Page Lambert: All Things Literary & All Things Natural

Twelve hundred years ago (give or take a few) the Chinese poet Li Po wrote a poem with images of a canyon, a path, a creek and an impossible valley, newborn clouds rising over open rock, and guests coming into wildflowers. "I'm still lingering on," Li Po wrote, "my climb unfinished."  This poem found its way to John and me on Saturday, our wedding day , written inside a Georgia O'Keeffe card.  Our guests, too, wandered up a mountain path where wildflowers bloomed.  Just days before the wedding, I had spent a week at Georgia O'Keeffe's Ghost Ranch in New Mexico.  The week-long gathering, the 2013 women's writing retreat hosted by A Room of Her Own Foundation ( AROHO ), was filled with powerful stories, shared by a few dozen of the nearly 100 inspiring women who attended. Janet Fitch , author of Oprah's Book Club novel  White Oleander, (featured here holding a watercolor of one of the well-known red bluffs), advised us during her keyn...

“Why,” my editor asked me, calling from New York after she'd read the first complete draft of my first novel several years ago, “do we need the mountain lion?  It’s not like she’s supernatural or mystical or anything.” True, the lion in Shifting Stars was only being a lion.  But she was linked by the land to a destiny greater than any of us could understand, and it was her destiny that was linked to Turtle Woman’s, and to mine.  No, not supernatural, not greater than nature, yet every bit as mysterious as nature. How, I wondered, does a writer find her way into the heart of a story without following the tracks of the animals?  How does a woman find her way through life without these animals to guide her? This month, my story is posted in full on the Women Writing the West website.  Please continue reading by clicking Follow the Tawny Tracks .   Thank you. 

We should all love a place as deeply as nature writer Rick Bass loves the Yaak Valley - sink to our knees awed by the splendor, find ourselves seduced as Bass tells us he was in his award-winning essay "The Larch: A Love Story" (published in Orion Magazine and winner of a 2013 John Burroughs Award ). I have never written as eloquently about the places I love as Bass, but I understand that loving takes root in knowing.     Yesterday I was on my knees in the mountain meadow my horse calls home, gathering samples of different grasses.   I brought them home and spread them on the deck and with hummingbirds zinging overhead (scolding the sapsucker who was stealing their nectar), I carefully opened my Bear Lodge Mountains plant field guide .   Pressed between the pages were leaves and blossoms and stalks from plants that lived with my children in those same mountains - wild geranium, cinquefoil, coneflower, mountain brome, thimbleberry, bur oak.   I love those...

I want to get better at inhabiting, at occupying my landscape, moment by moment - like the otter below inhabits hers.  Almost completely immersed.  I want to know intimately the physical world where the outer story of my life takes place.  After all, isn't this where our thoughts feel most at home?  How is storytelling any different? "Coastal Cruising" courtesy wildlife artist Daniel Smith “Writing the outer story is a matter of sending yourself on the journey, sending yourself through the moment to find the new thing in it…. Don’t think, but watch instead: occupy…” (from Ron Carlson Writes a Story , Graywolf Press).   Mary Dobbs, Spanish Mustang Collection No matter how long a horse has inhabited a terrain, if something new suddenly appears, his attention will be riveted toward it.  The boulder that has rolled down the hill during the night to lodge against a sage brush might be a crouching mountain lion waiting to attack his herd. The rogue h...

Reading Gail Storey's new book I Promise Not to Suffer , brought to mind a book I once became fascinated with when I lived in Wyoming - Seven Half-Miles from Home by Wyoming artist and naturalist Mary Back.  Suffering from circulation problems bad enough to kill her, Mary was eventually unable to walk more than one mile. Determined not to stay inside, she plotted out seven half-mile trails radiating out from her house, one path for each day of the week.  Every morning before breakfast, she took a different route—out half a mile, back half a mile. "Each walk brings her home through another world—the world of the living river, the boggy meadows and swamps, the fence rows, the thickets, the forests, her human neighbors yards and gardens, and the desert.   All these worlds form a great circle—the circle rotates around Mary and she around it.”   (From Crossing Wyoming by David Romtvedt.) I love the intimacy of Mary’s paths, how each led her home—but I...