In this second episode of our seasons conversation series, Volume 6 contributors David G. Haskell and Dara McAnulty explore how our senses shape myriad experiences of the seasons, some collective and some deeply personal. Finding wonder in the symbolism of daffodils in spring, carnivals of pollen-dusted black bees, and the feeling of joy tinged with grief as familiar seasonal moments return each year altered, David and Dara invite us to open our eyes, ears, and hearts to the celebration that lives within the seasons.

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Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.

This week, Diné poet Jake Skeets brings us into the rising dust, big sky, and bent light of summers on the Navajo Nation, and explores how the body is not separate from the seasons, rather one of the many terrains upon which they play out. Now living amid excessive heat warnings, sandstorms, and wildfire haze that test his love of the summer, Jake asks how such extremes will reshape our intimate and ancestral relationship with the seasons.

Read the essay.

Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.

Image Credit: Evelyn Dragan / Connected Archives

For Christian mystic Thomas Merton, the sacred and the profane were continuous: all was alive with divine presence. Stands of redwoods were his cathedral, the sky, birds, and wind were his prayers, and the silence of the forest his lover. This week, we return to an essay by Fred Bahnson, who follows Merton’s 1968 pilgrimage to the American West as he travels to Redwoods Monastery and Christ in the Desert Monastery. Guided by Merton’s contemplation and seeking the same solitude, Fred discovers anew the ways God runs through both land and heart.

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Watch the companion film by Jeremy Seifert.

Photo by Thomas Merton.