Everything Is Bad, But There Are Baby Deer

By: | June 8, 2026

Not everything can be awful, right? Not everything can be the worst. Anyway, I have just decided that I refuse to let everything be the worst and to succumb to the idea that no, it is, in fact, the worst. I feel a bit guilty about trying to grasp joy, but what choice does any of us have?

The baby fawns are back on the mountain where I live. I was driving downhill last week and two of them, and their mom, jumped into the road in front of my car. I stopped in plenty of time and watched them frantically scramble across to the other side. The deer must have been twins, because there was only one doe, and they sure were tiny. They were afraid, and small, and they wobbled as they tried to stay close to their mother while I rolled down the window to take photos. I was so happy to see them. I view them as a good omen. Spotted fawns are symbols of life and safety, and a wild representation of my younger daughter’s birthday this month.

Then I immediately felt bad about this flash of joy. There is so much wrong. Yes it is sunny today, and yes new deer were born, but the country is in decline and the world is falling apart, and what am I supposed to do, be happy about deer? For real? How can I hold this small joy in the same heart as the one breaking over the end of the world as I have always known it? Isn’t it ridiculous to worry about trying to hold both these truths? Moreover, is that something that I now need to also worry about, until there is recursive worry about anxiety over the wrong things outweighing the deserved anxiety about the Big Things? An oroborous of anxiety and doubt that eats itself?

There is much to be said about the juxtaposition of good and bad, joy and sorrow, throughout Christian tradition, and Buddhist tradition, and neuroscience too.

Joy is not the same thing as happiness. The latter is more transient, and the former is a state of being. Joy, in the Christian tradition I am familiar with, is a gift we have been given, as well as something that resides in us all. It is supposed to be something we can center and hold even in the worst times. At the Passover dinner before he was crucified, Jesus talked about joy: “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete. This is my commandment: love one another as I love you.” The word “joy” appears frequently throughout scripture in both the Hebrew and Christian books. Like hope, joy is a gift as well as a responsibility.

In Buddhism, joy is a practice. You might hear the concept “life is suffering” attributed to Buddha or at least Buddhism, though this is not a real quote, merely an oversimplification of the idea that existence involves suffering. In my limited experience, citing the equally important Buddhist principle of shared, sympathetic joy is a lot less common, especially online. It is called mudita, and it describes the pleasure of delighting in someone else’s delight. This feeling is something you can cultivate, and if you are like me, you probably have to work on it through something like meditation, because it is not always easy to attain. It takes work to find joy, and you should do the work, in other words. It is a gift, as well as a responsibility.

The third and probably best version of this juxtaposition comes from the place I get many good, lasting ideas: Daniel Tiger. “Sometimes / you feel two feelings at the same time / and that’s OK,” Daniel’s mom sings to him. This jingle, which is permanently part of my parental repertoire, comes after Daniel is disappointed he couldn’t take his preferred conveyance, Trolley, to a friend’s house. He was happy he still got to play, but he was also sad that it didn’t unfold exactly how he wanted, because this is how four-year-olds think sometimes.

Four-year-olds (like mine) are surprisingly capable of naming and feeling mixed emotions. I was curious, so I read some psychology literature. A 2015 study showed that children as young as 3 years old are able to recognize mixed feelings, showing that mixed-emotion understanding arises earlier than people thought.

I also learned that the brain regions that carry out mixed feelings are those usually involved with advanced functions. The anterior cingulate and ventromedial prefrontal cortex apparently activate in people watching a bittersweet film, in a more recent study. We are literally built to feel more than one feeling at the same time. So it is OK — advanced, even — to be both happy and sad.

It helped a bit to know there are physical and metaphysical ways to understand what I am dealing with here.

I am trying to hold on to joy, despite the burning sensation of anger and doubt that rises like bile when I read the news, my chosen profession. Innocent children in a giant Texas jail are expected to eat maggot-infested food, Russia keeps bombing Ukraine, Jannik Sinner lost shockingly early because it was dangerously hot at Roland Garros, the bark beetles are infesting Ponderosa pines, my mom is still gone.

And yet. Courts have held back or even remedied some of the offenses. At least one congressman is trying to shut down the concentration camp in Texas. Serena Williams is back. The trees in my woods are healthy. My almost-5-year-old is learning how to read. The forest is full of bears and wildflowers, and the baby deer have arrived. There is joy here, too.

At the very least, I am trying to cultivate a feeling of OKness about cultivating joy. Can I be happy, though I do not feel like it is ok to do so? As a wise friend put it to me recently, I prayed not to be healed, but to want to be healed.

Life in 2026 is A lot of this is bad, but not everything is bad, and I am allowed to seek and find the good. The baby deer are good.

Sometimes, you feel two feelings at the same time. And that’s OK.

Voice Mails from the Great Beyond

By: | June 5, 2026

On the morning my friend Kristina died, I listened and re-listened to the last voice mail she left me. I needed to hear her voice, and the mundaneness of her 35 second message was comforting. She was sorry she’d missed my call. She’d been out for a walk. She was planning a bike ride tomorrow but would call me again before that. She really wanted to connect.

I am notoriously terrible about clearing out my voice mails. I can’t bear to erase them. I have a habit of keeping at least one at all times from the people I love most. The content of the message isn’t important. It’s that I can hear their voice, catch them in the midst of ordinary life, before they are dead. I’ve learned that you never know when someone will be dead.

I once heard a story about a phone booth in Japan where people who lost friends and family in the 2011 tsunami and earthquake go to talk to their lost loved ones. I would use a phone booth like that.

I still occasionally listen to the voice mail I saved from my friend Mona before she died several years ago. I have heard her say that she’s just returned from Tai Chi class dozens of times. In the months after she died, I also texted her more than once. Sometimes I would forget, if only for a split second, that she was dead and feel compelled to follow through on my impulse to tell her something on my mind. Other times, I just needed to pretend for a moment that she wasn’t really gone. 

When I got the news that Kristina had died, I had just placed a letter to her in my mailbox. A few days earlier, a loved one had sent a message out saying that Kristina was turning inward and it was now best to send wishes and love by mail rather than text or phone. This was my second note to her in the previous two weeks, and I’m not sure if she ever read the first. After I received the news that she had passed, I stood on the front porch and stared at the little red flag raised on my mailbox at the end of the driveway. I could not make myself go retrieve the letter. 

Photo: Pxhere

This post first ran on March 29, 2021.

Bringing that spirit home

By: | June 3, 2026
A clump of tiny plants by the side of a road

You want travel to change you. Right? But then you come back home, and it’s back to your regular life, and the smells and sounds and memories and surprises drift away, and there you are, back the way you were.

This spring, I spent nearly two months on a pilgrimage, visiting 88 temples on the Japanese island of Shikoku. I know, I keep going on about it. It was, I hope, life-changing.

But how do you change a life? And why? I have good friends and interesting hobbies. I sing regularly. I live with a beloved man and dog. And yet I felt mild dread about going back home and having life be exactly like it was. What did I do this whole thing for, this two-month odyssey of tired feet and hard mattresses, if I was just going to end up back on the couch, scrolling on my phone?

Here’s a list I started halfway through the trip and added to as I went along, trying to capture some of what made the experience so rich and good – a mix of suggestions for home and descriptions of pilgrim life:

  • Walk a lot until I get a job
  • Walk in rain
  • Carry things
  • Stay off Instagram and Facebook
  • Knowing what I’m doing – a plan/goals
  • Being outside
  • New experiences
  • Learning
  • See people in person

So how am I doing on this list, a month after my return?

I took one six-mile wander in the first week or two, but other than that it’s mostly dog walks and then the walking you do when you get around mostly by public transit. Which is a fair amount of walking, but it’s not going to add up to 150 miles a month. I do lean a little more toward choosing to walk even if it’s raining. Carrying? I haven’t been carrying any more than is necessary – certainly not the 15-20 pounds I sometimes had while hiking.

Facebook and Instagram are my preferred social media apps, and it was important to me to actually be on my pilgrimage, not immersing myself in the news and outrages from home. Or, just as bad, living for my audience and their reactions. I did eventually go back to Facebook to get advice from the group devoted to the pilgrimage, and re-installed Instagram to keep up with people I met along the way. After a break, it was easy to see that opening social media is like settling into a warm bath of my friends’ and acquaintances’ opinions and anxieties. I have plenty of my own opinions and anxieties!

That perspective was easy to hang onto when I was engaged with the trip. But here I am, back at home, letting the old obsession creep back in.

The pilgrimage had a goal, and it took my whole dang body and mind every day. It wasn’t easy; planning my hybrid of walking, bus, and train meant bopping back and forth between a paper map covered in post-it notes, a guide book, Google Maps, the amazing Henro Helper app, and a Japanese navigation app – that last one because I now know there are bus routes that Google Maps isn’t aware of. I needed all of these to figure out how far to go each day, where to eat, whether I needed to carry lunch, and where I could stay.

I was also exercising my brain by speaking Japanese every day and constantly learning new words and characters. And I was remembering how great it is to interact with people face to face. (I’ve been talking to more strangers in my neighborhood, and if you’re in the D.C. area with free time on weekdays and I haven’t already gotten in touch about coffee, I’m sorry about that.)

Here at home, what is my goal? What is my project? To teach my dog a new trick? To live well until death? Finding a job is a project, but it’s not as fun as working out how to visit all of temples 60-65, keeping in mind the weather, the huge climb to temple 60, the opening hours of the temple offices, the limited transportation options, and the availability of lodgings. Solution: 63, 60, 61, 64, 62; three days, two buses, one inn; and a smidge of hitchhiking. It was awesome.

There are ways that I’ve brought the pilgrimage home with me physically. Not just my stamp book, filled with red stamps and black calligraphy, or the heaps of souvenirs. My actual body changed. Partway through the trip I took in the waistbands of my two pairs of hiking pants with safety pins, and now I’m wearing jeans I had long ago given up on. Last week the eye doctor confirmed that my eyesight had drastically improved since my last visit, just four months before. Now I’m waiting on new lenses for my glasses, but I’ll hang onto the old ones – I assume the return to a life where I rarely look farther than the end of a leash will bring back my old eyesight again.

A few weeks ago I was setting out to walk to a doctor’s appointment. It was more than a mile from the nearest metro station, and I was feeling vaguely irritated about it. And I thought: Wait, you love walking. What made it so good in Japan? And I thought of the perfect tiny assemblages of plants that grow up on roadsides, like in the photo at the top of this post – violets along a rural road near the town of Susaki. And I thought: You can find that here.

Moments later, an abandoned gas station came through.

Did it fill me with as much joy as the plants I saw in Shikoku? Not really. But it was still a perfect little glimpse of the world that grows around us, and it made my day better.

Photos: Helen Fields, obviously

If you want to read more about my trip – like, a lot more – I wrote on Substack along the way. Click here to read all about it!

Home/Not Home

By: | June 1, 2026

I wrote this on May 7, 2018 and I have no idea why it feels like I wrote it this morning, looking out my window and wondering what I was looking for. I’ve always done this, looked out my window and wondered why I was doing that, what was out there, what was I looking for?

I grew up near stands of what passes in northeast Illinois for old-growth forest.  The definition of “old-growth” is apparently a work in progress.  I take it to mean a forest that was there before a particular part of the country was cleared and settled, and in northeast Illinois that was pretty late, around the 1830’s.*  So these forests were named for local farm families that my family knew:  Egermann Woods, Goodrich Woods, Greene Valley Woods.  One forest that wasn’t named was behind our little farm — bottom of the hayfield, across the creek, and up a rise to the woods.

The woods was shaded by the treetops, not much on the ground except leaves, big rocks, moss, some grasses I think, and for sure wildflowers: shooting stars, dutchman’s breeches, may apples, jack-in-the-pulpits, spring beauties,** and in one place, yellow violets.

The woods had no suggestions for what to do except to look at things, sit down and lean against a big tree for a while, then get up and see what was beyond the next tree.  Back by the creek was a willow, easy to climb, that I sat in a lot, not thinking.  We weren’t supposed to go down to the woods — partly because it was someone else’s property and mostly because our mother couldn’t see us — so that was part of the draw.  The real reason we snuck down there over and over, time after time, for years was – I don’t know quite how to say it. It was deeply comfortable, you could breathe slowly, you felt lighter, it felt like you’d come home.

So decades later, in the city on the east coast, when my neighborhood got its shorts in an uproar over a local private school’s plans to clean out a tiny woods, I went to look at the woods.  The trees were scrawny, the ground was covered with ivy and brambles, and I thought, “What a wretched little woods.” The school could have cut that woods to the ground and the only ones suffering would be the displaced rats.

Years after that, I read Emma – “Coming of Age in a Trash Forest” — on the subject of urban nature and the silliness of trying to return it to its original and pure ecology, the “Big Pristine,” she calls it. She’s talking about the environmentalists’ swerve toward the realistic.

Every day, almost every day, most days, I walk along the streets of one of the most densely-populated neighborhoods in the city, and admire and criticize my neighbors’ gardens, though I keep any unfriendly opinions to myself. At the bottom of the hill is a little creek, a “stream” or a “run,” they call it here.  Along the far side of the creek is a dirt path that on a map runs through a green space.  The woods around the path are, I admit, green.

The trees are spindly, their habits misshapen; they’re covered with honeysuckle, English ivy, and poison ivy which will crown and kill them.  The vines are all over the ground too, and stands of weeds are head-high, no way you can walk off the path to the creek, you can’t get through and you’d fall over anyway.  Some of the stands are jewelweed, gold and crimson flowers. Some places have been carpeted by the lethally-invasive lesser celandine, such a beautiful name; they’re the glorious yellow of buttercups and the small shiny leaves look soft and bouncy.  Daffodils, lilies, and Japanese cherry trees have escaped from nearby lawns.  I saw a blue heron in the creek; a mallard couple lives there. Kids sort of live there too:  invasive bamboo has been cut to make lean-to hide-outs; dead branches and vines are laid out carefully over swampy patches.  Good and bad taken together, though, the woods are still unlovely; they’re full of aggressive plants and weak trees; they have their beauties and uses but they’re not home.

But who still thinks “home” is a place you can get to any more?  Who thinks it’s a place you’re even remembering rightly?  If you went back there, would it even feel like home? Isn’t “home” the place you are right now and where you’re likely to stay awhile? Isn’t it a place you find the best in, and that best is good enough for anyone?  I miss my old woods and the relief of their comfort.  But this “green space” I have now, it’s going about its life with verve — stupid and inept maybe, but full of beans.  And maybe the bed of lesser celandine, maybe it would be nice to sleep on.

_______

*The French and Indians were there much earlier — see the old place/river names – but they weren’t clearing and farming acreage.  I apologize for going on about this but I’m always surprised by the lack of history in northeastern Illinois.

**These are local names, maybe local even to my family, and not necessarily the flowers you’d see if you google-imaged them.

_________

spring beauties by Jay Sturner, lesser celandine by Katja Schulz, both via Flickr

Submission

By: | May 29, 2026

This post first ran in 2023

Abstract

Many years ago, some birds started breeding on an island. Several thousand of them still do. The world changes around them, but their basic needs have stayed the same. Will they be on the island much longer? We don’t know. We hope so. The signs are ambiguous.

Keywords: Seabirds, oceans, uncertainty

Introduction

A good introduction is a funnel. A funnel takes an otherwise unruly amount of material and feeds it through a small opening. It is a tool not so much of order as of constraint. Here, the unruly amount of material is the ecological state of the world. But we constrained ourselves to the changing nature of the ocean, and how that change affects some of the things that depend on it. That is a topic we can reasonably wrap our heads around, given the areas of our expertise.

We focused on birds. (We happen to like birds.) One species in particular, in one particular place. We have been watching this bird in this place for a while. During that time the ocean went through an especially severe change that lasted a few years. Thousands and thousands of animals died—not just birds, and not just here. (We are still determining the extent of the loss.) Then conditions returned more or less to “normal.” Whatever that means anymore.

We wanted to know how the birds we watched fared. More broadly, we want to know how they will survive in this world we’re making for them. But we can’t phrase our research question quite that way, so we will say something like: Given such-and-such marine states that we believe we can measure with some degree of accuracy, what did the birds do? How many laid an egg in a burrow, how many chicks hatched from those eggs, how many of those chicks survived to set off on their own?

To refine our thinking we reviewed the literature. It was often contradictory. We are left with our simple questions. Some of the answers were easier to come by than others. Here we report a few of the former.

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Branching

By: | May 27, 2026

In April, the sun started rising early enough so that I started walking or running near dawn. Each time I returned, there were people gathered underneath the same cluster of eucalyptus trees in the park and I didn’t ask why. I mean, I wondered why, but people do strange things sometimes.

Then, a few weeks ago, my friend Annie asked if I’d seen the owlets.

The next time I walked by the small knot of people beneath the trees, I stopped and looked up. Where are they? Someone pointed. And there they were: three fluffy white owlets lined up on a branch like bowling pins, and overlooking them, a stern-faced great horned owl.

The owls, I later learned, had been nesting there for months. Great horned owls usually move into another species’ nest over the winter. They need to start early, because once hatched, their owlets need more time under the watchful, night-seeing eyes of their parents compared to many other birds. A local naturalist told me that the owlets, even once they’re flying — one already is —  will still return to their parents throughout the summer, maybe even into fall. The parents will continue to feed them, even though the young owls can hunt on their own. “Like college students,” the naturalist told me.

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Uncle Bundy and the Technically Sweet

By: | May 25, 2026

I like to run this post on Memorial Day (the first version ran May 28, 2012) because when I think about soldiers and wars and Memorial Day, I think about Uncle Bundy. He was awfully opinionated and excessively direct but I admired him greatly and listened when he talked. Not he ever talked about the war, he didn’t. But in this case, what he was talking about is an ancient link between war, technology, and humans — a link began when someone first improved a stone into both the first hammer and the first spear. I’ve heard it about this link from many technologically-inclined people; I heard it again just the other day. Uncle Bundy has since died — at a nice old age with his family around him — and I miss him.

It’s Memorial Day in the U.S. but this is not a war story.  It does have a little war in it, but the real reason I’m writing it is because of this ball bearing  my uncle had.  My uncle’s name was Leverne, some of his buddies called him Vernie, all his relatives called him Bundy – no reason for that – and he’d always been a mechanic.  One summer day a long time ago, he was out in his garage working on a car and I was watching him.  “Look at this,” he said, “it’s a ball bearing.”  It was a grooved ring, and running in the groove were little metal balls.  “I just greased it,” he said, “and look how pretty it goes.”  He ran his finger over the little balls and, one after another, they turned smoothly and easily in their groove.  “Isn’t it pretty?” he asked.  No, it isn’t, I thought, but I didn’t answer.  I was in high school and an English major.  It’s greasy and dirty, I thought.  Poetry was pretty, not ball bearings.

Bundy was a farm boy who went to high school, then in November, 1942, joined the army.  He was sent first to the University of Utah, then went back to regular duty.  Then he requested to be sent to the Fort Sill Motor School, then went back to regular duty.  Then he requested to be sent to the 668th Field Artillery School, then went back to regular duty. Then he requested to be sent to the Schofield Barracks Motor School in Hawaii, and he learned to be a mechanic. He never got a college degree.

In 1944, he got on a Liberty troop ship, a little hollow tub short enough and the Pacific waves big enough that the ship went up one side of a wave and down the other while the seasick troops lined up along the deck and threw up over the side.  The ship was headed for the Philippines, to the battle of Leyte in which 3,000 Allied troups and 10,500 Japanese troops were being killed.  By this time Bundy wasn’t really mad at anyone any more and didn’t want to fight; and anyway Leyte turned out to need materiel, not troops; and besides the war was ending, so Bundy was just as glad when the Liberty ship turned around and went to Oahu, where he spent the rest of the war.

He came home to Illinois in November, 1945.  He and Mitzi, his new wife, lived in an unheated upstairs room in his sister’s house.  He got a job fixing cars and tried to figure out a place to live.  He found a little octagonal house that had been built for either hired hands or pigs, and bought it for $2,300 which he borrowed from his mother.  The house was too far from work so he bought a lot nearer by, and then he measured up the house and measured up the lot. Next he dug two rows of post holes and in the holes he stuck stove pipes which he filled with concrete, and this would be a foundation.  Then he asked his two brothers and his brother-in-law if they’d be willing to help move the house; and next he asked a customer at work if he could rent the customer’s flatbed truck for a Saturday at the going rate of $3 an hour.  His plan was to raise the house enough to back the flatbed under it.

He remembered seeing some 30-foot timbers somebody had left out along Route 66, and he and his brothers went out and picked them up.  They brought the timbers back to the house and with two hydraulic jacks, jacked up first one corner of the house and wedged a timber under it; then jacked up another corner of the house and wedged a timber under it, then went back to the first corner and jacked up the timber and wedged another timber under that one; and pretty soon the house was perched on the timbers up higher than the truck.  Then they backed the truck under the house, timbers and all, and headed out — Bundy stood on the roof to lift up any telephone or electric wires. When they got to the lot, they backed up to the foundation, unloaded the house, trimmed it up, and reversed the jacking-up process, removed the timbers, and rested the house on its foundations.  It worked exactly as planned.  Bundy paid the customer $9 for three hours rental, plus $1 tip.

Bundy and Mitzi lived in the house for five years, then sold it to his mother and moved to a house that could fit the six kids they eventually had, and where they lived the rest of their lives.  Bundy kept being an auto mechanic and by the time he retired, he owned his own garage.  Once my brother had questions about his college physics problems, and Bundy figured out the vectors and derivatives intuitively and got the answers. Bundy told me in the 1970’s to hold on to the Dodge slant-six but for my next car, give up and buy Japanese because otherwise Detroit wasn’t ever going to learn.  At age 91, he was fairly creaky but as bossy, opinionated, righteous, and as impressively, precisely competent, smart, and ingenious as he ever was.

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Leaving / Imprints

By: | May 22, 2026

Mom spreads maps over the dining room table. They’re oldish, not ancient, but the home I see in them is not the home I know. They are all of Colorado—mostly cities at the nexus of Rocky Mountains and High Plains, 40, 50, 60 years ago. The outpost of Ward, a funky old mining town up a sinuous dry canyon, guarded by two guys with broadswords. The hopping university town of Fort Collins, then just a smallish scatter of purple squares along a tidy grid of streets. And there’s Boulder in 1957, my hometown, where I’m visiting my family.

We press the map folds flat with our fingers and lean closer. The city then was a tiny yolk at the core of its current footprint, pressed hard against the mountains. The mesa where my parents live formed its eastward boundary, a new neighborhood then, not yet swallowed and sprawled miles beyond with malls and business parks and subdivisions and natural gas wells, the fingers of the city and its neighbors creeping outward over the plains, grasping each other to form an amoeba of light and noise that pulses with traffic along a vasculature of roads. A place forever swallowing itself. Becoming new and new again, without becoming better.

Every time I come back, I grumble about how much things have changed since I was a kid. For all my sharp words, though, there’s something unchanging here. It rises in me when I see the rolling, ponderosa-covered waves of the foothills breaking on the treeless slopes of the high Rockies to the west, when I see the plains reaching boundlessly east, haloed pink at the days’ two turns, from and towards darkness.

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