Emily Brisse

Lake Chapala and its surrounding towns are truly beautiful. I'll likely write an essay about them at some point. For now, I hope you've enjoyed these glimpses into some lesser-known regions of Mexico. We'll be back!

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here, And you must treat it as a powerful stranger, Must ask permission to know it and be known. The forest breathes. Listen. It answers, I have made this place around you. If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here. No two trees are the same to Raven. No two branches are the same to Wren. If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows Where you are. You must let it find you. -- by David Wagoner To a year of being found. Happy 2016, all.

 So, as I've mentioned here previously, we bought a fixer-upper this past spring. Where the house is quickly becoming one of my favorite characters (the unpredictable and quirky type), it is the land (of course) that has already merged with whatever voice I might use to write about it. One rainy morning, and it is all sanctuary and joy.  Hope you are relishing your summers, friends!

Good morning, It it raining here, lightly, and the view out my window is an ecstatic shaking green. I am three floors up, and yet I do not see the sky, I do not see the ground: just trunks and branches and leaves, close and middling and deep. What a scene to wake to! As ridiculous as these last months have been, these trees are saving me. Have saved me. Are already old friends.  I see now I'm going to have to write about them. Later. Soon. Graduation for the seniors tonight. And then: summer. Spring was a new house. A new roof. New floors and carpets and paint and cabinet liner and drawer pulls and towels. It was so much more space, these large open rooms that echoed even with our whispers. It was windows, light streaming in through the then bare branches. It was one holy morning when the buds popped open, and everywhere was suddenly yellow green and green yellow and holy holy holy. It was worrying about an old house with holes and trusting a new world so very able to fill it...

May your new year be full of adventure and clarity. (And lots of reading, writing, big hopes, simple dreams, and chocolate.) xo from the north shore of Minnesota!

Okay, not one can write a symphony, or a dictionary,    or even a letter to an old friend, full of remembrance    and comfort. Not one can manage a single sound though the blue jays    carp and whistle all day in the branches, without     the push of the wind.  But to tell the truth after a while I'm pale with longing     for their thick bodies ruckled with lichen  and you can't keep me from the woods, from the tonnage     of their shoulders, and their shining green hair.  Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a     little sunshine, a little rain.  Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from     one boot to another -- why don't you get going?  For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees.  And to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists     of idleness, I don...

 

Lahr (Schwarzwald), Germany : The area where I spent half of June and the first week of July. It reminded me in many ways of Minnesota. Although, in other ways, it was all and only Deutschland. And yes, in time I will expound. This will be the first in what I'm guessing will be a good number of "in photos" posts. So much to share! But first a disclaimer: the first photo was actually taken right outside of Seelbach, a neighboring village to Lahr. Isn't the Black Forest beautiful?  Hope you've been well, friends. It is strange and wonderful to be home (my own bed! English!), and although I want to and will live in the present as much as I can for the rest of this summer, I know when I'm in my moments of reflection, it will be gratitude gratitude gratitude.

I’ve been trying to pinpoint it: the moment I knew I loved the natural world. I’d like to say it happened while overlooking a lush Montana riverbank plump with wildflowers, an image I claim as my first memory, but I was two and a half years old then, and too young to make declarations. Years later, when I was sixteen, I glimpsed the Continental Divide stretching across the Colorado horizon and felt something come loose in me, an awe that lacked edges. But that was not the first time that feeling came, even if before I hadn’t had the language to describe it. I could pick from memories on Lake Superior or in the Badlands or on the Mississippi, but the moment I keep coming back to is a simple one, cushioned in no impressive names, that took place in my Minnesota small town front yard. My family had just moved, and everything about our new life seemed strange and overwhelming. How does one make new friends at ten? How does one navigate the avenues of grief for a life that we’d left...

on thick days the rhododendron, the azalea shrubs in blush are too much concluded praise,  so I slip into the quiet of green woods and green air and say nothing