It took us two days to drive from North Carolina to Key West in the tippy-tip of Florida, and another wind-blown four hours by Park Service boat to reach the Dry Tortugas National Park, home of the sooty tern and of Fort Jefferson. On the trip, Stuart introduced Sonny, an NPS employee who has been working with sooty terns almost since the research ( Read more... )

If you talk to some mid-level and late-career conservation professionals, you may hear despair and bitterness lacing their voices. You may hear the deep sorrow they know from having dedicated their lives to conserving some landscape, some species, some experience of nature...only to find that things are worse now than they were when they were young ( Read more... )

.. or have you too / turned from this world--
or have you too / gone crazy / for power / for things?"
- Mary Oliver

For the first time since summer, I feel a simplicity of purpose that, like sunshine captured in a magnifying glass, has focused with white-hot intensity on the path before me.

In the midst of my time in Beijing, I made the decision to ( Read more... )

 
I start entries, leave them half-written, and tired. Pies without filling.

Misa tells me to day that I am "glowing." I grin back at her. It's usually something I hear when I fall in love. This time, though, the glow was of having danced yesterday in New York - a fantastic lesson, wonderful partnering, feeling all my training in Beijing start to pay ( Read more... )

After nearly two blissful days in the city where I first discovered aloneness, I swallow the bitter pill of memory and face what I am becoming. Already I begin to feel that the path beneath me is becoming unstable, that the road drops precipitously away on one side and then the other, that I have lost my map in an earlier tumble, and that ( Read more... )

The view can sometimes be much clearer when viewed from a mile high.  I surprise myself by enjoying first class - the wine, the seats that are more armchair-like than anything else, and the easy openness of my seatmates. I wonder if there’s some correlation between people who fly first class and willingness to talk to other people ( Read more... )

I've been too quiet again, the days keeling over slowly like plants drowning. They've been full, so rich with the movement of life carrying on that I barely know how to contain them here. And with graduation at the end of this year, I've become paralyzed by the possibilities of what comes next.

I curse my own inability to blend the boundaries of ( Read more... )

There are so many moments to write about, recorded but not yet laid out here. They will arrive, in time. Daylight arrives for me after many sleepless, jet-lagged hours listening to rain on trees outside of my Durham window. Now I prefer to speak of what I have learned.

Twenty-seven hours I traveled to get here from Beijing, and yet barely a day ( Read more... )

I get off the bus at 11pm yesterday, a long day almost drawn to a close.  I got into the office early, and left late. There is much to be done, and as the first of the month springs its sweaty, smoggy head into my face, I feel the toothy bite of haste nipping at my heels. Still, I spent the evening with Mel and some of her AYAD cohort, at of all ( Read more... )

How unlikely relatives are! With this connection, it is entirely appropriate that I walked up to strangers, embraced them, and treated them instantly with my most utter respect. That I was taken immediately into confidence, and that I searched for and found (within minutes of meeting) pieces of myself in the face and character of those strangers.

( Read more... )