Monthly Archives: January 2026

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.”