A Dawning of Hope

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I didn’t initially grasp the significance of witnessing something I hadn’t for far too long: That feeling of hope that comes with the breaking of a new day. It seemed as if inspirational author Jayita Bhattacharjee was speaking directly to me when she wrote: “Let me tell you about the dawn, the birds, and the opening buds, so you will feel hope in your veins.”

Perhaps I’m not the only one searching for some semblance of hope in these trying times, times a friend described as “marinating in a cesspool of vulgarity.” Could an obscure, singular sunrise create such magic, such mental peace, such hope? Admittedly it has been awhile since I had awakened in time to catch the breaking of a new day, let alone birthing a sense of hope. Maybe this sleeping in is an “age thing” for in my younger, working days I was late to bed and early to rise. Always. Rising early enough to get in a jog or walk while making it to the C-Store for the morning newspaper by 6 a.m. 

Nowadays I miss most the sunrises, of being greeted by a soft, ground-hugging fog, of the sounds as nature awakens. I remember backpacking into the Rockies and heading to a stream with my fly rod for an early morning trout to fry with eggs. Or paddling as fog shrouded an island in the Boundary Waters. One of my last sunrises came at Crex Meadows last November, the morning after a gorgeous full moon gifted me with many beautiful images of Sandhill Cranes. Perhaps there was one or two since … over a half-year span.

A few weeks ago a promise was made to set my alarm one morning each week to revisit those day-breaking joys of nature. We’re not in a city where horns and the sounds of commerce increase with the awakening of a new day. Our home is now in the prairie where places exist to greet birds and the opening of buds. So when a friend with delightful tastes, Khadija Benaissa, posted some photographs of prairie flowers she had taken on a recent jaunt along the auto trail at nearby Big Stone National Wildlife Refuge, she included a pictures of beautiful meadow of coneflowers that for the past few years seemed hidden within heavy foliage. A thorough prairie burn this past spring appeared to have given those precious flowers some freedom in the meadow; thousands of coneflowers dance in the prairie breezes on sunny afternoons. 

To count the number of images I’ve made of those flowers in that same meadow through the years would take several hours, yet I can’t recall many being made at dawn. Let alone on a foggy dawn. One of my favorite images was of a high school senior, the daughter of a long, dear friend. With this humidity we’ve experienced these past few days the visualization of capturing images of coneflowers bracketed with a foggy dawn was much too alluring. My alarm was set for 5 a.m. which would hopefully allow for the 11 mile trip to arrive early enough to greet the new morning with my Nikon in hand a full half hour before sunrise. Ah, that anticipation of hope, of capturing beautiful moments of a prairie sunrise!

Those hopes rose even higher looking out the bathroom window after the alarm sounded, for even our home prairie was shrouded with a fog hugging those rising purplish leaves of big bluestem, and the short drive moments later certainly didn’t diminish my hope. Coming over the last hill that descends into the valley that is home to the headwaters of the Minnesota River even offered more promise. And there is this: Khadija has never, to my knowledge, led me astray. That blanket of coneflowers would be waiting.

Perhaps I entered the auto tour at speeds frankly frowned upon, and hopefully there aren’t skid marks on some of the sharp turns. When I finally crossed that last speed hump that meadow of pinkness spread out before me as a sight to behold. Acres of pink dotted through the grayness, blossoms so delicate, yet staunch enough to fight against a prairie wind. A softness prevailed, and the depth disappeared into the muted grayness of morning. 

Interestingly, the fog was quite thick, much more so than on the Big Stone Moraine where our prairie is located. After a good 20 minutes of playing around with the coneflowers, I left to see what was visible in the West Pool, although a few stops were made to capture some photographs of first a family of Canada geese easing across the stilled waters of the pool, then moments later those of a prolific chick-sitting merganser with her numerous brood cutting across the wetland directly across the West Pool dike. 

Since my goal was to experience the beauty as much as humanly possible, I was quickly out of the car with camera in hand. As I stood along the edge of the dike, mesmerized by an awakening morning as the sun began its assent into the grayness, a golden hue colored the eastern sky and the realm of water. Nature’s gold. Ring-billed gulls drifted across the sky and stilled waters, silhouettes peeking through the misty dawn to answer my prayers of magic. In that moment I realized what I’ve been missing for far too long. I noticed, then, the calmness of my breathing, as if I had just spent an hour forest bathing or practicing meditative yoga. Those feelings Bhattacharjee writes about in her meditative journals that speak glowingly of the magic of such moments of breaking light. Of experiencing a rising sun in the quiet of an evolving new morning.

After the sun had gained it’s foothold of the forthcoming day, I stepped back into the car and momentarily thought of the meadow. Perhaps I was mistaken, for there were thoughts that by the time I made it back around the prairie loop to the meadow the sun would have lifted too high for anything magical. 

Yet the magic was far from over. Heading toward home I remembered a grouping of Great White Egrets hanging around a Pleasant Valley wetland, those surviving pothole treasures of this old glacial moraine. When dropping Joe Pye off at the kennel a few weeks earlier I had passed the tall white birds congregating in a marshy area, although several trips past that spot since has been unsuccessful. Once again the marsh was barren of birds, so I made a turn toward a series of wetlands to the north where I received an early morning bonus —  a lone egret lifted up from the cattails, all bathed by those beautiful, soft golden hues of the fresh, early morning light.

So much beauty for one obscure sunrise, and one could wish that every sunrise offered as much beauty and opportunity for imagery. For one morning, though, it was thoroughly fulfilling. I had escaped from that “cesspool of vulgarity” that nowadays seems as real as breathing. So I offer my sincere gratitude to Khadija for her tip that provided the inertia I needed for such a fulfilling and special experience. I came home feeling the hope in my veins!

That Notice of Peace

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As my dear friend, Steve Bruns, began piecing together his final thoughts and stories for his family, the deeply religious man began with a simple statement: “I’m learning how to die.” His aim was in providing his thoughts about his personal view of eternity and how he now faces what remains of what has been and continues to be a full and vivid life. 

Among his thoughts were these: “The older I get, the more I notice colors. Maybe because life itself feels more precious now. Maybe because suffering sharpens your awareness of beauty. When you understand life is fragile, you stop rushing past sunsets. You stop overlooking robins’ eggs. You notice frost-blue snow early in the morning before footprints disturb it. You notice chickadees flashing blue-gray wings in winter trees. You notice the reflection of clouds in a quiet lake. You notice peace wherever you can find it.”

Although we’ve been friends for a quarter century, I hadn’t considered Steve a poet. An inventor. A creator. A story teller without par. A freind. Now I humbly stand corrected. Like Steve, though, I too notice peace.

A few months after learning his cancer had spread and is basically untreatable, Steve was encouraged by his beautiful and supportive wife, Jill, and his family to share his thoughts, to give his perspectives on his four sons and their families, to place in black and white those wonderfully entertaining stories his friends and family have enjoyed and laughed at over the years. They found a computer program that allows him to tell his stories as he always has and the words are printed as if he had written them. That moment of poetry was among his spoken thoughts.

His thoughts of peacefulness and colors resonated with me as I laid in the crunchy browned prairie duff focusing on one of my favorite and most interesting prairie forbs, Prairie Smoke. This “awareness of peace and beauty” was at the Lake Johanna Esker north of Sunburg and a bit east of the tallgrass Ordway Prairie. Such vivid colors, of such interesting shapes, mingled naturally with other May flowers on a haze-blessed sunny afternoon.

While Steve has found his peace in the color of blue, mine is more universal, more defined by the moment, and certainly as he stated, such moments seem more precious with age. For years Prairie Smoke has attracted my interest, an affection that has not waned with age.  

My discovery of Prairie Smoke began when we first moved here to Listening Stones Farm in 2013, moving into a house that Steve and I had labored to convert into the modern era with new insulation, wiring and plumbing, working seven days a week and long past “eight hour shifts.” A few weeks after he returned home to Hector, my soon-to-be (and long divorced) wife and I were rummaging through the nearby native Clinton Prairie when we came across my first sighting of Prairie Smoke. Immediately hooked, I would return time after time to find various angles of portrayal until the “smoke” eventually disappeared.

A few years later word came about a broad blanket of the spiky flowers existing at the Esker where acres of them brighten that virgin prairie with such color, beauty and joy. Our trip this past weekend was one of many over the years and once again added both peace and joy. Our adventure began by spotting several Prairie Blue-Eyed Grass blossoms just inside the fence, yet the pinkish allure of Prairie Smoke beckoned from the nearby rise, the pink vividness arching in contrast to the blooming White Pussy-toes and speckles of Blue-Eyed Grass. A bountiful floral vision!

This is such precious geological remnant, for an esker is basically a rocky stream bed created within a glacier, and that mound of historical wonder dominates the landscape. Such an esker is a rare find nowadays for many have been destroyed for gravel mining. In the prairie below was where the colorful carpet lay. And it didn’t take much hesitation to find just enough space to lay with a camera to search through the emerging “jungle” of greenery and colorful blossoms for interesting imagery. And Steve’s bit of poetry rang true for every moment I lay prone and in awe. Prone and in peace.

Prairie Smoke has long been one of my annual “photographic seasons” that begins with Steve’s favorite blues ­— beginning with post-melt Pasque Flowers and ending with that of autumn Asters. Since that first sighting of Prairie Smoke I’ve captured it throughout it’s short lifespan, and yes, we’ve even purchased plants from the nearby Morning Sky Nursery in Morris to plant in our native prairie gardens. Unfortunately, the “bully” Compass Plant has all but crowded out almost everything in that particular garden including our three Prairie Smoke plants.

So, yes, I suppose there are ample images stored in my files, so many I probably have no need for more. Ah, but there’s that difference between “need” and “want!” Yet, there is always a quest of perhaps capturing a perfect moment or image. If such a moment or image should exist.

Then there are the unexpected moments that have come along in those numerous quests: An unexpected fly-over of a pair of Sandhill Cranes offering a rare glimpse of timelessness for an image that was surreal geologically; or that muted blueness of pre-dawn light in such contrast to the softened pinkishness of the Prairie Smoke; or that explosive blast of a setting sun searing through silhouetted spikes; or the standing fluff of “smoke” from three individual blossoms made at sunrise that appeared as beautifully splendid and fanned widely as would a trio of fluffing peacocks. And, on and on. 

Which leads me back to another touch of poetry from my dear friend as he faces his conclusion of a full and beautiful life, one where he fears not his path toward eternity though he does his actual act of dying: 

“Back home on the prairie, the sunsets may still be my favorite. There is a moment just before darkness arrives when the entire sky becomes layered with oranges, pinks, purples, and deepening blues. The fields grow quiet. The wind softens. Trees become silhouettes. Sometimes the clouds catch the sunlight so perfectly it feels like heaven cracked open for a few minutes just to let us peek inside.”

Peeks into a heaven where he awaits a calmness in finding. A notice of eternal peace.

A Lingering Light

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How is this for good company within a delightfully sunny woodland? Kneeling in thought beside me as I focus my lens on our collective favorite brilliant harbingers of spring, the lovely trout lilly, are the aged-old naturalist John Burroughs and the delightful poet Mary Oliver. My mental companions would no doubt be loving every moment of this sun-blessed morning in the wooded hills of Nerstrand-Big Woods State Park just as I was as those tiny and delicate flowers reached preciously from the stem, hugging the white and yellow stamens.

Although I can’t recall the exact moment of a social media message that offered a much needed sprig of hope in these trying times, there is no uncertainty of the muse: “Now is the time to head to Nerstrand-Big Woods for the trout lillies and marsh marigolds!” read the message.

Both are wood-harbored wildflowers that offer as much hope and joy of spring as pasque flowers give us here in the grassy prairie. When I’m near such a shady ecosystem this time of year, both species are difficult to resist. Burroughs spoke of the possible reason behind the common name by pointing to the leaves he claimed seemed  “painted” like a flank of a freshly caught trout. Oliver? While her’s was the more easterly located yellow trout lilly, there is little doubt that seeing them here in the hills of Nerstrand would likewise have given her hope in these trying times as she painted so beautifully in her poem on trout lillies.

“All I know is,” she wrote upon seeing trout lillies in bloom, “there was a light that lingered, for hours,

under her eyelids – that made a difference

when she went back to a difficult house, at the end of the day.”

It was about this time a year ago when an overheard mention of trout lillies being in bloom near Nerstrand-Big Woods State Park caught my attention. We were about an hour north at a gallery where my canvases were hanging when naturalist and former State Senator Tedd Suss, whose spacious little farmstead lies just outside of the park, offered the information to a friend of his. Interestingly, earlier in the day we had walked the wooded path on the grounds of the Izaak Walton League’s gallery in search of various wild flowers including trout lillies.

Suss assured me there was a significant chance of photographing them so after our reception we added a couple of hours to our drive home to check out the park. Initially we were disappointed for no matter where we looked on the path downhill toward Hidden Falls there wasn’t a blossom to be seen. Then, on a set of wooden stairs created to perhaps ward off a nasty face plant on the rocky path, we met up with two women where pleasantries were exchanged. Within that my intent was spoken, and one of them said, “Oh, my. You’re much too late for those beautiful little lillies are long gone.”

Imagine my disappointment. Regardless, or perhaps in thoughts of dire protest, we continued our search into then knee-high growth along the pathway when suddenly Roberta asked, “Is this what you are looking for?” And, it was. Eventually we found about a half dozen hidden within the tall greenery in full maturity, and my sigh of recognition and relief perhaps fluttered those delicate white petals.

And, this time Mr. Suss was correct, for I had texted him before we left on the four hour, one-way drive. We were a week to ten days earlier this year, and yes, hundreds of them poked from the molted shade. In all stages, from pre-bloom to maturity. And yes, Burroughs’ description of the dappled leaves offered obvious evidence.

Among the lillies were other beauties of the woods including Jack-in-the-pulpits, wild blue phlox, hepatica, Dutchman’s breeches and those yellowish bellworts. We spied some trillium aching to blossom. Yet it was the trout lillies that drew me in. Delicate white petals hugged the stamens on the newly bloomed, their curtains widened with age. A slight breeze gave them the look of dancers offering a delicate ballet within the woodlands.

As we neared the Prairie Creek falls the dazzling yellows of marsh marigolds seemed to explode from the watery dampness. Seemingly acres of them, and all in mid-season form. With the harmonious sounds of the nearby falls one couldn’t ask for a more beautiful moment in nature. While others were drawn to the falls, my eyes were on the marigolds, of how they blended so perfectly with weathered wood and stair stepped their way up the glen toward the now distant trout lillies and the other woodland-based beauties of spring.

I find it so lovely here in this beautiful state park where the old growth Big Woods stands as a small memorable remnant of an ecosystem long-since destroyed for farming and commerce, much like the prairie that once extended from Canada to the tip of Texas was. Both are now basically erased from human memory. Like the pasques, trout lillies and marsh marigolds now offer a quaint reminder.

Nerstrand-Big Woods is one of a few of such remnants that the state of Minnesota has blissfully placed into permanent sanctuaries as state parks. Rice Lake State Park and Myre-Big Island State Park, due south of Nerstrand,  also come to mind, all laying east of the interstate highway. Once in the woods you can almost imagine these hills on the lip of the Driftless full of passenger pigeons back in Burroughs’ day as we can envision trout lillies and marsh marigolds hugging the nearby Canon and Straight River wildernesses for miles through dense woods.

Trout Lilies ... by Mary Oliver

It happened I couldn’t find in all my books
more than a picture and a few words concerning
the trout lily,

so I shut my eyes,
And let the darkness come in
and roll me back.
The old creek

began to sing in my ears
as it rolled along, like the hair of spring,
and the young girl I used to be
heard it also,

as she came swinging into the woods,
truant from everything as usual
except the clear globe of the day, and its
beautiful details.

Then she stopped,
where the first trout lilies of the year
had sprung from the ground
with their spotted bodies
and their six-antlered bright faces,
and their many red tongues.

If she spoke to them, 
I don’t remember what she said,
and if they kindly answered, it’s a gift that can’t be broken
by giving it away.
All I know is, there was a light that lingered, for hours,
under her eyelids – that made a difference
when she went back to a difficult house, at the end of the day.

Winging it with the Birdman

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We made it back in town in time to join a small caravan to Big Stone National Wildlife Refuge on chilly afternoon to hopefully catch some shorebirds passing through. Our leader was the “Birdman,” who has an encyclopedic recall of about everything you can expect on any bird you might encounter. Officially, Jason Frank is our head librarian who has given life to that aged institution not only in his selection of books and a more friendly organized layout for both kids and adults, but also in hosting seed propagation classes, art classes for both children and adults along with his birding expeditions. To me, though, he’s the Birdman!

As we eight stood on the wooden deck-like platform below the huge monolith of an outcrop with both mounted and provided spy glasses, binoculars and cameras, he spoke of our possible sightings. American Avocets, Yellowlegs, White-faced Ibises and perhaps even a pair of Western Grebes he suggested that seemed to hang around further down the road. As we waited with high expectations he explained various migration patterns, and explained that this Refuge was perhaps a halfway point between the arctic breeding grounds and their wintering below the equator. Here, like the Sandhill Cranes and Snow Geese find in central Nebraska each March, the passers-through hope to rest and fatten up before the next good southerly wind.

A Greater Yellowlegs was our only shorebird sighting.

“You never can predict when they’ll leave,” the Birdman explained. “Some night, when the southerly wind is just right, they’ll rise in the sky to catch a current and they’ll be gone. That’s how they cross the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. Hummingbirds do the same thing. Often they’ll find that current a few hundred meters high in the sky.”

For years Frank organized the annual Salt Lake Birder’s Weekend at nearby Salt Lake, just southwest of Marietta. That event draws dozens of birding enthusiasts from throughout the Midwest. He’s also a co-organizer of the annual Audubon Christmas Bird Count. This is on a December Saturday, and I’ve joined the count for the past several years. This past December Jason and I shared a car taking in the “pie wedge” from Big Stone Lake State Park to Clinton, our slice of the circular pie that extends from Marsh Lake and the Refuge into South Dakota that surrounds our town of Ortonville. Our slice is a beautiful stretch that includes nearly a dozen wetlands, woody  ravines and both abandoned and lived-in homesteads surrounded by old-wood windbreaks. Several overwintering arctic species can be counted along the roadsides. 

Ring-billed Gulls provided us with beautiful flight along the drive.

We’re fortunate to be living in a birding byway thanks to the multi-state “chain” of waterways that includes the tri-state stretch of the Missouri River up to our neck of the woods that eventually includes the headwaters of both the Minnesota and Red Rivers along with various potholes and river lakes. Another bonus is that we’re on the fringes of both the Eastern and Western flanges of the flyways.

As the Birdman talked we eight scanned the water’s edge and looked up into the grayish sky. As can be expected, cormorants commanded the shallow waters in front of us. Many people, and by this I mean mostly fishing fanatics, have a jaundiced view of these interesting, fish-eating birds who seem to spend as much time underwater as they do on the surface. Of all the feathered species, cormorants with their hooked beaks and body shape, appear to me as the most remnant prehistoric-looking of all the bird species and personally I can’t seem to get enough images of them. I’m simply fascinated.

Ah, but the cormorants, so prehistoric looking. To me, so poetic.

White Pelicans made flights over us, and cruised the waterway along with the cormorants. Every species spied brought more information from the Birdman, the pelicans included. He explained that the next Minnesota River “lake” … Marsh Lake …  downriver typically hosts around 20,000 breeding birds on a remote island, and that the ones we were actually seeing were immature birds younger than five years of age. 

With a chilly breeze some of us were becoming antsy, and the decision was made to return to the motor drive where he suggested at least three possible sites along the shore for the shorebirds. As we drove we did pass a single Yellowlegs, a skitterish bird who quickly waded away as if it didn’t want any attention. Frank then explained how shorebirds use different techniques to capture their food, and that most seemed to have specific diets. One species swirled its beak to stir up vitals, for example, while other probed and pecked at the muddy shoreline for morsels. As he pointed out various identification markers I realized my long-time friend was perhaps a savant with an unlimited ornithology knowledge. As he talked, Ring-billed Gulls circled overhead and along the shore. Ducks were both airborne or working the shallows, including a few Shovelers …. a beautiful species with the long bills. And the information just kept coming.

Pelicans and cormorants share a wetland waterway.

This wasn’t going to be a day for the shorebirds, however, and the lone Yellow Legs was our only sighting. As we turned the corner along the western shore of the West Pool several more pelicans and cormorants worked the waters. Three Great Blue Herons were working the weedy bank to the east. This wasn’t quite the end, though.

He told of a possible sighting of a beaver family on one of the bends of the Minnesota River along perhaps one of the more interesting and beautiful quarter mile stretches of Big Stone County roadways. “Earlier this week I caught the parents teaching their growing youngsters how to build a dam,” he explained.

Oh, and there was an eagle’s nest along another river bend where he told of watching one of the eagles land with a fish, and began tearing it apart to feed the two newly hatched eaglets. Earlier on the deck he pulled out a paper to show the markings that distinguished the differences between an immature Bald Eagle and a Golden, for often the  immatures are mistaken for the larger, more western-based Golden.

As a fitting conclusion to a delightful tour, Ring-necked Ducks was a benediction.

In all, the Birdman was clearly in his element for the 90 or so minutes we were on the tour as tidbits of birding life and identification continued to emerge. Jason does so rather matter-of-factually, and it seems to roll off his tongue as common conversation. 

We slowed to check the bends for the beavers, and again for the eagle’s nest before catching the route out of the Refuge. On a small wetland where I’ve photographer dozens of ducks over the years, a male and female Ring-necked Duck rested on weathered stumps. Stoic and beautiful, they seemed a fitting conclusion to an interesting early evening of birding, all under the gifted direction of the Birdman.

A Calmness in ‘Colorful Silence’

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There, at the foot of my driveway, came an unexpected moment of peace. Drifts from the seemingly endless winds had edged the blowing snow over the rise and into the lip of our south prairie in near parallels, forming a fan-like array. I was en route to the mailbox as the sun was lowering into a sunset. Fortunately I had my camera along. A quick single paragraph back story:

Moments before I had looked through the plateglas window of our kitchen when I noticed odd poetic lines crossing a smooth expanse of snow. A “blue hour” color tinted the snow. At the moment and the distance it was difficult to see what might have created the burrowing lines, so I quickly dressed for the elements and grabbed my camera. Closer to the two inch depths of the lines were literally thousands of tiny paw prints. Voles were my assumption. Just beyond the half tunneled lines were telltale rabbit prints, which were enormous compared to those inside the small crevices. It was moments later that I came upon that unexpected moment of peace.

It was impressionist artist Henri Mattisse who noted that “a certain blue enters your soul.”

From the “snow waves” at the foot of our driveway.

Was that my “certain blue?” This was late afternoon mere hours after the brutal murder of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, the second of two ICE murders and the third resident ICE had shot. Renee Good’s murder, and the short film of her comment to her killer seconds before she was murdered, was challenging enough for my son had lived for a few years within a block of her murder. Pretti’s murder two weeks later hit me almost in the same manner as the second plane crashing into the World Trade Center. This time the attack against our nation was from within, perpetuated by our own president and his minions. After plodding through a trying day of distress came this unexpected sense of calm.

As this wave momentarily washed over me my breathing was easier. That cloud of discontent and anger was slightly lifted. Bluish colors eased from the images an hour of so later when I brought them up on my computer along with various shades of violets streaking through. Although I had driven and or walked past those drifts a few times before, there was hardly a reaction. Which made me wonder if the colors could have possibly created such a near instant sense of calmness?

The yellow light seemed a beacon of hope on the day of the Winter Solstice.

A study by the Moffit Cancer Center found that colors can affect your subconscious, and the color blue is strongly associated with peace, calm, and tranquility, evoking feelings of serenity, stability, and relaxation. Shades of violet, or purple, adds the Center, can evoke spirituality and inner balance. Perhaps that might explain the psychological finger-snap of calmness I had felt.

Other colors the Center says may have a similar impact: Green represents nature and offers a calmness and restfulness, while lighter shades like soft pink may promote physical soothing, and even white symbolizes peace through symbols like a dove. Snow and ice perhaps isn’t quite as soothing and comforting as, say, Richard Bach’s “Jonathan Livingston Seagull.” 

According to their website, yoga mat company, Manduka, did numerous studies on the affects of color as they searched for hues they felt would create a more mellowing mood for practitioners, and blue was among their favored colors.

An ambient sunset over the Big Stone National Wildlife Refuge.

Enough of science. How does this fit into the spectrum of the arts? After looking at the colorful blue and purplish sunset colors amplified by the wind waves at the base of our driveway, a quick review was made of some of the earlier images that had affected me at some point. One example was a Winter Solstice image taken last December. Although I had visualized a different image, a walk to the river’s edge allowed me to find a slight hint of yellowish light in the midst of a jagged ice floe bathed in a soft blue. That yellow seemed to symbolize an emergence of resistance in the depths of the blueish ice ­— this was barely a week after ICE had landed in Minneapolis, and only a few weeks before their two murders. Within the comfort of blue the yellow seemed a beacon of hope.

Impressionist Claude Monet described such a sensation as a “colorful silence,” while Ralph Waldo Emerson noted, “Nature always wears the colors of the spirit” while capturing the serene, grounding influence of softened hues. 

As I look around in these dour and dangerous times, there seems a need to find a some sense of inner peace and comfort. Moments in nature are offered as a way as do colors. Mine momentarily came in remnant colors of a sunset on a cold winter afternoon at the foot of our driveway. And a day or so later, walking along the edge of the prairie as evening settled in came another moment of calm that is much more common, that of what a young friend once labeled as a “rainbow” sky ­­— those “twilight hues” of softened blues that meld into a soft violet along the prairie horizon as darkness settles in. I have a deep longing for such moments.

A ‘rainbow sky’ above our family’s Shagbark Waters farm pond.

Long ago my eyes were drawn to the eastern sky more so than a setting sun, seeking those ambient and softened colors along  the horizon, those same twilight colors I remember from my teenage years while casting flies close to the cattails of a farm pond and feeling the coolness of the evening surround me. That softened violet that yields ever so slightly to a milky blueness, of how those pastel colors of an approaching evening would slowly ebb away the cares of the day. Yes, Monet’s “colorful silence.”

Unless we are blanketed with deep cloud cover, the beauty of ambient colors banking off distant clouds in easterly skies have captured me for decades. Then there are those rare moments of being unexpectedly surprised by the soft blues and purples in wind blown snowy drifts that offers a sudden calmness in the midst of our nation’s turmoil. In these changing times. In these times when a hint of “colorful silence” seems a blessing.

In Times of War

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Most of our recent days have us enveloped in frigid, icy whiteness due to drifting and blowing snow, obscuring the normally visible including our roads, nature and landscapes. During a blow we can barely see our mailbox about the distance of a football field away. Temperatures are well below the comfort of humanity. Forecasts for the Ice Out protests on Friday suggested the coldest temperatures of our current winter will be accompanied with staunch winds. Meteorologist Paul Douglas suggested in a weather column this week that these will be the coldest days of the past seven years.

Frankly, though, I am thoroughly ICE-d out and in need of escape from the inhumane war being waged against our beautiful state by our Federal government. It’s a chore to handle reading the first five or six pages of our two dailies with our president threatening NATO allies and projecting wars not only here in Minnesota, but wherever his newest fantasies of taking over the world suddenly enters his fevered mind. I’ve been in need of nature, or whatever I might see in it within this haze of snowy whiteness.

Rather than fight my rage or cocoon indoors, I’ve instead taken to the country roads where if one ventures slow enough and can still see the grassy edges alongside the gravel, that beyond this narrow measure of suspected safety there might be some interesting imagery to capture. Of course, such conditions mean you must travel with your headlights on and with a prayer or two. Not just because of potential traffic. Combining these temperatures and winds, a simple, costly mistake might be deadly.

For example, my driver’s side window on the pickup seems to be permanently frozen tight against the frame. This means that for an unobstructed view with my camera I must exit the warm comfort of the truck into below freezing temperatures and wind gusts up to 40 mph. Locking myself out is a constant concern. This combination of factors literally takes your breath away and causes your heart to pound. One wouldn’t survive long in these conditions, which causes me to shudder at the thought for those who are unfortunately homeless, or thrown into an ICE truck or unheated compound, and I remain wholly respectful of friends and neighbors who have pledged to protest in the streets of the Twin Cities.

Unfortunately accidents can happen and do so quickly. A day or so ago I stopped for the mail and an advertising newspaper supplement and a few envelopes blew from my hands. Fortunately big bluestem came to the rescue on the envelopes so I didn’t have to wade into the deep, blowing snow out into the open prairie to retrieve them. The supplement may have ended up in Lac qui Parle or Chippewa County many miles to the south. My sincere apologies for littering!

While I would prefer tracking down trophy bucks who have yet to shed their antlers, or some nifty and shifty colorful birds, finding imagery in this whiteness has been somewhat rewarding. These weather-related factors offer varying views of what is commonly seen. A few years ago on the way home from Sioux Falls on a foggy morning my eye caught a glimpse of a wind turbine barely peeking through the grayish haze. Fog covered the base and most of the tower and pushed down from above as I pulled over with my camera. Seeing only portions of the upper third of the turbine seemed otherworldly through the halo of haze.

I’ve found a similar view of several nearby trees these past few days as mystic and barely visible views have momentarily peeked through this wind-driven whiteness. Prairie grasses have bent to the elements as the rasping particles of icy snow knifed through the matted vegetation. Birds hunkered low behind thick branches and leafy clusters, feathers fluffed in life-saving protection, hopefully with long enough soft quilts of down feathers to cover their bony legs as much as possible to prevent freezing. Some hide beneath our deck, too, with the feeders mostly devoid of even sparrows. Occasionally a nuthatch will bounce from the haze to quickly perch for a “happy” meal.

This is, as the old prairie people like to say, a short world. It’s not unlike fog, though much more dangerous. Fog rarely survives in such temperatures. Not around here. We don’t have a lake effect similar to Superior, yet the snow haze seems foggy enough. Almost a pure world of whiteness, except for when you linger over an image where hints of brown, a khaki-looking brownness, shows through. Dirt. Poor dirt after years of indiscriminate farming practices. Yes, dirt is blowing, too, except where stalks were left standing after harvest or the farmer has planted a cover crop.

On a recent clear morning following a staunch eastern windy whiteness we awakened to nearly a millimeter of dirt covering our prairie and lawn. Later that day on a drive between wind storms into the black desert to visit an ailing friend, the winds had provided some interesting art of erosion scenes, particularly on US 12 between Sacred Heart and Hector. I longed to have my camera along although I have a library full of such fearful art.

Often I’ll look out our kitchen window, especially around sunset when sometimes a hint of color breaks through the haziness along the horizon. Perhaps the only light and color of an entire day. Some moments overtake me as I rush into my warm outerwear and head for the truck. Rarely do I leave the end of the driveway for in these winter months a farmer’s windbreak across the gravel seems to align well with the momentary light and clouds, yet on the ground snow continues to flow and blow, with way too much velocity to settle into a drift.

This morning there was a break in the whiteout, and looking out my office window at a lone tree in the distant former fence line, herringbone patterns of blowing snow shifted across my neighbor’s tilled crop field. It was like watching an earth-wide kaleidoscopic show as snow glided across the barren soil, whorls feathering above the driven flow, with that lone distant tree anchoring the distant view. Although I tried, capturing this winter-land magic in a stilled image, it didn’t come close to portraying the actual beauty of the moving magic. 

Snow flakes are said to be truly unique individually, offering microscopic magic without compare. No two are ever alike, according to visualists far more adept than me. Out here in the prairie our winds win over that crystalline magic and beauty, collapsing the individual crystals into waves of turmoil and gusts of obscurity. Either offers a glimpse of poetry. Winter, and snow have given poets, songwriters and word smiths muse for centuries, yet whoever pinned this following piece may have been speaking for a lot of us in Minnesota presently as we fight against both the icy wind-blown weather and our president’s storm trooper-ICE mugging and murdering us on our streets and communities: 

“A snowflake is one of God’s most fragile creations,” the saying goes, “but look what they can do when they stick together!” 

As with a prayer: “Amen!”

Of Fire and Ice

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(To those readers who enjoy my nature thoughts and writing, my apologies. I feel a need to offer my thoughts on our obscene political situation. With hope and prayers, maybe we will return to more normal times in the near future.)

An image from a few winters ago came to mind this week during the atrocious armed invasion of the Twin Cities, one titled “Fire and Ice.” In search of this particular photograph taken during a bone-chilling sunset over an ice-crusted wetland just north of the farm, I came across a few others. Contrasts of imagery.

Then, Robert Frost’s short poem, “Fire and Ice,” came to mind, all of which resonates since our “president’s” war-like efforts are now focused not on oil-rich Venezuela but rather on our state, perhaps one of the most peaceful places I’ve ever worked or lived. Every day seems more catastrophic, and now the White House is threatening the “Insurrection Act” … a move that speaks of the waging of an internal war on our own people, or more to the point, a collapse of the long-standing firewall between civilian life and military control.

Within his six lines of poetry Frost wrote: “Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.”

Capitalize “ICE” and you begin to wonder if the long-passed Vermont poet might have unwittingly forethought our peaceful city’s fate, at least a peace that existed before ICE was sicced upon our communities, schools, restaurants, hospitals, churches, shopping centers and streets where they murdered a young mother who had just dropped her child off at a neighborhood school. Read that list again. Three bullets in the head within seconds of her smiling and saying, “I’m not angry with you … “ Boom! Her car, and all those places in the neighborhood should suggest a harbor from fear and terror and being murdered by unruly storm troopers especially in the United States. 

Of course, unless you’re among our brown-skinned Natives, Blacks and now immigrants who all know that safe havens simply do not exist. And unscrupulous tricks and techniques are now being used to kidnap the unfortunate.

That murder was last week. Overnight in a nearby neighborhood war weapons were exploded on peaceful protestors who had taken to the streets in vast numbers, weapons masked ICE troopers deployed on unarmed observers after a fight broke out during an attempt to arrest a Venezuelan immigrant who, in the process of an illegal entry and arrest, was wounded by a gunshot in the leg. And now we face a threat from our unhinged president of having our national troops deployed against those protesting these illegal ICE tactics, all by a man who laughingly feels worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize!

This seems more of a move to harm a “blue” state and our governor, who was a vice presidential candidate on the ticket opposing Trump-Vance in the last election, Governor Tim Walz who is a decent man who has led investigations into a claim of fraudulent activities by alleged Somalian immigrants during the Covid years. 

Washington alleges that this storm trooper invasion and threat of war is about illegal immigration. Federal data pinpoints that only 0.9 percent of an estimated 14 million undocumented immigrants in the nation live in Minnesota based on 2023 statistics. In realistic numbers, 130,000. In contrast, pro-Trump red states Texas and Florida list two million and 1.8 million immigrants respectfully. Is this federal invasion in our Twin Cities about controlling immigration? Want to invest in a bridge from LA to Hawaii?

These threats and attacks against peaceful protestors, a murder of an innocent mother by ICE, elementary and high school students nabbed out of schools, patients pulled out of hospitals, workers including roofers pulled off roofs and out of factories, and now, just people minding their own business being attacked unlawfully. Don’t believe it? This report was in the Star Tribune this morning of a family returning from a basketball practice and unwittingly got caught in the mob: “A family with six children in a van caught in the clash last night were hit with tear gas and air bags detonated by a flash-bang grenade. Three of the children, including a six-month-old infant, were taken to a hospital by ambulance for treatment. ‘My kids were innocent. I was innocent. My husband was innocent. This shouldn’t have happened,’ the mother told Kilat Fitzgerald of Fox9 in Minneapolis. ‘We were just trying to go home’.”

Fire or ICE? 

In truth, out here on the prairie we have our sunrises and sunsets. Life hasn’t changed a whole lot. The son of a friend and neighbor who has worked in relief efforts in war-ravaged Ukraine for a few years now lives a concerning yet peaceful existence on the western border far from the battles in the east. Not unlike life on his boyhood home here in the prairie. That is sort of how this feels here on our little farm.

Reading the dailies is a constant struggle that reminds me that in my son’s old Minneapolis neighborhood a war is being raged against his former neighbors and friends, folks who are observing and protesting both a murder and an insurrection of masked federal agents while facing despair, intimidation and fear of ICE agents who now seem quite anxious to deploy war weapons on crowds of innocent bystanders … and even a family who were simply heading home with their children. 

We now hear that an organized anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant group of counter protestors from around the country will stage a protest this weekend in that same South Minneapolis neighborhood. Observers and peaceful protestors who have been manning the streets and/or following the ICE thugs are now being asked to simply stay home and not confront the out-of-towners counter protestors. 

Tinges of a civilian war? A flat out Blue State war waged by our own government? Fire or ICE? 

Our madman in the Oval Office is, in my opinion, out of control. Deploying our armed forces to invade and capture the President and his wife from their bedroom in Venezuela, threatening to send troops to, ironically, fight the Iranian government who are at war with peaceful protestors that Trump himself has sicced his ICE and now threatens articles of war against in a state of his own nation while subquently threatening to send troops to snatch Greenland from Denmark? This, grant you, is threatening our post-WWII alliance with NATO as those cooperating countries move troops and war machinery into Greenland in defiance of a country they felt was solidified with them against the threats of Putin and Russia. No longer.

Fire or ICE?

Yes, I have used Frost’s iconic poem as a metaphore of our dire times, and that might not be so far fetched if you look at the writing of David Gosselin, an Indiana writer, researcher and poet who wrote: “(Fire and Ice) encompasses the universe and the forces behind the world’s undoing and at the same time peers into the depths of the human soul. Indeed, it is a poem of stark contrasts: fire against ice, the cosmic against the personal, the theoretical against the real, desire against hate.”

We have a madman stroking hatred worldwide, hatred that is now focused on the ground in one of the more peaceful and beautiful cities within our 50 states, one with hundreds of acres of trees, beautiful lakes, fine art, world-class restaurants and people who care about their neighbors; people who are now uniting in ideological protest of a war he is raging against our state that is in contrast with his demented soul … watchful and supportive neighbors who are feeling the “theoretical against the real, desire against hate.”

Oh, and about those images …  may they offer you a moment of peace.

Bouquets for a Murdered Mother

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We are living in desperate times, a time when for all practical thoughts and visions our nation is reliving the Nazi takeover of pre-war Germany of the 1930s. Times when a political party and their leader has provoked not only a possible war against another country, but also seems intent on starting one on our own soil. The murder of a young Minneapolis mother, 37 year old Renee Nicole Good, by our president’s “storm troopers” in a South Minneapolis neighborhood feels like a tipping point. 

A few hours later ICE storm troopers raided Roosevelt High School shortly after the nearby murder prompting Minneapolis Public Schools to cancel classes district-wide for the remainder of the week “due to safety concerns.” The district stated it was acting “out of an abundance of caution.” In an American city.

Have we had enough? Protesters filled the neighborhood where she was killed, within a half block of where my son lived 16 years ago before moving to Norway. The noise of protest was loud and crystal clear ­­­— get Donald Trump and Kristi Noem’s ICE out of Minnesota!

A year ago November, the morning after the election when Trump was declared the winner, I left home in my pickup with a need to simply be alone, to seek calm waters. About five miles from here I passed a wetland where I simply had to stop to gaze at the waters. Calm waters. Over the years there was seldom a time when there wasn’t a wind-swept surface, yet on this moment there was barely a wave. A slight breeze riffled a tiny portion across the way as I raised my camera for a picture, an image that has twice been selected as a viewer’s choice in exhibits. That wetland moment was the just the beginning of my quest. Several more prairie wetlands were visited, ones I routinely visit for my art, and on each the waters were calm. Was this an omen? That was my hope. Since the inauguration our lives nationwide have been altered and chaos reigns.

Nowadays my thoughts are to look for guidance from a poet like Mary Oliver, or from a philosopher like Wendell Berry, someone who can offer solace in such troubling times. Or perhaps even Renee Nicole Good, considered a notable poet in her own right. After her thoroughly unnecessary murder by ICE goons, the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, in a press conference in the midst of his dismay, shouted for ICE to “get the fuck out of Minneapolis.” A few hours later Governor Tim Walz said he was putting the Minnesota National Guard on alert. Two courageous leaders were standing in defiance of our unglued president, his ass-sucking Congress and Supreme Court, his storm troopers, ICE, and their “Barbie”-like leader, Noem. Will his own party finally take a stand of defiance? As of now, apparently not.

In my reckoning of the election 14 months ago, my expectation were that we would again face uncertain times, much like we faced in his first four year term that ended with an assault on our nation’s capital on January 6, which interestingly enough was a mere five years and a day before the murder of the young mother in Minneapolis. My fears 14 months ago were overshot within weeks of his new administration and is decidedly worse. We awake each morning wondering, “What next? What new horrors will we awake to?” 

Our humane and human safeguards environmentally and health wise have been basically trashed. Vital research has been gutted with layoffs and firings. Basic human rights are seemingly long gone as bigotry becomes wholeheartedly welcomed by his followers and such presidential advisors as Steven Miller. International markets for our farmer’s crops have been destroyed, as have safeguards for our lonely planet.

We have a cabinet and presidential advisors who are either incompetent or are Nazi sympathizers with a published (Project 2025) goal to destroy our government. Our allies, including our neighboring nations to the north and south, have been sullied. Our allies across the Atlantic have wholeheartedly dismissed us as a powerful and friendly nation. NATO has been scoffed at by his administration and the once proud Republican Party. 

His “make America great again” is long past the joking stage. This past week he rose past even Putin to capture another nation’s president and his wife in a midnight bedroom raid and taken over the oil reserves. Does this set precedent of disregard to international (and even our own Constitution) law, to open the doors for Putin to kidnap Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un to grab his South Korean counterpart, Lee Jae Myung, or even China’s Xi Jinping to raid the bedroom of Taiwan’s Lai Ching-te? Trump’s lawlessness apparently has no bounds and is a threat to not only us in Minnesota, but to humans worldwide.

Those peaceful times, and the calm waters that soothed my anxiety and fears mere months ago are now deep in ice (lower case!). If Good’s murder is indeed the tipping point, what next? Leave the country? I have a son with disabilities including autism living in a group home, which our current health care czar dismisses as a sham. I cannot abandon my son. And now my other son, who married a Norwegian woman and has built a wonderful life in Norway, just messaged me that he has decided to renounce his U.S. citizenship over this murder in his former neighborhood, on streets where we have walked together as father and son in search of a good immigrant-owned restaurant. This one hit my heart nearly as hard as watching the endless reports on the ICE murder.

My sincere hope is that justice will be served for the murder of Renee Good, that Congress will finally step up to oust Trump and his so called cabinet, and that the threats against our neighbors be they other nations, our immigrants and even our own communities will cease. My desire is to see Trump, Noem and the alleged shooter, identified as Jonathon Ross, imprisoned. Perhaps that will be the light “in the midst of darkness” as Gandhi once suggested. 

Not of flowers, though perhaps a memorial … and a message of hope.

Then I read these words from a post by dear friend and naturalist Nicole Zimpel, an incredible human and nature artist who years ago went into the woods to rediscover her soul: “I am angry because of the brazen and lawless actions of this administration. But, I refuse to be guided by this anger. I’m just trying to work through it as best I can. I am deeply sad about the division amongst people in this country, and I’m working through this too, but what I have found is that the best way to counter my own sadness is to do something good or helpful to others and to my surroundings. It’s little, maybe even insignificant in the larger picture, but I do it anyway.”

Nicole is the “ultimate” optimist who has an innate ability to rise above the darknesses faced in her life, a woman I hold dear as I do the words of Oliver, Berry and Gandhi. She’s a good role model, for I, too, have a lot of anger about what has happened and is now happening to our nation and state. May you find a moment of peace in the images I now share as a bouquet along with a memorial for a government sanctioned murder of a young mother, images of prairie flowers that I have garnered in my moments of uncertainty. Images for the late Renee Good. To paraphrase my friend, Nicole: “It’s little, maybe even insignificant in the larger picture, but I’ll do it anyway.” 

A Year of Auroras, Birds and Wetlands

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One of the traditions I so thoroughly enjoyed in my long ago newspaper years came near the end of December when we were asked to sort through and submit our favorite image, or images, of the year just before New Year’s Day. This gave layout editors fodder for a traditionally slow news week between Christmas and January 1.

For us this was a chance to review the stories and our photographs. For me, that review was crucial to my growth as a photojournalist. Did the imagery seem to hold up to previous years, or was there a lag? Was there a sense of growth? Had my “eye” for composition, working with natural lighting, choosing an appropriate focal length worked with the news event or photographic moment?

My concern nowadays is if my “eye” has held true since my retirement as I’ve moved to more closely document our last one percent of the glacially-blessed native prairie and wetland ecosystem that has been systematically and throughly destroyed by mankind since the 1860s. This destruction and my care for recording the remnants photographically has been stated repeatedly in my artist’s statements that have accompanied my exhibits and art shows.

Since moving more into a creative arts community this tradition of reviewing my past year of imagery to choose 12 of my favorite images has continued over the past 11 years. My choice and intent is not to choose just one but a dozen, initially to pick one for each month. It didn’t take long to realize that better images were being left out, and since this is my choice on what to show, that concept died a quick death.

While the annual review is fun, the intent remains the same — seeking a measure of growth, of how my “eye” might have evolved over time. So, here we go, along with a few comments for each of the images are my dozen for 2025. If you wish for a closer look simply “click” on the picture to enlarge it. Meanwhile, thanks for your kind comments and support of my work through this and for all these years.

Just outside of Big Stone Lake State Park this piece of the glacial moraine that separates the River Warren river bed, now Big Stone Lake, and a huge, miles long ravine that is home to Meadowbrook Creek. This interesting afterglow was one of those “you had to be there” moments giving the native prairie the appearance of a staged play.

Moments before this was captured, I was pulling out of the fisherman’s lower parking lot below the Marsh Lake Dam when a pod of pelicans flew over. There was no chance for a picture, and I left the area disappointed. At the “T” at the end of the dam road, I took a left hopeful of getting closer to my road home and ended up at Curt Vacek’s machine shed. A dead end. As I headed back another pod flew over. Both times dozens of pelicans seemed to be heading toward their island refuge. Hopeful, I sped back to the dam, backed onto the dike and just as I rolled down my window and grabbed my camera, this pod flew over exhibiting grace and aerial choreography. Pelican flights often seem to offer such grace to our prairie skies. That the birds stood out against the subtle grayness of a cloudy sky makes the picture. One of my favorites from over the years.

Ever since moving here I’ve had an eye on this lone tree on the bank of a long drained prairie pothole lake that before being ditched and drained stretched for miles and over what is now many commodity grain fields. From the bottom of the old lake bed the tree looked to be in line with the sun of the Summer Solstice, and once again I was blessed by nature when a lone bird flew into the sunset.

Between my boyhood hometown of Macon, MO, and neighboring Atlanta, the Missouri Department of Conservation damed a channel of the Chariton River to create a multi-mile lake and eventual state park. After driving through the park we exited through the far north gate and turned toward the major highway when we crossed a high bridge at the last “finger” at the head of the lake. This wasn’t my initial view, yet the swallows flying from beneath the bridge and silhouetted against a distant brewing storm caught my eye back in mid-July, and again in review.

Although we had a cabin on Lake One on the lip of the BWCA, we did more exploring around the area because my favorite woman lacked comfort in a canoe, and in those adventures we stopped at Bear Head Lake State Park, which after years of being in and around Ely I had never noticed. We took a hike on a wooded trail that ended up at Norberg Lake. The calm waters of this small lake surrounded by age-old timber offered an incredibly soothing moment, especially in our distanced escape from the political chaos of the summer. This scene was a reflection of my calmness and comfort.

Just a few miles from home a lone pelican and the ambient afterglow reflected in a wetland. More of what I call poetic photography. Often I leave home just before sunset to drive around the area wetlands, and unlike most of the counties around us, it is estimated that 15 percent of the original wetlands still exist in Big Stone County compared to less than a percent elsewhere in Western Minnesota and Northwest Iowa. And it seems that every year I’ll come across a lone pelican in a prairie water wetland. This was my moment in 2025, a moment of peaceful bliss.

In my exhibit this image carries a simple title: “The Leaf.” Yes, this singular leaf caught my eye within the midst of the “forest” in the high Minnesota River backwaters of mid-summer at the Big Stone National Wildlife Refuge. I love the angular tree and its reflection, yet the “individualism” of the stark leaf is what caught my eye. I guess I’ve always been sort of a “loner,” like “The Leaf,” feeling a bit out of step with the society that seems to surround me.

November, and the “super” moon at Crex Meadows just across the Wisconsin border with Minnesota. Sandhill Cranes are my favorite bird and this image is one I’ve visualized for several years. An unfulfilled dream, if you will. With the promise of a full moon along with prayers we would have a cloudless sky, we drove nearly five hours across the state to Crex and got a motel room. We then found a vista that might offer a gigantic full moon rising along the horizon, along with hope that the cranes returning from the nearby stalk fields would offer a blessing. This was among several images of cranes flying through that incredible moon, and this was my favorite of the bunch. Once again nature provided a special blessing!

Then, the following morning in the “nautical” twilight … again, Sandhill Cranes. Have I said I love them? Even after a half dozen trips to Central Nebraska each March, along with various outings to both Crex Meadows and the nearby Sherburne NWR between St. Cloud and the Twin Cities, I can’t seem to get enough “crane time.” My first viewing of Sandhills was on a organic farm near Monte Vista, CO, when my now late friend, Greg Gosar, whose farm I helped feature in a Money Magazine story, came running into the house to ask if I wanted to sneak up on a feeding flock of cranes in his wheat field. We sauntered as quietly as possible up a sandy draw before leaning against the bank to see the birds. A highlight was a lone Whooping Crane back when their number was in the low 70s, along with what Aldo Leopold called the “trumpets in the orchestra of evolution.” This was in the late 1970s, and I’ve “chased” those beautiful songs and flights ever since.

Northern Lights, the auroras of the heavens …. a Cinderella-like moment for the normally muddy Eli Lake in nearby Clinton. I love this view of this disregarded lake on the edge of town along US 75 and a county road. Certainly I’ve witnessed more spectacular Aurora displays, yet what attracts me to this image is both the natural composition along with the reflection highlighting the colors even as “subdued” as they appear. Despite the shallow waters, seldom seen as blue, the Aurora awakened the waters from its normally placid blandness — an Aurora that provides a glimpse of normally unrealized beauty.

While we’re on Northern Lights, this was captured with my cell phone when the settings on my camera got messed up. This was a spectacular display in all directions, and taken over a prairie wetland at the lip of our prairie looking toward the Northwest. While the October 10th display was considered the highlight of the year’s displays among us Aurora geeks, this display might have been an equal, offering both vivid colors and that hum from the heavens … something you don’t always hear, with colors you seldom see this far south.

Another moment from a nearby wetland, a Great White Egret lifting from a vista featuring a setting sun. Once again when I look through my couple thousand images of wetlands, I feel such a sense of loss. Besides the benefits of recharging the underground aquifers and cleansing agricultural chemicals from the runoff, they benefit wildlife and provide incredible beauty to the prairie for many of us. The 99 percent of destruction of the wetlands is such an incredible loss, and a loss that keeps me in constant search for poetic imagery. And in this instance, I was once again blessed by Mother Nature.

A Search for Meaning on the Solstice

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She just didn’t seem to understand my angst. I was stumbling back to bed at 6:10 a.m. thoroughly angry that my cell phone alarm didn’t sound, and it was much too late to take a 90 minute drive for the break of the Solstice sun over a small pothole lake south of Willmar. We had passed the lake on a trip home from getting my son’s zither tuned when I noticed the dozens of muskrat “huts” jutting from the cattail-rich shallows.

From the expected direction of a Solstice sun, it appeared this was a scene that would make a nice image for my annual photographic depiction of light on this, the shortest day or longest night or start of winter or the coming of light, whatever one someone decides is the true meaning of their personal Solstice. How would this one work out? Finding hope within one of the darkest times of my life because of this disastrous political and humanitarian situation created by the vile human we have in the Oval Office, along with his enablers in Congress and the Supreme Court, and their deployment of masked “storm troopers” to illegally grab immigrants of color from their hopes, dreams and our neighborhoods. 

So, yes, I had a need to find some semblance of hope, of finding some way of adding light to my inner soul.

Being more “spiritual” than “religious,” and having been basically introduced to the celebration of light by dear friends, Audrey Arner and Richard Handeen, who once again recently hosted a bonfire celebration on their Moonstone Farm northwest of Montevideo, I began to take the Winter Solstice to heart many years ago. Their influence gave me a reason to take the Solstice seriously and to depict it with hopefully meaningful imagery. 

My first attempt of an annual Solstice image, taken in 2009, a sun peaking after days of squalid weather. It seemed to offer hope during our long winter.

Capturing the significance of the Solstice began back when I was running a small country weekly newspaper and was in need of a front page picture on a rather weak week of news. Looking out the huge back window of our prairie-facing sun room, which housed our music and personal library, the lowered sun was breaking through the muted frigid and dismal haze of a miserable and chilly day. This seemed a perfect portrayal of our need to welcome and celebrate warmth and light. The year was 2009, meaning I was a bit late joining the bandwagon.

Though I’m probably no more of a pagan nut than any of my friends in our small universe, finding a Winter Solstice image seemed just as important to me as hanging a wreath for the annual celebrations of the Christian’s Christmas. Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, supposedly the first emperor to convert to Christianity, is credited for moving the celebration of the birth of Christ to December 25 in 336 AD to more closely align the celebration with the pagan Winter Solstice festivals like Saturnalia and Sol Invictus. This decision effectively and permanently moved the Jesus’ Annunciation up by some nine months according to biblical records. 

“Sol” reflected on a moon offered hope in the blueness of time, after the death of my wife.

My creating an image on the celebration of light on the Solstice has continued ever since. Over the years there have been some anxious moments, for my initial intent was to in some way feature our dear Sol on the Solstice. That hasn’t always happened thanks to the increasing presence of cloudy skies, so it became more significant to feature light and hope more so than the actual sun. In the year of my retirement, which came with the passing of my wife, my image was made in the nearby Bonanza portion of Big Stone Lake State Park and featured the moon peeking through the hefty branches of a sturdy oak. The darkness of night more closely matched my feelings at the time, yet the light of the distant moon signified hope while the strong sturdy limbs of the surrounding oaks offered a sense of strength. 

On the following year, my first since remarrying and actually moving to Listening Stones, it was a grouping of late season gulls over the East Pool of the Big Stone Wildlife Refuge that seemed to portray a new sense of freedom and joy of life. The following three Winter Solstice years were met with days of absolutely cloud cover, and only late afternoon sorries into the prairie did I find anything close to a celebration of light. Light, more so than Sol itself. One was a muted “sunset” over a wetland of long dead stumps of an old woodland, trees reflected in waters surrounding an ice floe, and the last of the only “light” of the day as a break in the clouds offered an orangish afterglow peeking through a crack of a huge glacial erratic. Hidden meanings? Or simply a acknowledgement of light?

A year later, hope found in the freedom of flight.

Every year seems to offer visuals that are completely different. Last year it was finding a pair of crossing animal tracks in the crusted snow where I’d taken the earlier photograph of the gulls. The woman questioning my angst, Roberta, and I were firmly involved in our new and budding relationship, our paths crossing in togetherness after nearly 40 years of friendship.

None of my previous Solstice images were planned … until this winter. Until my alarm failed. Life is mysterious, yet my momentary disappointment was real. She claimed I was a grouse during the day, although I disagreed. Then I followed my second “planned” option in the late afternoon lowering of the sun at a stretch of the Minnesota River near the headwaters where currents had created an interesting bed of jagged ice. 

My initial idea was to capture the tinges of colorful ambient light of an afterglow on the roughened edges of the ice tips. When I arrived, though, there was an immediate realization that the river coursed sharply toward the northwest while the setting sun was a good 55 degrees due southwest. A high bank rimmed the river. The lowering sunlight wasn’t close to touching the ice, and wouldn’t.

This year, an emerging light in the darkness of the times.

After taking some mundane landscape pictures, including one of silhouetted birds roosting in a distant tree, I sauntered down the shoulder of the highway to get closer to the river, to study the ice and the light. It was then that a faint glow of yellowish light beckoned from the troughs of the floe, and my thoughts returned to our dire political situation. Sometimes there is a reasoning behind the significance of an image, of a photograph, and I saw the light signifying an emergence of resistance in the depths of the blueish ice. ICE. Yes, capitalized, of our shedding light on Trump’s storm troopers enforcing his MAGA racist policies. There, in the depths of the icy Minnesota River, near the headwaters, on a cold winter afternoon, was my symbolic Winter Solstice image.

Two shots were made before I turned to carefully make my way back over the rough terrain and through the grasping grasses to the pickup, and I’m reasonably sure any residual anger was long gone and replaced by a smile of comfort and acknowledgement. Those cattail rich muskrat huts in the shallows of a wetland might have made a decent, visually nice Solstice image, yet there are reasons, often unrealized, why things don’t work out as planned. This image of emerging light amidst the jagged ice floe more symbolically captured our moment in time. At least for me, which is why trying to capture a symbolic image on this, on the day of the celebration of light, is so personally necessary.