounts of rural Wisconsin life enchanted me, and when I heard him speak at last year's festival and then read another of his books, Roughneck Grace: Farmer Yoga, Creeping Codgerism, Apple Golf, and Other Brief Essays from On and Off the Back Forty, I became an even more faithful fan.

​​This year, he read from his latest book, Montaigne in Barn Boots: An Amateur Ambles Through Philosophy. As the blurb describes it, the book is a down-to-earth look at the ideas of a philosopher "ensconced in a castle tower overlooking his vineyard," channeled by a Midwestern American writing "in a room above the garage overlooking a disused pig pen." I can't wait to read it.

​​


​As in previous years, it was heartening to be in the company of more than 130,000 book lovers, to overhear conversations about books and authors and see people browsing through and actually reading books. 

But still weary and bleary from the nearly 2,000-mile drive, we could expect only so much of our brains. The festival's entertainment schedule of sixty-some performances offered restorative time-outs from nonstop literary engagement. ​

​We applauded pint-sized musicians, whooped it up with local clog dancers, the Saguaro Stompers, and ooh-ed and aah-ed at acrobatic feats.

​By the end of the weekend, we were inspired, entertained, enlightened, and ready to take on more of Tucson.