Two summers ago, while participating in the annual bike trip Ride Across South Dakota (RASDAK), I spent long minutes looking at fences. South Dakota fences. Which are sometimes different from and sometimes similar to the lodgepole pine fences I helped build in my youth in Montana. Those fences were made of trees we found up…
I had thought that when I turned 60 I would have fewer questions about life and more answers. But the exact opposite has happened. As my own mortality looms closer on the horizon of life, my field of vision has expanded the boundaries of life’s meaning and stretched me further than I could imagine. At…
When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was without shape or form, it was dark over the deep sea, and God’s wind swept over the waters. “Watch your step!” Sheila’s warning coincides with my fall off the ladder, landing on my knees. She had told me not to come down the…
Ecclesiastes 3:18 “I also thought, where human beings are concerned, God tests them to show them that they are but animals 19 because human beings and animals share the same fate. One dies just like the other—both have the same life-breath. Humans are no better off than animals because everything is pointless. 20 All go…
“Loss is a cousin of loneliness,” Olivia Laing. The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone My mother and Lost Bird, a Lakota woman who died at the age of 29, share at least one thing in common. Both have lived at All Saints, the Sioux quartzite building in Sioux Falls, South Dakota….
Winter: Turbulent northwest winds usher in blizzard conditions, leaving Dakota buried under ice and snow that piles along the roads, crusting into white and black. In 2013, winter arrived prematurely when a blizzard blanketed western South Dakota, killing tens of thousands of cattle, horses, and sheep. In one day, the West River rains switched to…