“Perhaps I am a bear or some hibrnating animal underneath, for the instinct to be half-asleep all winter is so strong in me.” – Anne Morrow Lindbergh.
So true. When it is dark and cold outside, in late November, December and January, all I want to do is put on warm sweaters and cozy up to a roaring fire in the fireplace. Add something that warms my insides as well and I’m happy, and half asleep.

If you were living in northern Oklahoma during February 2011, you remember “The Blizzard. ” Just over three years before, we had the Ice Storm of 2007, when thousands of residents lost power for days and days. Power was lost during the 2011 Blizzard, too, but the biggest thing about the blizzard was that many of us couldn’t even get out of our driveways after 14 inches of snow overnight on Jan. 31/Feb. 1.

I’m wishing and dreaming for snowflakes. As a weatherman put it just last week, we had June-uary, not January. But snow could be on the way this month, and the time to learn about snow is NOW!
Snow is a word that can describe lots of different weather phenomena. It can be more than just an icy, solid form of precipitation. These differences are unimportant to most of us. We are either thrilled or wary when it snows! If we further define ‘snow’ it can become sleet, sneet (snow and sleet) or even ice.They are all cold and white, but description, and personal experience, make all the difference. A weatherman can describe snow flurries, snow showers, snow squalls and blizzards. Fact is, they are all SNOW.

From “Winter Solstice at the Moab Slough” by Terry Tempest Williams in Heart of the Land, the Nature Conservancy, 2000.
“D.H. Lawrence writes, “In every living thing there is a desire for love, for the relationship of union with the rest of things.”
I think of my own stream of desires, how cautious I have become with love. It is a vulnerable enterprise to feel deeply and I may not survive my affections.

“There.”
I couldn’t see it. The trees were thick opposite the rock fall, just beyond a flat grassy meadow.
Bess gathered her strength and stood. Slowly, we picked our way across the rocks and then stepped across the meadow. The undergrowth in front of us was thick, but then, it wasn’t underbrush. It was a house.

Here in Tulsa we are so lucky to be able to see our national bird, The American Bald Eagle, all year long. Back from the verge of extinction, this bird is a success story! It is now nesting in parts of the United States where it had virtually vanished in the 1960s.
One of the groups that researched and worked to return nesting populations of bald eagles to their natural habitats was the George Miksch Sutton Avian Research Center in Bartlesville, Ok. (www.suttoncenter.org)

“I rejoice that there are owls. They represent the stark, twilight, unsatisfied thoughts I have.” — Henry David Thoreau
In an earlier post, I asked readers to let me know what animals they wanted to learn more about. One request was for information about owls. This quote from Thoreau seems appropriate. I think that many of us wonder about owls. They seem like mystical beings with their huge eyes and silent flight.

“I better get going.” I grabbed one of the forest trails topo maps from the counter display.
Erick made a move to grab his jacket, but then checked himself. I knew he shouldn’t leave his post, and I didn’t want him to. I didn’t need help, or companionship. I wanted to find the cougar, and in the process, find the Witch of the Forest.

Are you as fascinated by the stars as I am? One of my favorite activities as a child was to lay out on a blanket in the back yard after dark and stare up at the sky.
My family had one of those star charts.

“I like all that goes on in the hundred years of a tree’s life, or the two hundred or five hundred years of its span — all the ice and snow, the windstorms, the fires that creep around the edges of some forests and sweep through anhd across others, starting the process all over, and leaving behind a holy kind of pause, a momentary break in power, before things begin to stretch and grow again, as vigorously as ever.”