nature writing

When I was in college I had an English professor who joked that art is mostly about two things—birth or death. He said that somewhere in the crannies and creases of every great poem, painting, novel, sculpture, or song, you could locate this theme-of-themes, this eternal dance between the beginning and the end of the human earthly existence.

It's seven in the morning. Coffee steams from my cup and I've been up for nearly an hour. I've already been out with the dog. It's cool today, a good break from all the unseasonably warm weather we've had. The drought has lifted for a little while. My rain gauge, unemptied, still tells me last week we had over an inch and a half of rain here east of Spartanburg. It's felt like the South again for a few days-moist and verdant. Now autumn has suddenly arrived, and the dry weather will likely return if the patterns hold true. The sourwood trees are turning that burnt red that for me signals fall. Winter is only 12 weeks away.

This past weekend I drove to Charlottesville, Virginia to speak at a reading sponsored by the Southern Environmental Law Center, a group responsible for some of the best and most important conservation work being done in the South. I like to think of SELC as the legal voice for Southern land and animals.