My second recording session for Keeping Kith proved even more dramatic than the first. Part of what excited me about making these recordings was that I would have no idea who or what would join me, but I knew it would be interesting. In my experience, inviting kith into conversation is never a boring endeavor.

Horses, VERY high winds, sudden snow, and what a crazy time it is to be human-ing are all present in this missive, as well as thoughts on how we might rebuild our relationships with our kith going forward…

Meanwhile, as a former Minneapolis native, with many friends and family still there, I questioned whether I wanted to continue with this project in light of everything happening to the people and city I love so much. All my big ideas and small joys seem silly set against not only what they are enduring, but what certainly seems to be coming next if too many of us decide to continue treating the well-being of our neighbors (human and otherwise) as somehow separate from our own.

And then I remember my commitment to my kith—my sheep, the grass that nourishes them, the endless colored flag of sky that paints itself anew every morning and evening, and I stopped to marvel at the beauty of it all.

So, I’ll be back next week with another recording, and I will leave you today with the final paragraph from this week’s column (which was about motherhood):

“The reason I am thinking of motherhood this week, though, is because every night as I’ve lain down to read bedtime stories, or give bedtime snuggles, I’ve been thinking about how much I love my kids, how desperately I longed for them before they were born, and how thankful I am that I got to become a mother.

This week, lying in the dark, feeling their soft breath slow as they slide towards sleep, I’ve also been thinking about what a mess we are in right now and how daunting it is to navigate. But as I hold my babies, who aren’t babies anymore, I’ve also been thinking of you–all of you, and everyone you know, and everyone they know. No one, no matter where or how or to whom they were born, is any less deserving of the kind of love a mother feels as she cradles her child in the quiet of a long night.

So, I am sending this out to all who read these words with the hope that the next time you lie down to rest, you feel that love. You are as cherished by creation as the most longed-for child. You are sacred. You are beloved. We all are.”

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.

I uploaded this video last week to social media. It was one of those awesome moments when I suddenly felt a lot of clarity around the role technology could play in our lives if we collectively decide to make it so. The self- and community-discipline required to make it a tool of connection instead of polarization is definitely a topic worth discussing anyway. It’s so easy to vilify technology or lament the ways it is taking over our lives, but it’s also opening doors and windows of collaboration and communication, and that is equally beautiful to behold.

After I posted this video to facebook, my cousin added a comment. My mom had eight siblings so I have A LOT of cousins. This particular cousin lives in Arizona, and if not for social media, it would be very hard for us to keep track of each other. In his comment, he related a story about his mother gifting him wind chimes before she passed away. The wind chimes now hang in a big tree in his yard. In the summer, the leaves muffle their ringing, but when the tree drops her leaves, the music of the chimes reemerges, and that music is a beautiful reminder of his beloved mother.

I’ll tell you what, friends, that story—and the fact that he was able to share it with me as effortlessly as if we’d been sitting in his yard listening to the same tree rustling in the evening breeze—just…breaks me in the best possible way. As we navigate all the systems and institutions that are collapsing or undergoing radical transformation with the advent of so much innovation, the gift of a simple story about a relative or old friend, the symphony of the flickering sunset against the last of the autumn leaves, the brand new baby we may not get to hold but still cherish, these things are still just as precious, just as present, and just as important to share with each other. Celebrating that needs to be part of the map we use as we move into the uncertain future, keeping joy and belonging as the guideposts. We may not know where we are going, but I’m beginning to believe that is how we will find the way…

I spent a hour sitting on a hillside in the rain this morning. As regular readers know, we brought home some “milking sheep'“ last summer, so while most of the flock had their babies in the spring, I kept two ewes separate so they could lamb in the fall and be milked through the winter. This week, one of those ewes, Millie, had a set of twins. The other, Godiva, looks ready to have her own babies any minute.

Now, lambing this time of year has some risks. Namely, that is can still be very hot, which will make labor arduous. Waiting until later in the fall puts us up against winter, however, which is even harder on the moms and babies. Consequently, I was keeping an eye on the forecast, hoping it would stay temperate. What I did not even think to worry about was rain, because, well, in western South Dakota, moisture comes in sudden, fast-moving storms or not at all.

The day Millie’s twins were born, it was unseasonably cool, but not cold. Perfect birthing weather. The next day was warmish and sunny. The next day it started to rain, and it hasn’t stopped since, which is how I found myself on the hillside.

This morning, it wasn’t cold enough to be considered cold, but the wind had picked up, and I was concerned. Sure enough, when I went to check on the babies, they were doing ok, but not great. I tucked them both in my coat, hunkered down, and tried to decide what to do next.

At first, I didn’t want to bring them all the way back to the barn, as their mom is shy and I knew it would stress her to be moved. Also, it is still August, and it was only supposed to be raining for another hour. As of this writing, however, I have moved the little family (plus Godiva) to the corral beside the barn, as it has been raining all day and the forecast is now predicting more to come with dropping temperatures.

But, what I actually want to tell you about is the podcast I happened to be listening to for part of that hour on the hillside. Since I can’t figure out how to reformat this post in substack, my video talking about the podcast is shown first above, the youtube version of the podcast comes next, and underneath the photo below you can find the link to just the audio of the podcast is that is your preferred method.

Anyway, I’m interested to hear your thoughts on his thoughts, and I am not going to say too much more just now…other than this does feel like a portal I’ve been moving towards for a while now, and an articulation of why it has been so hard for me to write anything lately.

Meanwhile, the picture below is Millie’s babies after they’d been warmed up in my coat but before they got moved to the barn. I don’t want to clog up your inboxes with more emails, but I will put an update about them on social media in the coming days for those those who are interested

I’ve been hinting about campers for a while…and here’s why: I’ve been working for the last few months to start a traveling theater company!! I’m including our new mission statement below. (As well as our logo, which I LOVE.) I’m also posting an essay I wrote in February, which offers a tiny bit of our origin story.

Friends, I am not being hyperbolic when I say this is the most excited I’ve ever been for a project…my first true love was musical theater. Singing along to cassette tapes of Broadway musicals was how I found my voice. And now, to be finding ways to perform AND bring musical theater to rural audiences…EEEEEKKKKK! It’s just too wonderful to believe.

Roots & Grass Theater Co

Roots & Grass Theater Co is a new initiative to bring high-quality, interactive, ecosystem-specific music + theater directly to underserved, rural communities. Our traveling productions are more than just performances–they are immersive, regionally-inspired experiences that celebrate the unique stories, landscapes, and culture of the prairie. We transform barns, fields, and main streets into living stages, forming connections through art that’s rooted in place and designed to inspire a deeper awareness of organic community.

In the next 12 months, we will launch our first two regional tours. One will be a semi-staged production of ‘The Grass Widow,’ a folk opera written and performed by Eliza Blue in collaboration with Jon Bakken, Sandra Kern Mollman, and Talon Bazille. The other will be an adaptation of ‘The Adventures of Pearl & Theo,’ an interactive readers’ theater-style show aimed at young audiences. Both shows will utilize the R & G camper that serves as a set, stage, and housing for performers on the road.

Birthday Campers

I have long believed that what happens on your birthday says a lot about the year ahead. This is mostly because what you decide to do on that day says a lot about what you value at that moment. But that's not the only reason. It is also because I believe life is more mysterious and crafty than most of us realize.

I came up with this theory in my twenties, and after seeing it proven year after year, I started to make birthday plans based on the year I hoped lay ahead. Did I want to travel more? A birthday trip. Did I want to focus more on friendships and homemaking? A cozy dinner party.

At some point though, I had to admit that the unexpected things that happened on my birthday almost always were more defining than the events I’d orchestrated.

Once I became a mom, celebrating birthdays changed a lot, but the theory held. For several years in a row, when the kids were tiny, one or more of us had the puking flu on my “special” day. Talk about a terrible omen! But that did feel accurate–most of those years revolved entirely around caring for and cleaning up after children. I am nostalgic for it now, but that was a very emotionally and physically exhausting time.

Last year, on a whim, I looked up airline tickets to NYC, a place I lived in my 20s and still love. Amazingly, I found incredibly cheap flights, so I spent my birthday showing my husband and kids a place that still holds a huge place in my heart. It felt like my young adult self and my middle-aged self were meeting for the first time, and that has been a very accurate metaphor for the year in so many wonderful ways.

Which brings us to this year’s birthday shenanigans. Tempted once again to try and influence fate, I told my husband all I really wanted for my birthday was a camper for my traveling summer shows, as well as camping on our land (preferably while sheep graze nearby). Some of you may remember that I bought a tiny teardrop camper a few years back for a similar purpose. I loved (and still love) that camper like a person, but I clearly wasn’t thinking about the future with that purchase. By last summer, it was already impossible for me and the kids to use it for gigs as the three of us could barely squeeze inside anymore, and truth be told, my husband had always been too tall to fit comfortably.

There were a lot of layers to the problem of finding a new camper, however. Like most things in life, when it comes to campers you can either find something that is cheap but needs a lot of work, or something that is very expensive (and will probably need work soon, because, well, it’s a camper…) In other words, you pay with time or you pay with money.

The other barrier was finding something small enough that my smallish vehicle could tow it, but that could also sleep all of us. Finally, though I was more than willing to compromise on this aspect, aesthetics are not entirely irrelevant, and I was secretly pining for an old-fashioned canned ham-style camper. After many laborious months of searching, I was fairly sure that the camper of my dreams was not going to materialize EVER, and certainly not for my birthday. But somehow I still hoped birthday magic would intervene.

I’m going to skip to the end here because of word count considerations, but in a truly stunning twist, I didn’t get a camper for my birthday…I got two. One will be for family camping in the pasture, one will be for gigs when it’s just the kids and I. Both are adorable, vintage, and also “rustic,” which means no amenities whatsoever. I don’t mind a bit. And I don’t know what that portends for the year ahead, but I’ve never been more excited to find out.

I’ve always found the concept of ‘Earth Day’ a bit odd. Like so many modern American rituals, Earth Day highlights the way our ‘celebrations’ have become more about anxiety than joy, more about forgetting than remembering. I could put it a different way by asking the question: How is every day not Earth Day? How is every day not a celebration of this amazing place we call home? How is praise for this planet not embedded in every other celebration and ritual we perform? To set aside a day once a year and call it ‘Earth Day’…well, it just feels weird to me…

A few years ago, a friend sent me this youtube video of a song called ‘The Lost Words Blessing’, which is part of a larger artistic undertaking. (*It’s also the song I’m singing in the video posted above*) Their website describes the project like this: “Conceived and commissioned by Folk by the Oak festival, Spell Songs is a musical evolution of both The Lost Words & The Lost Spells books by acclaimed author Robert Macfarlane and award-winning illustrator Jackie Morris; creating a listening experience that intersects music, literature, language and art, as a call to reawaken our love of the wild.”

The shorter way they describe it is this: “Singing nature back to life through the power of poetry, art and music.”

The album, and specifically the song from that original video for The Lost Words Blessing, created a subtle shift in my known universe and became a container for much of the work I’ve done since. And yet the description “singing nature back to life…” has never sat well with me. It’s similar to how I feel about Earth Day, and I think it’s because we ARE nature. We ARE the Earth. Everything we are made of is a natural material generated, created, and birthed by the Earth. Human beings are not distinct from the Earth, and neither are the things we create.

Does this mean we humans aren’t currently creating and disrupting systems on a scale that may be unprecedented in geologic history? There’s plenty of evidence that, yes, we are. But even that is part of the Earth’s “natural” cycles, because we were created by the Earth. What we sing into being, the Earth sings first, because she sang us into being.

Are we also potentially creating conditions our species (and many, many others) can’t survive? Also, yes, and that is a conversation worth having, though not the purview of this post.

So I sing this song not because I think it will bring nature “back to life.” Just as I don’t think setting aside one day a year to celebrate Earth will somehow halt the juggernaut of human con/de-struction. Not to save the planet, which I suspect will continue to birth new life through generative destruction with or without our species. I sing it because I love singing. Because when I sing I don’t feel as angry. I remember anger is often just grief that’s trying to find its way home. I remember that I love being part of this Earth choir. I remember that I am a beloved child of creation itself. This song didn’t start with me, and it won’t end with me either.

But, that is the macro…the micro is that this song has walked with me through the deepest griefs of my life so far. When I found out one of my best, deepest friends was dying of inoperable brain cancer, I listened to this song over and over while I walked and sobbed. When I think of what we are losing now, what will lose, what we have lost, when I am overwhelmed again with weeping, this song reminds me to “let the heron still my breathing…” It breaks my heart and heals the wound at exactly the same moment, as every good spell should.

And that’s why, though I distrust the language used to describe the song, I trust the song, and I trust the singing, and I trust that one way or another, we will sing each other home.

I recorded this the other day to put up on social media, fully realizing the irony of posting about my frustrations with posting. And then I realized there was no way the algorithm was going to show it to anybody, so I just posted it here instead. If you are reading this now, you already found my substack and you don’t need to watch the whole video, though there’s a pretty good explanation at the end about why I appreciate this platform in its current form. Hopefully, it will remain a place where people can find my work without having to be inundated by ads…In other words, the video is basically me venting while I do chores…but the struggle is real! I want to connect with people, but I’m also weary of feeding a machine that doesn’t need more food.

All of which is to say, in 2025, I am going to continue to mainly use substack for my writing and music, but also as a way to tell you about the gatherings that I hope will bring more of us together in real life. If you haven’t already, please subscribe, and make sure to check your junk mail folders, as I know they can get sent there.

I’ll be sending more info soon about the latest project I’m working on, and I’d love to hear more from you all. What are you planning for 2025?

I spent last weekend at the Festival of the Book in Brookings, SD. Got to meet some amazing authors, including Trent Preszler, whose book Little and Often was the ‘One Book South Dakota 2024’ for good reason. He’s also a very cool guy, and watching him build boats on Instagram is my new favorite relaxation technique.

BUT the highlight by far was getting to perform selections from our ‘folk-opera-in-progress’ with my musical partner Jon Bakken (who also happens to have a new book out…) I’ve played a lot of great music with a lot of great folks over the years, but the Grass Widow is in its own category. These songs just…I don’t know…have their own life, and it’s an honor and a pleasure every time we get to play them for people.

So we are going to take the show on the road next summer! Hopefully with a fuller sound (aka other musicians and actors.) How big and how much we tour is wholly dependent on funding. We aren’t going to do a full staging…yet…this will be readers theater style. We will leave costumes and sets for the next iteration.

We’d especially like to bring this production to rural spaces and small towns, so if you think your arts org or front porch or main street needs more musical theater send me an email!

And please enjoy this tiny preview video. I made this earlier in the summer for the folks over at Rural Strategies but it gives a little of the opera’s backstory. You can also find our ‘Rough Drafts’ recording here and here if you are interested!

This a podcast from 2021, but how fun that many of the dreams I describe here are now coming true…I still believe (as I describe in the podcast) that what we leave undone is as important as what we do, but I also am heartened by the things that get done s l o w l y, coming to fruition with their own sweet timing.