Thin Earth Blog

I have been learning to use colored pencils this year–Laura’s idea really. She and I bought matching sets of pencils and two drawing journals. We spent many winter nights drawing before bedtime. As is usual with any new drawing practice, this has changed my way of seeing the world. When you try to accurately reproduce…

Twenty years ago, after the twin towers were hit, the local Lutheran Campus Minister here in Winona held a candlelight vigil. People came up to the microphone and shared how they felt. I read an early version of this poem–I can still see the crowd of stunned, sad faces flickering in the light of little…

My friend Kurt Cobb’s recent essay, found here, posits an epistemological divide between”two main ways of knowing in our modern culture: 1) the rational, reductionist way and 2) the holistic, relational, intuitive way.”  The first way is dominant in Modernity–in fact defines it.  Our “institutions, scientific, economic, financial and organizational” are organized by this mode…

Why am I obsessed with this drawing?  It was just a throw-away sketch, something I did on scratch paper while sitting at the dining table.  But I find myself looking at it often.  I am not a very observant person, for the most part.  I am in my head a lot of the time.  This…

In his poem “The Scholars,” W.B. Yeats describes academics thus: Bald heads forgetful of their sins, Old, learned, respectable bald heads Edit and annotate the lines That young men, tossing on their beds, Rhymed out in love’s despair To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear. All shuffle there; all cough in ink; All wear the carpet with…

If you follow Highway 3 north out of Enterprise, Oregon, you first meet a sign that says “no gas for the next 72 miles.”  The road rises through the empty brown hills of the Oregon shortgrass prairie and sage steppe, passing the entrance roads to vast ranches.  Gradually you reach the Ponderosa pines of the…

On my journey across the West this autumn I spent some time following the Oregon Trail, the name most people use when referring to a network of old wagon routes heading west from the Missouri River.  The trail is really many trails with three main destinations: the Oregon Territories, the California gold fields, and the…

Buried in the torrent of election news this past week was the World Wildlife Fund’s report that between 1970 and 2014, the world’s population of vertebrate animals has declined on average by 60%.  Ed Yong, at the Atlantic’s website, makes this a bit more visualizable: Since the 1980s, the giraffe population has fallen by up…

I just got back from a trip out west–a four thousand mile journey that took me across northern Nebraska, through Wyoming and Idaho and up through Oregon.  I discovered two things apropos capturing images: 1) it is impossible to sketch while driving, or even when you stop to rest–that is, if you are on a…