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What Does a Loon Sound Like at Night?
A loon sound at night is not exactly terror, and not fright in the ordinary sense. But it is the feeling you get when the hairs on the back of your neck rise suddenly while resting in darkness on a northern lake. Something ancient speaks and we respond. If you have ever slept near a…
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SAGA OF A LOVE AFFAIR WITH RADIO
WOJB in smoky voice and guitar. The radio was on in my childhood home, always. A radio keeps songs alive long after they’re hits. I was two years old when Harry Belafonte’s Banana Boat Song climbed the charts, but my hometown station played it for years until it lodged in my mind. Belafonte’s energetic tenor…
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Sounds Older than Sitar
Pulling the cord to start the Evinrude nothing happens. I pull again, and again, nothing. The sound of its cough, a serious protest, carries across the lake in a way that seems older than the sitar.
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Yoga Reset From the Inside
My latest article published in OM Yoga Magazine May 1, 2026 A yoga reset from the inside takes time. And when we stay long enough, the surface may may open-up, curl, or crack like birch bark drying in the sun. But eventually, resistance to self-discovery and tuning into self gives way, and what begins showing…
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Blood Sound
I’d been traveling for two days and was tired of being treated like a number. I’m at a cabin in northern Wisconsin, the Pacific of Hawaii still in me. Opening the door, I step over a creaking threshold, my boots landing on a green throw rug, a lily pad on the lake. Soon I’m listening…
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A Grammar Older Than Roads
The monument is simple. Stone and cement. It holds its ground the way a place does when it has nothing to prove, like The Old-Style Place. For a moment, I was elsewhere, stepping down thirty-three wooden stairs to a Wisconsin lake where loons call. Then the veil lifted. I was back on the bluff, walking…
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The Wood Duck Drum: A Father’s Measure, A Son’s Keeping
At the cabin, the work begins with what has fallen. A lightning-struck oak, opened by time and water becomes a drum. I stand in the lake and carve, an eagle circles overhead then leaves. I keep the rhythm and circle through hand, attention, and rhythm.
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Pressed Shirt, Polished Steel: The Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride
I learned how to dress-up when I was sixteen while working after school at a men’s clothing store in my hometown. The sales staff included four men and one woman. I was there through a highschool distributive education program that paid the state hourly wage ($1.10 at that time) while teaching sales skills. The owner…
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A Northwoods Practice of Stillness, Light, and Listening: When Small is Beautiful
Stories Emerge Like Bears is a forthcoming lyric memoir by Gregory Ormson, set in a Northwoods cabin where attention, labor, and place shape a life lived at human speed. Snowmelt drips from the roof. I watch long enough to feel the pace of winter loosening its grip, giving itself to spring. The water drips without…
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Prime the Pump: What a Northwoods Cabin Taught Me About Learning and Attention
To get anything from my students I had to prime the pump. They were just like the pump, squeaking and whining before finally being coaxed out of their shells to participate.
Got any book recommendations?