I don’t make it two minutes beyond the long gravel driveway onto the county dirt roads before I start snapping landscape photos, even though I know that’s not the form in which I need them for social media assets. I can’t watch a sunrise from my front door or a sunset from the field with…

Disco Duck and his little side duck’s tails shake on my handlebars as I ride on the grassy trail through the meadow mowed by 78-year-old Sister Jane, next to the prairie range where the alpacas graze. I am heading toward the straw bale cottage known here (on the farm in rural Kansas where I am…

To be neccesary. To know that a kind, gentle animal got sustenance because of me. To have people counting on me to close the chicken coop doors after the last ray of setting sun so predators don’t get them overnight. To feel the dignity of belonging. Of having a small role in the bigger picture…

Terra texted that we were leaving a half hour early to pick up the studs — the visiting boys who would be impregnating the girls this weekend. There was a problem with the trailer tires and we had to go to Christi’s to borrow her trailer instead (which meant I would get to see her…

So I draw a lot of lines out here while traveling Round America with a Duck. The routes I want or need to take on bikes, buses and trains to get to my desired destinations. The rows for planting seeds on the farms. The art I create. I realized while deep in thought gathering chicken…

Well, that was easy! Turns out a whole year of saying goodbye to my beloved wine with dinner (since Mother’s Day 2022) was the second easiest thing I ever did. (Easiest was going vegetarian, which I did in 2007 and intended to do for only a year as experiential research for a story, as I…

My hair is the color of the prairie. Golden and gray and brown. I fit in here. I know that. I feel that. They tell me, jokingly, that I don’t have to leave. Ever. And I turn that idea over and around in my head, wind-blown like the swaying golden grasses in the field alongside…

Meet Terra. Perfectly named, she’s the farm manager where I am currently WWOOFing. Rocking color-coordinated work clothes from Duluth Trading Company each day, she is a pink-hair-streaked, pierced ray of Millennial sunshine here on this alpaca farm and eco-spirituality retreat center owned and operated by the super cool Dominican Sisters of Peace, all in their…

America’s heartland The sun rises right outside my front door on the Kansas prairie in the heart of America, where I’m staying as part of the global WWOOF program while traveling Round America with a Duck via bikes, buses and trains. I do my Vinyasa flow of warrior poses before heading to my chores —…

I can’t sleep. After a harrowing several days simply surviving, I arrived in Wichita, Kansas yesterday with a couple of hours to kill before Christy and Tre were picking me up, four hours round-trip for them from the 80-acre farm owned and operated by the Dominican Sisters of Peace. After my excellent five-mile bike ride…