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How nature supports, informs, and inspires our lives
We want you to spend time in nature and come away in love with the place. We want your kids to love the grasses, ponds and woods. “We” are the LBJ Grasslands Project, and so far that is Michael Smith and Kayla West. We… Continue Reading “Introducing You to the Grasslands”
Hardly anything is finer than a green Forest Service gate opening onto trails that lead through the grasslands and oak woodlands of LBJ National Grasslands. Those meadows and woods change throughout the seasons, and each of those changes is beautiful. If I had to… Continue Reading “In the November Woods”
Fields of grasses and flowers stretching into the distance pull me into some sort of enchantment. In late autumn and winter their colors and textures could keep me wandering for hours, with the sun glinting through the tufted seeds of little bluestem and the… Continue Reading “Falling Deeper into Prairie Magic”
The Texas Hill Country is a beautiful region, and Meghan Cassidy and I finally got around to visiting it in mid-October. In our work on a forthcoming book on mindfulness in Texas’ nature, we have been to a lot of places around the “edges”… Continue Reading “At Pedernales Falls”
A few weeks ago, it was back to the Big Bend region with Meghan Cassidy for one of the last trips for the book on mindfulness in nature. I’ve made a number of trips there during the past twenty years, and my attachment to… Continue Reading “Mindfulness, Mountains & Snakes in the Big Bend”
At 3:30pm I was sitting in a chair in the shade, looking out at a field of little bluestem and Indiangrass waving in the gentle breeze. Scattered in with the grasses were a few violet spikes of dotted gayfeather, a smallish prairie plant whose… Continue Reading “Quiet, and Then Storms at the Grasslands”
I climbed the switchback trail up to the ridge at Southwest Nature Preserve yesterday, and it felt a little different. The high temperature was still in the 90s and there were no clouds to deflect a little of the sun’s radiant warmth, but there… Continue Reading “Is It Autumn Yet?”
At the end of 2019, I wanted to write a book about practicing mindfulness in nature. I wanted to describe what it was like to let go of the background noise and pay attention fully to the present moment, while exploring the woods, the… Continue Reading “A Few More Destinations”
June 16, 2021 The day-long drive set the stage for our arrival in the Big Bend country. The land became flatter and more arid, and the stretches between towns lengthened. We began to see dust devils spinning across short distances among the mesquite and… Continue Reading “The Road to the Big Bend”
Avoiding Encounters and Enjoying Them When They Do Occur (I wrote this for The Post Oak, newsletter of the Arlington Conservation Council. It appeared in the June, 2021 issue.) It is spring, and now we’ve had rain, and so the abundance of life is… Continue Reading “Our Venomous Snakes”
Lives In Nature 