Last week, as Martin and I flew into Denver on our way to the Aspen Summer Words literary festival, we could see giant billows of smoke from the High Park fire outside Fort Collins, about sixty-five miles to the north. The fire has burnt more than 100 square miles over the last several weeks and, as of this writing, is still not completely contained. We met a cabbie who said philosophically that Mother Nature would have her way and that people who lived in fire hot spots should expect to get burned out. We talked about people who build houses in hurricane zones or on fault lines and concluded that human beings could be a little slow on the uptake.

At the festival, we had the great pleasure of meeting Luis Urrea, one of the keynote speakers, and his wonderful wife Cindy. In a session with H. Emerson Blake, editor of Orion Magazine, Luis recounted meeting a group of curanderas in Mexico several years ago. They immediately sensed that he was accompanied by the spirit of a Sioux warrior, although they were puzzled by the word “Sioux,” which they hadn’t encountered before. Luis was puzzled as well: he had been in the company of Sioux shaman not long before who told him that he was sending a warrior spirit with him for protection, but Luis had understood this in a metaphorical way. The curanderas assured him there was nothing metaphorical about it.

When they found out he was a writer, they were disappointed. They had seen that he was a communicator of some sort, but they told him that he was really a healer. Sorry, he said; if I could cure people, I would, but I can’t. You’ve just been lazy, they told him, but if you won’t do that hard work, we guess your writing can work to heal the spirits of those who did not die in peace. Don’t be lazy now, they said. There is work to be done. Sick souls rely on art, on works of beauty, to lead them into health and peace. Art, they told him, cures by lighting bonfires in the soul, in souls that were filled with deadwood before they died, deadwood that holds them back even after death. This is not metaphorical: get to work. And he did, writing books that depict the ways of thoughtless devastation and grace. His own soul having been kindled, his work is like a taper that readers can use (or not) to light their own souls on fire for the work of justice, beauty, and harmony.

But how does lighting that flame cure a soul? As a culture, Americans tend to focus more on curing disease in bodies, and for most of us, putting ourselves into the care of the medical profession is an act of faith whether we call it that or not. I go to a doctor, and if I trust her, I do what she tells me to do and take the drugs she tells me to take, even if I have no idea how those drugs work. I also look for a doctor who sees beyond the complex systems of the body to the unique conformation of my very particular life, sometimes called the soul; who helps patients as they walk through the fire that comes with confronting pain and mortality.

In Christianity, curing souls—traditionally the work of priests—involved discerning the movement of the Spirit within a life. This process is now more commonly called spiritual direction. As is the case with other religious traditions, the Christian discernment process calls followers to maturity through the Three Ways of purgation, illumination, and union. Purgation is often associated with dust and ashes, with desert and fire, with wandering lost in the wilderness, with penitence. T. S. Eliot ends his great aria of the Three Ways—confusingly called Four Quartets—with the conviction that, even in union, the fires of purgation are present, though transformed:

A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

According to Urrea’s curanderas, the care of the body, the cure of the soul, and art are intimately interrelated. Many physicians will not wish to have their work compared to curanderismo, the work of folk healers who use herbs, water, mud, and esoteric knowledge to effect their cures—and I understand why. If I had a child with a serious medical condition, we’d go straight to a medical doctor, not to a shaman. And yet Western science seems to be realizing the need to see the human body as more than the sum of its physically constituent parts, to tend to the fractured realities of psyche, mind, genetic inheritance, environment, and time and place in history, the unique friction that some of us call the soul (though naming it feels reductive). We are beginning to acknowledge support groups, meditation, Eastern medical practices, massage, hospice care, and more as legitimate tools in the medical kit, even though Western metrics cannot easily measure their efficacy. We are starting to see that curing bodies is sometimes inextricable from caring for souls. Curanderismo has worked with this humbling understanding for centuries, even millennia. The controlled burning of deadwood in the soul—the tinder-dry fuel of fear, pain, and isolation—is not new work to the best of medical doctors. They still try to help if those flames begin to burn out of control.

Given the actual fires roaring through Colorado right now, it seems silly to claim for anyone besides firefighters the distinction of pulling people through fires. But there are people who pull us through fires that are metaphorical and utterly real and destructive. But artists, like firefighters and physicians, walk people through fires, whatever their source, and fire is, after all, a vital component in the maintenance of any healthy ecosystem. I love the idea of bonfires in the soul. It’s just the kind of image toward which I’m likely to gravitate. It’s beautiful. Poetic. Religious under- and overtones. Words that can drift in and out of my head like smoke, eventually leaving nothing behind. If taken seriously—more than literally—they’re a call to get moving. There’s work to be done.

What we’re reading
Heather: Luis Alberto Urrea, The Hummingbird’s Daughter
Martin: Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

Heather’s father Henry E. Catto Jr. died on December 18, 2011. The following is an adaptation of remarks she delivered at his memorial service at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in San Antonio on January 7.

My friend Mimi Swartz wrote a wonderful piece in the November 2010 issue of Texas Monthly about the lovely and sometimes exasperating process of getting to know her father after her mother died. Pic Swartz had been one of my father’s dearest friends since before Mimi and I were born, but I read her piece with more than just the prurient pleasure of reading about someone you already know in excellent prose. She very accurately described a process I recognized in my relationship with my own father but that I hadn’t thought about yet. My mother, like Mimi’s, was the switchboard operator through whom most family information was routed. When she died, I was faced with what appeared to be a daunting task: getting to know my then-seventy-nine-year-old father without a mediator.

I don’t mean for a minute to suggest that he was somehow absent from my life. He drew silly cartoons on my lunch bags when I was in grade school, perhaps to make up for the fact that no one would trade lunches with me—my mother was an early adopter of what was then called “health food,” and the other kids utterly scorned my lunches. He scared the shorts off all his children (and his wife) when we made our yearly summer drive from San Antonio (where we lived at the time) to Aspen, Colorado, over a then-unpaved Independence Pass: he loved to pretend to lose control of the station wagon and hear us shriek with pleasure at our narrow escape. (My mother’s shrieking may not have been pleasure-based.)

Through my teenage and college years, he impressed on me the importance of being prompt (although I’m not, particularly). The sight of him sitting in a grumpy heap of plaid bathrobe at the bottom of the stairs late at night was one I learned actively to avoid. He also taught me the importance of looking up the meaning of words I didn’t know. One day he wrote me a note for school: “Please excuse Heather’s absence from school yesterday. She was malingering.” When I didn’t ask him what malingering was, he suggested that I look it up. After I did so and shrieked, “DAD-dy!” he wrote another: “Please excuse Heather’s absence from school yesterday. She was gold-bricking.” Not yet having learned my lesson, I had to shriek one more time before I received a satisfactory note; my love of dictionaries has continued to this day.

He drove me to Massachusetts from our home in northern Virginia for my freshman year of college at his own alma mater, pointing out places he had known and loved as we got nearer Williamstown. As we approached my dorm, he suddenly spluttered in outrage at the displacement of his beautiful old frat house by an architecturally unfortunate library. Aggravated as he was, he refocused his attentions to carry my station wagonload of stuff to the third-floor room and cried before he drove away, even as he continued muttering imprecations against willful artistic ugliness, an issue that vexed him all his life.

I also knew that he could be an unusually good sport. Political discussions, of course, were always central to our family’s common life, and my mother, who was a Democrat and always up for an argument, never let a political proclamation from my father drive by without pulling it over and checking its registration. She taught her children well, which means that it’s likely his whole family voted him out of a job he loved in 1992, when President Clinton came in. I never heard a word of recrimination. He didn’t stop trying to show me the true Republican light, however much he felt its glow in the past years had dimmed. In fact, in the end I was forced to admit that he might have some points worth considering.

I already knew these things about my father when my mother died: that he was funny, a stickler for precision in language, an advocate for order and beauty in the arts, and usually a very good sport. That’s not a bad list to start with, or even to finish up with. What I’ve learned about him in the last two years without my mother has surprised me and left me very grateful, despite the cost of the knowing.

Most of you who knew him have probably noted that I haven’t yet mentioned what might be my father’s most salient characteristic: his charm, which, having swum in all my life, I had ceased to notice. When I did notice it, I often thought of his charm as an accessory, a frill. Charm just wasn’t Serious. It wasn’t Deep. It was Frivolous.

In the past two years, Dad and I spent a considerable amount of time at M. D. Anderson, where I watched him “oozing charm from every pore.” What I came to realize after a while was that his charm was not directed just to the people who might be useful to him. It oozed all over the place in a cheerfully undisciplined flow. Cashiers in the cafeteria, janitors, doctors, volunteers, nurses, all laughed at his jokes, smiled at his suspenders and bow ties, graciously tolerated his corrections of their grammar, and responded to his courtly interest in them so that lightness and buoyancy tended to bob up where he was. I began to notice it in other places we went as well, this capacity to disarm people from all walks of life, people who might easily have dismissed him as a stuffy, inflexible elitist.

This is the backdrop against which I made my most unexpected discovery about my father: he had a capacity to ask genuinely for pardon when he had offended and to forgive when offended against. I have come to see his charm as an outward and visible sign of a deep humility, a bloom that became particularly noticeable to me after my mother died. It was something I had completely overlooked—and perhaps something he hadn’t known about himself and which may have sprung from the sharp compassion that can emerge from grief.

In the last two years we had many, many opportunities to ask for each other’s pardon. Although he had a pair of very expensive hearing aids, he rarely wore them, preferring to accuse me of mumbling and requiring me to repeat myself with frequency, followed by exhortations not to yell. One morning I was driving him somewhere and just lost my temper when told to stop mumbling and yelling yet again. “Maybe,” I said with some asperity, “you ought to consider apologizing to me for making me repeat myself over and over again when you could just put in your damn hearing aids.” He raised an eyebrow and said, “But it’s so much easier to blame you”—and then, just before I pulled over and throttled him, he truly apologized, although he did not put in his hearing aids.

We spent a lot of our time together arguing. We argued about his driving and his tendency to want to control his medical appointments without telling anyone about them. We argued about what he considered my tendency to worry and fuss. We argued about the need for nurses. We argued about the need for new kitchen appliances. We argued about moving the TV in his room to a place where he could actually see and hear it. Arguing with my father was not a novel experience. What began to follow the arguments was. Almost inevitably, I would get a call a few minutes after an argument, or a request for my presence, followed by a genuine apology, which in turn, allowed the same to be called forth from me. I learned that the moments of annoyance were never the last word. I learned to respect and be led by a depth of sweetness that I had previously judged to be frivolous. I learned how to love him all the way down because he showed me how to do it.

Learning to see the deep roots of his charm—which sprang from a genuine desire for peace at global and personal levels—I have come to see that my father was one of the blessed peacemakers Jesus called the children of God. That, in his own struggle with grief, he could reveal himself as this child of blessing was his greatest gift and example to me. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed is Henry Catto, with or without his hearing aids.

What we’re reading
Heather: Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
Martin: Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin

I have a bone to pick with Freeman Dyson, professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and generally acknowledged scientific genius. I bet he’s really nervous.

On a recent trip to Aspen, I picked up The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010, edited by Dyson, and the latest installment in a wonderful series that began in 2000. In the introduction, Dyson laments that most current science writing appears as brief news items rather than “thoughtful essays” like the ones John McPhee wrote for The New Yorker. Apparently magazine editors don’t feel that science as science has much reader appeal. Nature writing is much more common; Dyson notes that the book contains twice as many essays about nature as about science. “Nature is now fashionable among readers and publishers of magazines,” he grumbles. “Science is unfashionable.”

Somewhat later he claims that the essays about nature are “written for nature lovers, not science lovers,” because “the quality of the writing is as important as the subject matter.” The environmental movement is the product not of science, but is rather the “leading secular religion of our age,” a replacement for Marxism. “Environmentalism doesn’t have much to do with science,” he says, although he proudly shares the ethics of the environmental movement. He is hopeful about the future of the Earth because two such committed communities are “working to preserve living space for our fellow creatures….”

While his analysis is in some ways perfectly reasonable, I object to the idea that there is an unbreachable demarcation between science and other disciplines rather than a permeable boundary that encourages heavy traffic and frequent discussion about just exactly where that boundary is, particularly between the sciences and the arts. (I include religion in the realm of art for purposes of this essay.)

Subsequent events since I read Dyson’s introduction have encouraged me to continue this line of thought. Maggie Fox, CEO of the Climate Protection Action Fund, was the featured speaker at the recent Jessica Catto Leadership Dialogues, a program of the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies. She opened her talk by suggesting that the bar code would be the symbol for this era; technology, media, and advertising have converged in such a way that we are encouraged in all arenas to chose what we already know and prefer and to live in a bubble that reflects our predispositions. She urged us to step out of our silos both inside and outside the environmental community and to refuse to identify too exclusively with what we already know.

The day after this talk I read an article in The Atlantic Monthly entitled “The Triumph of New-Age Medicine,” by David H. Freedman, that investigates the rise—and apparent efficacy—of alternative, or integrative, or holistic medical practices in America. Mainstream medicine has a mixed reaction to this turn of events. Freedman quotes one doctor willing to consider integrative medicine’s benefits as saying, “Doctors tend to end up trained in silos of specialization.” Those who object to alternative medicine as hokum can be virulently negative about it, despite the opening in recent years of forty-two integrative medical research centers, all of them at major medical institutions like Harvard, Yale, Duke, and the Mayo Clinic. Says one critic, “It’s cleverly marketed, dangerous quackery…. There’s only one type of medicine, and that’s medicine whose treatments have been proven to work. When something works, it’s not all that hard to prove it. These people have been trying to prove their alternative treatments work for years, and they can’t do it.”

From there, Freedman takes a look at what constitutes “proof” in mainstream medicine. He interviews a Harvard researcher who claims that many mainstream medical treatments are little better than placebos. Says Freedman, “The vast majority of drugs don’t work in as many as 70 percent of patients, according to a study within the pharmaceutical industry. One recent study concluded that 85 percent of new prescription drugs hitting the market are of little or no benefit to patients.” But patients keep buying them, because, according to the researcher, “knowing that you’re getting a treatment is a critical part of the ritual of seeing any kind of practitioner.”

It appears, then, that effective treatment relies in part on patients’ perceptions and expectations, two things that are notoriously resistant to empirical testing. The belief that treatment will be efficacious is frequently augmented by a solid relationship between healer and patient. Freedman says that studies “have even shown that patients still get a beneficial placebo effect when practitioners are honest but optimistic with patients about the placebo—saying something along the lines of ‘We know of no reason why this should work, yet it seems to work with many patients.’ Sure enough, it often does.”

Freedman also interviewed a neuroscientist at the University of California at Davis who studies the effects of meditation on the brain and who said, “We have to be careful about allowing presumed objective scientific methods to trump all aspects of human experience. Instead, science has to learn to listen in a sophisticated way to what individuals report to us, and to relate those findings to other kinds of knowledge obtained from external measurements.” This, of course, was my takeaway from the article, which deserves to be read in its entirety and not just in my messily truncated version of it.

After reading this article, I attended a concert in the Aspen Music Festival summer series featuring Beethoven’s third piano concerto. My father and I sat where we could watch Joyce Yang, the soloist, as she played this beautifully complex and lyrical piece. I’m not able to judge whether it was a flawless performance (it certainly seemed like one), but it was utterly riveting. Her performance took a series of givens, of facts, that any performer of the piece faces: the piano, the musical score, the liturgies required in a concert performance, and technical mastery over all of them. These givens, in combination with Yang’s ebullient, unmeasurable, unprovable subjective self, brought forth something beautifully new and of soul-jolting clarity. She was the vehicle of a kind of revelation.

Dyson himself recounted in his own career as a physicist a moment that sounds to me analogous to Yang’s performance. A 2009 profile in The New York Times Magazine entitled “The Civil Heretic” described how he solved a particularly difficult problem given to him by a professor, a subset of a larger problem Einstein had proposed. Dyson had just parted from the brilliant physicist Richard Feynman, with whom he’d been on a road trip through America:

Inspired by this and by a mesmerizing sermon on nonviolence that Dyson happened to hear a traveling divinity student deliver in Berkeley, Dyson sat aboard his final Greyhound of the summer, heading East. He had no pencil or paper. He was thinking very hard. On a bumpy stretch of highway, long after dark, somewhere out in the middle of Nebraska, Dyson says, “Suddenly the physics problem became clear.”

The intersection of the givens of the discipline of physics with Dyson’s unmeasurable, subjective self brought about something new, a revelation. Perhaps the masters of any discipline are more like each other than they are like the competent workers within their disciplines, the people who move a discipline forward without changing its course.

Which gets me back to my irritation with Dyson’s silo-ing off of science writing from nature writing and environmental writing. Of course there are nature/environmental writers whose grasp of science is negligible (like me), whose substitution of sentiment for rigorous thinking is exasperating, whose awareness of the history of nature writing is minimal, or whose identification with a political orthodoxy is absolute. But there are also nature and environmental writers who marry mastery of their craft with their unmeasurable, subjective selves in such a way that something compellingly new arises, something revelatory about the not always entirely overlapping human and natural worlds.

Even as I was reading the new Best of, I was also reading Writing the Sacred into the Real, a compilation of essays on beloved places by poet Alison Hawthorne Deming. The quality of her writing is as important as her subject matter, a statement which Dyson would not necessarily intend as a compliment. I’m not sure why he would exclude scientists from the pleasure of reading her essays, which are as much reflections on writing as they are on nature; she is not a scientist but has read and reflected on science, and it informs her observations without being their subject matter. Her subject matter is the ways in which Americans have been shaped by the natural world, even as much of American culture becomes more removed from it and, consequently, careless in its stewardship. Her purpose is to make us look, really look, at our surroundings: “The human eye does more than see; it stitches the seen and the unseen together, the temporal and the eternal. It wakes me again and again to the astonishment of finding myself in a body moving through a world of beauty and dying and mystery.” She insists on the power and presence of the invisible in human experience, on the ways in which a deep, focused involvement with nature leads to a glimmer of understanding that surpasses the sum of its parts:

For me, the natural world in all its evolutionary splendor is a revelation of the divine—the inviolable matrix of cause and effect that reveals itself to us in what we cannot control or manipulate, no matter how pervasive our meddling. This is the reason that our technological mastery over nature will always remain flawed. The matrix is more complex than our intelligence. We may control a part, but the whole body of nature must incorporate the change, and we are not capable of anticipating how it will do so. We will always be humbled before nature, even as we destroy it. And to diminish nature beyond its capacity to restore itself, as our culture seems perversely bent to do, is to desecrate the sacred force of Earth to which we owe a gentler hand.

This doesn’t sound all that different from what Einstein said about his sense of faith:

A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty—it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man…. Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvelous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavor to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.

These two masters of distinct disciplines sound very much like each other. Given what I’ve read of and by Dyson, I don’t think he would disagree with me, or them. There seems, however, to be within many disciplines a tendency to defend their boundaries with a tribal fierceness, a tendency that Dyson exhibits in his introduction. I hope that the masters of all disciplines find ways to seek each other out and investigate their common ground rather than defend their own turf—not a bad exercise for the drones, either.

What we’re reading
Heather: Alison Hawthorne Deming, Writing the Sacred into the Real
Martin: Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

I’ve been surveying the multitude of leftovers in the refrigerator of my mind. When was the last time this thing was cleaned out? Jeez. Prodded into further examination of my last post by subsequent emails, conversations, and readings, I’ve concluded that my thinking is a little moldy and needs either to have the fuzz shaved off or be thrown out. Caveat lector: slightly smelly smorgasbord on the way.

Fuzzy thought number one: Chiding me for a Band-Aid approach to life-threatening environmental crises, a friend emailed this: “I actually think democratic control of the world through political action must be established. For me that means crushing the power of corporations.” On the one hand, I agree fully. The sheer, concentrated force of most multinational corporations is flabbergasting: the fact that British Petroleum still enjoys reasonable financial health despite the costs of the oil spill cleanup beggars the imagination. That much money is as good as a private militia, if not a private nuclear arsenal. Like anything powerful and willful, corporations need constant skeptical scrutiny.

Fuzzy thought number two: Bill McKibben, environmental prophet extraordinaire, was the first speaker a few weeks ago in a new annual lecture series endowed by my father in my mother’s memory at the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies. Martin and I were unable to attend, but my sister told me that the evening was beautiful, the talk was inspiring, and McKibben was a passionate and humble witness to the planet- (and therefore self-) destructive path we’re currently running down. (A few days later he gave a more formal version of his lecture at the Aspen Ideas Festival; either version is very much worth the time it takes to watch.)

Likening the scope of climate change to the devastation of nuclear warfare, he says that Americans “have so far failed to imagine that the explosion of a billion pistons and a billion cylinders each minute around the world could wreak the same kind of damage on the same scale.” Contributing to this failure of imagination are national inertia (we like the way we live); the divide between wealthy and poor nations (how do we tell others not to do what we have done when we are so comfortable?); and, unsurprisingly, the defensive position of the fossil fuel industry, which has hefted its mighty bulk directly on top of anything that might derail profits as usual. Imagine the public response to a campaign by the munitions industry downplaying the effects of nuclear warfare; one assumes that most of us would be thunderstruck. We should be as horrified by an industry that uses “the atmosphere as an open sewer for the effluent of their product” and makes more money than any industry in the history of money. But apparently we’re not. Yet.

Fuzzy thought number three: corporations aren’t going away, nor should they. They (can/should) provide the infrastructure that local and sustainable economies need to thrive. The problem comes when mighty corporate bulk squishes the little guys flat, which is what usually happens. Governmental regulations meant to restrain the mighty corporate bulk often squish the little guys even flatter. (That’s about the most sophisticated economic observation I’m capable of producing, so I hope you enjoyed it.)

Fuzzy thoughts numbers four through six, which come from the very back of the bottom shelf: when faced with complex, apparently insoluble problems, my tendency is to go for a walk. Or pull out Band-Aids. Or make a big messy meal requiring lots of cleaning up. (Martin, as chief dishwasher, gets tired of this one.) But having spent the week reading Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the great Christian theologians of the twentieth century, and listening to Bill McKibben, I must sadly conclude that mine are inadequate responses. Writing with the stench of World War II still in the air, Niebuhr rebuked those Christians who had concluded that the only response to evil in the world was pacifism, trusting in power of human goodness to convert evil. Nor did he allow those who act against evil to trust fully in their own righteousness. Rather, he said, we need to be acutely aware that “political controversies are always conflicts between sinners and not between righteous men and sinners. [The Christian faith] ought to mitigate the self-righteousness which is an inevitable concomitant of all human conflict. The spirit of contrition is an important ingredient in the sense of justice.” As tempting as it is to preen, when we choose to fight the bully power of corporations, we need to be clear about our own implication in the tangled web of environmental injustice.

Add Niebuhr’s words to these: McKibben, a mild-mannered science writer, published a column titled “We’re hot as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore” on the TomDispatch.com website this week that immediately went viral. Furthermore, our mild-mannered hero writes specifically about the refusal of our political leaders even to consider climate legislation last week: “So what I want to say is: This is fucked up. The time has come to get mad, and then to get busy.” This from a Methodist Sunday School teacher!

The organization he started in 2008 with seven recent Middlebury College graduates—350.org—was a ragtag effort to organize a worldwide response to climate change. The results of that effort were astonishing. It turns out that the term “environmentalist” does not apply just to a bunch of over-educated, effete white Americans; in fact, the rest of the world—most of it brown, young, poor, and powerless—knows something we Americans still aren’t willing to confront: climate change, driven by fossil fuels, has crippled the regularity of the natural order we rely on for everything. Everything. Everything.

Through 350.org, we have an opportunity on October 10, 2010—10/10/10—to tell the powers that be that we’re hot as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore. We should still walk through our neighborhoods and chat with our neighbors. We should still introduce people to the profound pleasures of eating locally and according to the seasons. Acts like these will give us sustenance for the battle ahead, especially those of us who don’t feel much like fighters, who don’t want to crush anyone or anything, and most especially those of us who don’t want out clean out our refrigerators.

What we’re reading
Heather: Dan O’Brien, Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch
Martin: Warren St. John, Outcasts United: An American Town, a Refugee Team, and One Woman’s Quest to Make a Difference

The first sparks for the idea of Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing and the Environment were kindled about a year ago in conversations with my mother, Jessica Hobby Catto. She has listened carefully and thoughtfully to my sometimes wildly utopian ideas, offering hard-earned practical advice and persistent encouragement.

Her death on September 30 has left me so stunned that I’m having trouble relegating her to the past tense. I am struggling to stay in the present perfect, which refuses to point to a specific time, preferring instead to drift between the present and the past. This grammatical eddy allows me to dawdle a little longer before I face a present and future without her. At the same time, I know that at Madroño her spirit is always present, always past, always future.

My mother’s love for the outdoors shaped my life. The first house I remember was on a bluff north of the San Antonio airport, terrain that didn’t qualify as even remotely suburban at the time. Since my three siblings and I arrived within six years of each other, my mother must have deemed it a survival strategy to push us out of doors as much as possible. We had no immediate neighbors and spent our time pretending to be lost in the woods, investigating the draws and seasonal creeks that occasionally flooded and kept us home from school, and sliding down the cliff (strictly forbidden) to visit the nearest neighbors who rewarded us with butterscotch candies. The gravel road on which we lived was rural enough that people felt comfortable dumping trash on it. Every few months my mother would send us to drag a large trash can and pick up the trash on the road that we could pick up: we were permitted to leave the large appliances and dead livestock. Her point was—and is—clear: some human interactions with the landscape are unacceptable.

She also taught me that love of place is a perfectly reasonable principle by which to order a life. Converted to the Church of High Altitudes at Cimarroncita Ranch Camp in New Mexico, she began proselytizing to her children in the mid-1960s when we began annual summer treks to Aspen, Colorado. In the requisite station wagon filled with pillows, the reek of Panhandle oil and cattle, and squabbling children, we always stopped at the top of then-unpaved Independence Pass (12,000-plus feet above sea level) to play in the snow.

Aspen then had one paved street, one stop sign, a drug store with a soda fountain, and two fine old movie theaters. What more did we need? On days we didn’t hike, my mother shooed us outside to play in the puddles if it was raining or to climb up nearby Aspen Mountain with raincoats or pieces of cardboard upon which we would slide back down the meadow grasses. When my father’s career took us away from Texas and to other interesting venues, Colorado was the place we always returned to, my mother’s spiritual center. Despite her peripatetic life, she had a profound love of the Roaring Fork River valley, its smells and flowers, its imperious weather changes, the varieties of its wildness. These never ceased to sustain her, and she in turn worked to sustain them through her involvement with various environmental causes, particularly land conservation.

When she was diagnosed with metastatic colon cancer in 2007, my parents began spending more time at their San Antonio home to be near the doctors she most trusted. Since she had long since given her heart and energy to Colorado, I was worried that she would feel unmoored during her time in San Antonio, adding to the discomforts of treatment. As we talked about ways in which she could stay connected to the conservation world she loved, especially in a state like Texas that so dearly values its private property rights, the idea of creating a gathering place for people passionate about nurturing the natural world was born.

I know I will eventually move out of the strange timelessness that hovers around times of death, but never completely. Despite her preference for the mountains, she saw the beauties of the Texas Hill Country and bought the original piece of what has become Madroño Ranch more than fifteen years ago. The blessings she bestowed on me—awareness of human limits, love of place, the place itself—are with me as long as I am here to receive them.

What we’re reading
Heather: Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist
Martin: Charles Dickens, Great Expectations