I’ve been thinking a lot about listening.

If you’ve been with me through Little Pasture on the Prairie or Our Little Pasture, you already know this work has never really been about me alone. It’s been about weather and seasons, about sheep and grass, about the way a place shapes a life if you stay long enough to notice.

This new project grows directly out of that practice, but it shifts the center of gravity.

I’ve bee alluding to this for a while, but I’m beginning a weekly field recording series called Keeping Kith. Each episode is recorded outdoors—while I’m with the flock, in the barn, or walking across the prairie—and left mostly unedited on purpose. I don’t clean up the wind. I don’t remove the birds or the sheep or the long pauses. Whatever arrives gets to stay.

The idea behind this is something I’ve been calling kithship: a kind of belonging that comes not from shared blood, but from shared place. Over time, the prairie itself has become one of my closest collaborators. The wind sets the tempo. The season shapes the tone. The more-than-human neighbors decide when they want to join in.

This isn’t a polished podcast or a scripted essay series. It’s closer to a field note you can listen to. A weekly act of witnessing. A way of letting the land speak alongside the human voice instead of behind it.

You’ll still find my writing at Our Little Pasture. That root system isn’t going anywhere. This project is simply another way of practicing attention—one that feels truer to how this place actually sounds.

If you’ve ever read a piece and wished you could hear the moment it came from, this is for you. And I’ll also add, at this particular moment in human, and especially American history, I think listening—really listening—with compassion and tenderness to our neighbors is a practice that can only help us navigate the complicated challenges ahead.

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