Hello, Prairiewoods friends! I hope you are faring well today and enjoying this extended weekend. Spring is unfolding beautifully at Prairiewoods, and I am excited to share it with you. Prairiewoods and Metro Catholic Outreach (MCO) have been partnering since 2014 with our shared vegetable garden, the Green Prairie Garden, located on the land at Prairiewoods.…
AAAWWWHOOO AAAWWWHOOO Who cooks for you?? Still Still Blink Swoooooop Clutch, hold, hold, hold Swivel to peer, search, scan AAAWWWHOOO AAAWWWHOOO Who cooks for you?? Still Still Ruffle Gaze Swivel If you guessed it was the magnificent Owl that captured my imagination in last week’s blog entry, you were right! “Who cooks for you?” is…
Hello, Prairiewoods friends! My favorite days are the days when I fall in love over and over and over again. With people’s faces, their smiles, with the bees drinking water at the fountain or the prairie grasses dancing with the wind, a dog’s gruff bark, the feeling of love emanating from deep within me. I haven’t…
Five years ago, my husband and I bought our first home, relishing the joys of our own walls, our own lawn, our own silence. And for five springs, I’m ashamed to say, we have rushed through our lives, barely aware of the natural world that also calls this plot of land home. (We only seemed…
“Love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.” —James Hillman, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 2012 “Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can, No need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of…
My neighbors are wild. They are often up half the night. They sing at the top of their lungs in the wee hours of the morning. They tear my hostas right out of the ground. One neighbor walked the perimeter of my yard and then proceeded to matter-of-factly pee on the side of my house.…
Hello, Prairiewoods friends! Last Saturday I was out at Palisades-Kepler State Park. It is a place I feel at home with, a land of love, wisdom and magic. The Spring Beauty wildflowers are in bloom, carpeting the land in utter delight. They are so abundant, so joyful in their dancing, that I could not help but…
A great blessing, among many, of Prairiewoods is the honor of walking with people in discovering nature as threshold into deeper awareness of God. In these days of pandemic—a.k.a. pan-deepening at Prairiewoods—we witness young and old of all faiths, race, economic status drawn to the intriguing woods, wetland and prairie. As John Muir, father of…
“We are pregnant with a new earth. All of us. The virus is beginning the contractions. Shedding light on our fears as we get closer to the birth. What we are in the process of letting go of What we will take with us. What we will leave behind.” —Kali Quinn, “Learning about the process…
“Conversation is perhaps our greatest hope not only for healing the rifts in human understanding but also for restoring and reinspiring our relationship with the natural world, which is our first and most profound home. Care of the world is always essential, and care arises from conversation.” —Thomas Dean, Introduction, Tallgrass Conversations: In Search of…