Terrain: “Poems and Gardens as Kind Companions”

A year into the pandemic, when everything was grim, Hannah, a friend who I knew from my time working at a farm in the Berkshires, called to ask if I would like to build an anthology of contemporary gardening poems. “People are taking such solace in gardening now,” she told me.

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Seattle Times - Digging my way out of climate grief

This winter there were moments when I wasn’t sure I was going to make it back into my garden. I wasn’t sure I wanted to, would have time, would care. I wasn’t sure it would ever stop raining.

After six of the warmest years ever recorded in California, after five years of record wildfires, amid the driest period in 1,200 years, this year’s record snowfall, its deluge after deluge of violent rain seemed more than the earth could take.

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CNN - Opinion: A Californian’s message to East Coasters struggling in smoke-filled air

CNN — What do you do when the air fills with smoke from wildfires?

Well, if you’re a New Yorker or East Coast person and this is new to you, just know that you’re joining a reality that people across the West have been facing for several years now, in increasing chapters. In my life, we’ve experienced worsening wildfires in California and fled smoke several times, as well as just making do with it sometimes hanging over our lives for weeks.

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LA Times - Opinion: How to dig your way out of climate grief

This winter there were moments when I wasn’t sure I was going to make it back into my garden. I wasn’t sure I wanted to, would have time, would care. I wasn’t sure it would ever stop raining. 

After six of the warmest years ever recorded in California, after five years of record wildfires, amid the driest period in 1,200 years, this year’s record snowfall, its deluge after deluge of violent rain seemed more than the earth could take.

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CNN - Opinion: The surprising antidote to burnout

CNN — I know they say that April is the cruelest month. But honestly, May, just before the school year ends, seems to be pretty wild, as well. How can everything on earth be due now?

Recently, just when I thought I was far too busy to take on another thing under the sun, I remembered that I had volunteered for a whole day at my son’s school to teach some poems to the sixth grade class and then to take a bunch of third graders to do weeding and garden bed-clearing at a community orchard.

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