Greetings from the Mojave Desert!

It's quiet and still this morning as I write in the late winter sun. From where I'm sitting I can see the San Bernardino mountains off to the west, dusted in snow, the more immediate landscape flat and sandy and dotted with desert Chaparral and Joshua Trees. We're on the last leg of our three-week trip in California. The first two weeks were spent up around the Bay Area where we stayed with family, working remotely, visiting old friends, and freewheeling around San Francisco like we used to.

We decided to come down to the desert to soak up some sun and warmth our last week before returning home to the Wisconsin winter. You see when we planned this trip, we were anticipating a normal-as-can-be February at home, with freezing temperatures and ideally some snow. Oddly enough, most days we've been away it has been warmer where we live in Wisconsin than it has been here in California! Two days ago the high in Joshua Tree was 66 degrees. Vermont, Wisconsin? 70. While I'm sure the spring temperatures feel lovely and invigorating, I find the warmth (and lack of precipitation) unnerving.

In southern Wisconsin, the typical average temperature in February is in the mid 20s. Yes it warms up by the end of the month, and it's not unusual to have a few days in the 40s, but 70 degrees is much, much too hot, and I find myself experiencing a climate anxiety like never before. Perhaps the most immediate sensation is one of helplessness. I know there are many things, large and small, that we can all do to help mitigate changes to our climate, but at the end of the day, it is what it is. I don't control the weather and neither do you. No one does! And I'm learning how to be with that, as scary as it feels.

I find myself worried about the plants that won't be able to survive these wild fluctuations, worried about the trees that will leaf out early and likely have their flowers damaged by frosts. I’m worried about the animals that are active too soon with very little food available—and I'm worried about us. For whatever reason I'm not really thinking about society and long-term survival, but instead wondering about us as individuals. How do we experience spring when there is no winter? Who do we become? I was recently told by an ecologist that our southern Wisconsin birch trees are migrating north as they can no longer survive our feeble winters—they need the deep freeze and the long cold. Who are we without the birch trees? Who are we without the deep freeze and the long cold?

And another question I've been asking myself for a long time now: how do I want to live my life amid the nuances and paradoxes of these times? How do I appreciate what feels good (like May temps in February) without engaging in cognitive dissonance about the realities and unknowns we're collectively facing (and with the awareness of so much horrific suffering and violence in the world)? What does that look like as an ongoing practice, lifeway and orientation?

For the past month I've been snaking my way through The Driftless Reader, a compilation of ecological, historical, and creative writings about the part of Wisconsin we call home. If you don't know, the Driftless is a hilly, rugged landscape shaped by moving water and defined by the absence of glacial drift. While most of the upper midwest was at one point or another covered by massive sheets of ice, for whatever reason (and the exact reason is still unknown), the 24,000 square miles that comprise the Driftless never were.

As I make my way through the book, I've been finding a lot of comfort in learning about the geologic history of where I live, in sensing beyond the immediacy of our clocks and calendars, and into the vastness of time. I like trying to wrap my mind around the unfathomable amount of change these lands experienced before we even got here. Not as a way to dismiss the challenges we face today or to shirk accountability, but to better understand loss, resiliency, survival, and adaptation.

And within it all, I find it comforting to be reminded of the smallness of my life, and of our human societies and constructs. I am nothing! (Or better put, I'm hardly anything.) And yet here I am and here we are—we're a part of something unimaginably old, infinitely intelligent, and beautiful beyond belief. The original paradox.

I’m not sure there are fixed answers to my questions, and I get the sense that learning how to live well in these times, and to do right by each other and the Earth, is an ongoing process. Like the ever-moving, meandering, streaming, draining, seeping, spilling, sometimes crashing water that shapes the Driftless, perhaps a good approach is to follow the flow of the land and see where we end up. Like the rivers that flow to the sea, my guess is that it will bring us together.

Outside the wind has picked up. It's slicing through the branches of an olive-like desert shrub I can't identify. I'm going to take my dog to a nearby wetland to see what's going on with the willows and the cottonwood trees and to know what it feels like to look more closely at the distant mountains. But I'm also looking forward to being back in familiar wetlands next week, scent of mud and home. I've heard that the cranes are already returning to our southern Wisconsin waterways. I'm sad to have missed their first calls, the exhilarating crack of air as it echoes between hills.

~ Clare