Page Lambert: All Things Literary & All Things Natural

"When rehearsals for King Lear started," friend, actor and playwright Ellen McLaughlin told us our first night on the river, "Just ride the tiger. That's what my director told me."   Ellen had been starring in King Lear as King Lear, a female actor portraying one of Shakespeare's most demanding and tragic male characters. The director didn't tell Ellen to hire a voice coach and learn to speak like a man, or to dress like a man (which Ellen wouldn't have done anyway). She told Ellen to ride the tiger.   The show opened and closed to packed audiences and critical acclaim. A day and a half after Ellen's final exhilarating performance, and after a brief reunion with her husband who had driven two thousand miles to celebrate their anniversary, I whisked her away for an all-women, 6-day rafting trip on Utah's Green River.      Our trip leader Brenda had been with me for nearly all of my river writing journeys over the last twenty-six years. She app

Cultures and communities that still live close to the land as our ancestors once did - farmers and ranchers, tribal people, rural neighbors - all know the wisdom of allowing the land to lie fallow. Even the neighborhood horse co-op that I belong to rotates our herd of horses from one mountain pasture to the next during the growing season. "Leave enough biomass  above the ground,"  traditional wisdom advises, "so that the sun may feed the roots  below the ground. " The golden grasses are dormant now - resting and recouping. The horses rest, too, conserving their energy. During a recent spell of subfreezing temperatures, each morning the herd stood quietly facing the sun, as if their bodies were living, breathing solar panels soaking in the warm rays.  Yet I often grind away at each day, sometimes not lifting my eyes long enough to feel the sun on my face, let alone rest long enough to nourish the roots that sustain me. Perhaps I need a sabbatical.  The archaic word h

Deborah O'Connor is a gifted astrologer and, on the near eve of my birthday, I find her latest message especially insightful and wise. I hope you do, as well. The photo of the Indian Paintbrush I took on the edge of the canyon near our mountain home several years ago. I have always cherished my June birthdays, and this one seems even more impactful. Midsummer is a poignant time. Light itself moves through us and into our world with more intensity than any other day of the year. On this bright and light-filled day, we recognize that, like the sun that has been expanding itself more and more and more for six months now, we have been working—body and soul—to energize our lives. But today is a turning point, literally.  Summer Solstice begins when the Sun moves into heart-aware Cancer. This is a day when Time itself pauses to see the way forward. Since the sun began to gain light and strength at Winter Solstice six months ago, we've driven ourselves as we felt its energy fillin

Photo by Time Magazine In 1964, the Beatles walked down the steps of a Pan Am Boeing 707 and stepped onto American soil at New York's Kennedy Airport. A few months later, my parents drove our family of four across the United States from Colorado to the World’s Fair in New York City. From there, we drove to Montreal, sold our car, and sailed on the cold waters of the Atlantic down the St. Lawrence Seaway on a steamship bound for England. We didn’t step back on American soil until 1965—one year, 27 countries, and one London Beatles concert later.   The world would never be the same—for our family, for the Beatles, for the teenage girls who swooned over John, Paul, George, and Ringo as girls had swooned over Elvis and James Dean. Those times now seem deceptively innocent, the girls with their penny loafers and ponytails, the half-grown boys with their bobbed bangs singing, S he's in love with me, and I feel fine ... She's so glad, she's telling all the world....  Ukraine i

When John took this photo of my favorite knoll at the ranch in Wyoming, eight years had already passed since I'd climbed to her barren top and peered down at the redtail hawk soaring beneath. Yet the stories I continue to tell about this land create an ongoing dialogue that pulses through everything new. During the last half of 2021, I shrugged off guilt as each monthly blog post went unwritten, in part because new chapters of the novel on which I was working continued to unfold. The writing experience had become less about interpreting the world, and more about listening.  Immersed each morning in the novel, I listened to the Colorado wind blowing through the ponderosas outside my window and to the woman whose story I was telling. When Monique rested her hand on the back of her grandfather's gray horse, I felt the horse's warmth beneath my own.* When Monique slid onto Nishiime's back and draped her bare legs around his ribs, urging him along the lakeshore and into its

Always, in the month of May, I feel my mother's presence in the untamed view outside our windows (which was once her view), in the mountain neighbors who once knew her, even in the noisy crows who congregate in the gangly ponderosas in our yard. The elders of this crow family might have been youngsters when Mom was alive, growing as she aged, recognizing her just as they recognized the mother fox and each new set of kits who denned below the house. Mom loved nature, and walks in the woods, but she also loved Japanese art, exotic travels, world-class museums, good books, classical music, Darjeeling tea, and French food. She never had these things growing up, which is perhaps why, later in life, she loved them so much. She loved Van Gogh, but not as much as she loved Claude Monet. A print of Monet's Japanese Bridge  found its way onto every bedroom wall I had as a child.   I've been re-reading my old journal entries from 2004, when my mother's valient struggles with cance

Two special women in my life just passed and I find myself filled with nostalgia for my own mother and for a childhood that was, by all measures, a good one. And yet there were tragedies, as with all childhoods. This poem, in this new year, takes me into the heart of a few of these memories... Forty-five years ago, Colorado’s South Platte River left her banks and thrust herself at the tall cottonwoods whose deep roots until that moment drank  matter-of-factly from her mossy waters near the frog pond by my childhood home twenty feet tall, the river roared across mowed lawns  scoured cul-de-sacs, inundated our home as indiscriminately as she snatched Betsy Grant’s  two-story brick house, carving a gaping hole where the basement had been, leaving nothing but a curtain rod. I do not remember if the day the rains came, on the heels of mountain snowmelt if on that day, a rainbow – like now, here on the Green River – stretched across the blue horizon offering itself as retribution and apology

The morning after the veterinarian injected the little white mare with a sedative, and then a lethal dose of barbiturates, the herd did not want to go out to the pasture. They stayed near the gate where the sweet elderly Arabian had taken her last breath.  “The timing is good,” the veterinarian had said. “Not too soon, and not too late.” She had taken care of Echo for many years. None of us wanted the thin mare to endure another hard winter, even with the herd beside her, even with abundant hay. The slender white mare had roamed these high mountain pastures for nearly thirty years. As other horses came and went, Echo’s presence remained as constant as the glow of moonlight over the meadows. She wasn’t a leader. She wasn’t an enforcer. She wasn’t even a follower. But like her name suggested, she was the mirror that reflected back to the other horses their sense of order, their sense that all was right in the world.  Like the vista of a deep canyon inspires us to shout across the water a