I have an alien penpal. I don’t know what that penpal looks like. I don’t even know if “it” is male or female. “It” has never seen Earth, doesn’t really know what our mountains are, or oceans, or grasslands. “It” has never been to Oklahoma. But I have learned that my alien penpal has five sense – can see, smell, touch, hear and taste. I have learned that our languages are the same – they actually speak English.

“For each home ground we need new maps, living maps, stories and poems, photographs and paintings, essays and songs. We need to know where we are, so that we may dwell in our place with a full heart.”
Scott Russell Sanders, “Buckeye”
“The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust, “Remembrance of Things Past”
I’m passionate about Sense of Place.

As a nature lover, I struggle with desert. Of all the types of ecosystems, I find the least beauty there. What is there to love about desert? So, I’ve put my own theory to the test. Can I “connect” with desert, when I find little of beauty or attraction there?

Nature prepares creatures for the cold weather. In my earlier post on Winter Survival, on January 18, I focused on survival facts, interesting behaviors and physical characteristics that keep animals alive in the coldest months.
We put on heavy clothes, snuggle into our houses, and consume warm/hot foods and drinks. Likewise, animals of all kinds do the best they can to survive. Here are more interesting survival tricks.

“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)