I’ve been missing the steady tone of a good novel, so when my book club decided to read Barbara Kingsolver’s newest, “The Lacuna,” I felt relieved to be given the assignment even though the book is long and time is short. Plus it gives me something to do in the middle of the night.

One of the best lines I’ve read so far is this: “Mother is a museum of bad words.” I wonder what I’m a museum of?

These days, I am a museum of unrepentant desire. Fortunately, my appetites are pretty benign: chocolate, sleep, red wine and hot showers. Sometimes my longings run to a perfectly placed sleeping bag under a starlit sky. Being curled up next to a river or under a meteor shower is a bonus.

But beneath the surface, with a bit of probing, I find something more malicious, like fire in the maw of a dragon, a baseness that lives in the negative spaces between my cells, not contained within, but defining them nonetheless.

In 1980, just graduated from college, I went to work for an advertising agency in a mid-sized Indiana town.

At first, all I did was place and track media buys. Our biggest client was Roman Meal Bread. The details are a little fuzzy, but my recollection is that the agency had hired Pittsburgh Steeler Rocky Bleier as spokesman for our client, and we were buying a lot of advertising and getting a 15 percent commission on all those purchases.

Eventually, I was promoted to copywriting. We had several small banks as clients, and deregulation had just happened. Competition from savings and loans was heating up. I wrote ad copy and radio spots about the benefits of keeping your money in a real bank, and away from those amateurs at the S&Ls. It was dreadful work.

My boss, I’ll call him Sam, was very smart, but he was a drunk. He raided the agency’s bar at five o’clock every night. Since he rarely made it into the office before mid-morning, we often worked late, Sam running through case histories from his long and varied career in the ad business. We’d work for a while, sipping (or gulping) our cocktails, then move the party to the neighborhood bar on the next block. Sam lived 45 minutes away on country roads, and it was a miracle that he didn’t kill himself or someone else driving home in the middle of the night after eight or 10 drinks.

Working at the agency, I also met two commercial photographers who did occasional contract work for us and had a studio a couple of blocks away. They’d invite me to lunch at the Taco Bell next door. We called it “Black and Decker” because they used an electric drill to mix the refried beans. They’d call me when the newest Vogue magazine showed up in the mail, to come to the studio, drink cheap wine and critique the photography. I’d help set up props and sets occasionally for photo shoots and watched them fuss over tiny details, getting the shadows just exactly right.

The photographers both claimed unhappy marriages, living with their own demons. But I saw in their work a deep passion for excellence, and took that to heart.

I don’t know what Sam was drowning out, but I know what he was drowning in: bourbon. He had three or four ex-wives, and his kids weren’t speaking to him. He’d had triple bypass surgery. He was a classic, in a “Mad Men” sort of way. He had a deeply flawed personality, seeped in dark matter. In the end, though, the job was my opportunity to sit at the feet of a man with a brilliant marketing mind and learn about this crazy business.

I left all that behind when I married and moved away. The agency folded, bankrupted under a mountain of debt when the commissions on all those advertising buys were spent on booze and high rent. One of the photographers had multiple sclerosis, and died in a nursing home a few years ago. The other is living happily ever after with his new wife and young son.

And me? I’m trying to remember the lessons I learned all those years ago, without succumbing to the dragon’s breath.

After four decades devoted to informing fans about the cowboy life style of Roy Rogers and his wife, Dale (Queen of the West) Evans, the family museum in Branson, Missouri, has shut its doors….Christie’s [Auction House] will be selling off most of the collection July 14-15…(including)…Rogers’s trusty costar Trigger, in the flesh.––Item in The New Yorker magazine, July 12, 2010

I’ll admit that I was irresistibly drawn to the Christie’s website to delve further into the spoils of the museum’s dismantling. I wondered who in his right mind would pay a quarter of a million dollars for a stuffed horse rearing up on its two hind legs? (The obvious answer, I suppose, is someone with too much money and perhaps not quite in his right mind.)

And so arose the next question: who would pay $3000 for this lot? TRIGGER’S ROAD APPLES Comprising two Buffalo Nickels and a bolo tie and an ash tray made from Trigger’s road apples.*

I am not making this up.

A number of lots intriguingly labeled Nudie the Rodeo Tailor included fringed and embroidered costumes created by Rogers’s and Evans’s tailor, James Nudie. Nudie was the first man to put rhinestones on clothing, not surprising since early in his tailoring career he was making G-strings for showgirls.

Nudie also designed a custom Pontiac Bonneville for Rogers and Evans — a “Nudiemobile” — that sports a six-foot wide pair of Texas longhorns on the front, six-shooters as gear shift mechanisms and door handles, and 150 silver dollars decorating the center console. Like the stuffed Trigger, it also fetched upwards of $250,000 at auction.

The impression I get from looking at the items that were sold is that using the phrase “cowboy life style” to describe Rogers’s and Evans’s lives is a bit of a stretch, sort of like calling Hearst Castle a typical American split-level home. Talk about the phenomenon of Hollywood packaging.

A flower arrangement with a red gladiola stem at the center came my way a few days ago. Its petals shone iridescent in the midday sun. I got out the magnifying glass to confirm what I was seeing: the surface seemed to be simultaneously absorbing and reflecting the light, like a length of brilliant red silk velvet.

This too is packaging, designed to draw in wasps, moths or birds to pollinate and ensure survival. But the naked desire in that display of color and surface, based on reproductive necessity, seems infinitely more honest than the fringe-y, silvery, rhinestone-y packaging of Rogers’s and Evans’s personae.

As a performer (and not just a celebrity), you hope that your performance and your public self bring joy to your audience, like Evans and Rogers did in their heyday. You’d have to believe that you have something special to deliver, and have hope that the audience will respond to what you’re offering up.

But you also have to hold your true self in balance, remembering as Naomi Shihab Nye advises, to “Walk around feeling like a leaf. Know you could tumble any second.”

We all have a desire for attention to some degree, but the culture of Hollywood has always encouraged taking things to the extreme. Make it bigger, louder, fancier, more lurid and they will beat a path to your door. They will pay big money to witness the spectacle, in fact. But to be captivated by all those trappings, to be lured in, is to pollinate something pretentious and spurious. (Can you say “Lindsay Lohan”?)

If you only thrive in the spotlight, when people look away – and they will look away – you will feel that something essential has been lost to you.

But if you’re lucky, one day you’ll wake up and find that the illusion no longer holds water. That rhinestone-encrusted vessel has become a leaky, waterlogged boat and you’ve got to make your way to shore. You’re obliged to take a more honest assessment of the world and yourself. You’re driven to discover that something like a flower petal can thrill you and captivate your imagination.

Fame is a two-sided coin, but maybe it’s a buffalo nickel made out of a road apple.

*A road apple is a euphemism for a chunk of horse excrement.

This morning I took the dog for a walk up the urban trail. Gilia, milkvetch, and dalmation toadflax were all in bloom. I pulled up a few of the invasive toadflax plants, making a tiny action toward weeding the forest.

In my own wild yard, the iris blossoms are spent. Columbine, sage and lavender are flowering now, and beneath the thick mulch, the soil is still cool and moist. The lamb’s ear will be next, bringing bees and sphinx moths. After that, there will be tickseed coreopsis and echinacea flowers. Almost everything I planted last fall survived our crazy winter. And as usual, it’s a good time to buy dandelion futures.

This spring, I’ve been working on my small “urban farm” garden. I’m wishing for more land, and at the same time slightly horrified by how much time has been spent moving dirt and building structure. I even created my own weather: a roto-tiller-induced dust storm. Unfortunately, there’s been precious little actual planting and caring for crops.

Gardens hold so much promise, but require so many leaps of faith. First, there are the promises on the seed packets. Then you have to believe that there won’t be a freak snowstorm. Frankly, that’s why my garden is just now getting planted. Every time I’d have an impulse to dig in the dirt, we’d get “one last” snowstorm. And then another. And another. I no longer believed in summer.

Last week, I took my kayak up to Lee’s Ferry and paddled upstream for a couple of miles, noticing the light on the water and the canyon walls, noticing the way the wind moved through the grasses at the shoreline. Except for the canyon wren’s call, it was quiet there and the experience settled my heart.

So why, when we’re surrounded by such extraordinarily beautiful wild places, do gardens matter?

My sense is that we can learn a lot about the natural world by practicing creative husbandry. Learning the rules at work in the natural world, and working within that structure teaches us about flow and purpose and attention.

And there’s something else important at work. The activity engages the left hemisphere of our brains, and the rest of the mind is free to wander, to think about big ideas, or notice something as spectacular as a comet-tailed columbine flower.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve loved to dig in the dirt. Not even garden, per se, but actually dig in the dirt. The flowers and veggies are a nice by-product, but for me, the digging is really the point. I invariably find little treasures: lost marbles, a matchbox-sized Jeep, or a plastic army man.

I puzzle about what I’ve left behind in the dirt while discovering what others have lost.

Sometimes I am filled to the brim with the sweetness and pain that arises from that personal archeology. I wonder how we manage to bear the suffering that comes out of loss. And yet, what option do we have? Suffering somehow forges our humanness, and keeps us from floating away on a cloud of ecstasy. The fire of suffering makes us strong, builds layer after layer of hurt and love and hurt and love, even as the hot and cold of everyday life tempers us.

I once had a dream about driving through one of my old neighborhoods, past a rickety house where I used to live. As the spot came into view, I saw that where the house used to stand, there was only yard.

When I woke up, I felt glad the structure was gone. Because of course it’s better to tear down a place like that than cobble it back together. Better to address your suffering by taking positive action instead of wading around in a pool of despair. Better instead to dig a hole, plant a seedling, notice your suffering, and put it in context.

I was recently interviewed for Mountain Living Magazine’s June issue, in the Bio-Rhythm feature. Look for the magazine on newsstands around Flagstaff all month long, or check out the PDF version posted here.

Through a fortunate set of circumstances, I recently spent ten days living at the south rim of Grand Canyon, hiking, making art, writing, and then, on the last two days, sitting on the jury panel for the park’s Artist in Residence program.

Though I feel I barely know the canyon, I am enthralled. Also, intimidated, curious, and profoundly impressed.

Each dawn, through my second-story bedroom window, the clouds, light, and atmospheric conditions put on a different show at the rim. I could barely take my eyes off the place.

I discovered that I needed to walk. I walked down the Kaibab and Bright Angel trails. I walked to the store for groceries, and along the rim trail from Mather Point to Hermit’s Rest, stopping at Kolb studio every chance I got. On the last day, I walked to the river and back, an arduous twelve-hour day hike.

At trailheads, the park service warns people not to do this. They rescue too many rubes who attempt it without preparation. But the weather that day was nearly perfect. We had plenty of water, nice snacks, and good shoes. At the end of the day I was dead-tired, but felt like I’d accomplished something big.

In my twenties and thirties, I didn’t do much adventuring. For kicks, I rode roller coasters at Disneyland. I dreamt of skydiving and epic, cross-country bike journeys, but I didn’t have that kind of courage.

Ten years ago I started running half-marathon races to raise money for cancer research.

And shortly thereafter, in a small way, I took up with river rafting. First, there was a ducky trip on the San Juan. Then we paddled through Desolation and Gray Canyons on the Green. Two years ago, I spent 21 days on the Colorado through Grand Canyon. On the San Juan trip, I fractured the top of my tibia, and since then have suffered numerous other humiliations. But I’m not dead yet.

The 21-day trip was grueling. Wikipedia defines gruel as “any watery or liquidy food…of unknown character…often eaten by peasantry.” I’ll admit that I was food captain on that trip, but in my defense, I didn’t get the assignment until two weeks before we launched. No one died of malnutrition, but they were overjoyed to see Derrick take over cooking duties after he joined the trip at Phantom.

If I caught tiny glimpses of the canyon’s magic on that trip, there were also too many missed opportunities, lost from slow starts and bad calls. I plan to someday redeem another ticket for the beauty cruise.

For years now, I’ve been trying to understand why so many of my friends express such fondness for a place that, at its core, extorts such so much from living beings.

The answer came to me in this way: I put my watercolor set and notebook in my day pack, thinking that I would stop along the path and paint a bit. Foolish me. As I carried those paints around, their psychic weight grew to be like a hunk of schist. I began to develop a deep fear of trying to draw this enormous, complex, overwhelming place.

And then I understood why I couldn’t do it. It’s impossible for a mere mortal to see the whole of this place.

So with my paints and my pencil and a blank page in front of me, I concentrated on the micro view instead, realizing that Anne Lamott’s advice to begin with a one-inch picture frame would help narrow and simplify, and eventually, allow me to see the whole. I still failed miserably, but I could see how with practice this approach might work.

People who are intimate with the canyon have a sweet way of speaking about the plants and animals that grow there, and about the beauty and spectacle of the place. And I see now that’s how canyon aficionados manage to fall in love. Grand Canyon is so utterly, well, grand, that to grasp its meaning and breadth we have to break it down into its component parts: springs, plants, trees, birds, river, lizards, smells, mammals, air, limestone, schist, granite, insects, fossils, history, future, politics, ownership, sound. Then maybe we can begin to understand.

“If you do not intend to stipulate that marks of punctuation be transmitted, write your message without punctuation and read it carefully to make sure that it is not ambiguous.” — Instructions from a 1928 pamphlet intended to help people write more effective telegrams.

I’ve been thinking about texting and telegrams lately, and wondering what we might learn about texting from that older form.

It seems that people took language more seriously back then, when a telegram was an Event. We get so many transmissions these days, via text (and all the other media) that nothing really seems to matter. We stand in the middle of a constant stream of messages, from which we have to decipher hierarchy and meaning.

In 1928 every word counted. From my research, though, it seems that the number of characters in a telegram didn’t matter. There was none of this “CU@4” business.

Numbers were communicated not with digits, but with words. Because it left less room for error, they would write “one hundred million” instead of “100,000,000.” Imagine the consequences for a missing zero here or there, and you’ll see why it was ultimately more efficient to spell it out.

Periods weren’t used because they were too easily missed in the transmission. Hence, the use of STOP, as in:

MEET GARE DU NORD PARIS APRIL TWENTIETH STOP REPLY SOONEST

Two things happened within the past year that prompted me to text more. Last summer, my son, Keenan, moved to Minnesota. He’s almost always in class or at work, so I text him messages instead of calling. Second, I upgraded to a phone with a keypad; never could quite get the hang of T9.

Thus far, I refuse to give up punctuation. I rarely use capital letters, which truly are just too much trouble, and seem irrelevant to getting my point across.

I get messages like this from him: “Sitting in the laundromat washing my clothes.” I like these little everyday glimpses into my son’s life that his texts afford me.

But I could never get anything close to the full picture of his life from those laconic bits. I need phone calls or Skype video chats with him to feel like I’m fully informed.

Last February in Tucson, I purchased a hot pink raincoat at a consignment store. It was almost the last thing I needed, but was such an iconic item that I had to have it. Much like the red purse I wrote about last year, it attracts attention every time I wear it. It’s shorthand, a kind of telegraphic statement of sorts.

LOOK NOW STOP WAHOO HAPPY SPRING

Of course, someone seeing me in my hot pink coat only gets the short version of the story. They don’t hear how I shop only under the duress of a fashion emergency, and that I am not generally a lucky shopper. They don’t hear how my mother (who rarely buys used, but never pays full price for new items either) urged me to pay the shockingly high price of $17.

You also wouldn’t know from a glance about the reviled red zip-up raincoat that I owned but refused to wear as a teen because I thought it was so dumb-looking. We lived in very rainy Belgium at the time, but I preferred wet over geeky. That awful red raincoat ruined raincoats for me, until now.

The full story is so much more revealing, but the urgency of the Pink Coat’s telegraphic message could easily override the more interesting backstory.

So while brevity and clarity have their place, narrative is so much deeper and juicier. Language grows out of our need to express concepts and nuance, like a gourmet meal, with flavors and colors layered in delightful and interesting ways. Think fresh, ripe strawberries with the surprise of a balsamic vinegar sauce. In view of that, texting is like eating Sweet Tarts all day long.

Recently, on a sunny day I saw a man joyfully playing a trumpet on the corner of the driveway by Target. No one was paying any attention to him, but he was fully engaged with his instrument. Afterwards, I wished I had stopped to chat to find out more of his story. His telegram said this to me:

TRUMPET MY LIFE STOP LISTEN BE HAPPY

And maybe that’s all I really needed to know.

The other day, as I was browsing the internet, I encountered information about Deborah Crombie’s newest book, Necessary as Blood, published by William Morrow. Deborah wrote to me mid-year in 2008 to ask me about my art and techniques, and has kindly acknowledged me on her website.

I’m honored that Deborah, a New York Times notable author, sought my advice, and that she found it useful in the creation of her book, which made the New York Times Bestseller list in late 2009.

There’s snow falling – again – but I’m starting to get my annual urge to dig in the dirt. This is a dangerous impulse in Flagstaff in early March, but considering the possibility raises some hope in me.

Years ago as newlyweds, we lived for two years in an Iowa farmhouse. All things seemed fertile there, including me. That summer I was pregnant with our older son, Keenan. Being out of work at the time, I’d toddle out to the garden every morning with my hoe, and attempt to hack back the weeds that had sprouted overnight.

Our garden was a forty- by eighty-foot plot fenced off from the surrounding barnyard. Ditch weed grew wild in one part of the patch, terrible stuff that smelled like moldy socks and apparently didn’t produce but an inkling of the desired result.

A brown wren lived in one of the box elder trees that grew next to the garden. He’d come sing to me as I hoed and harvested, a song about the sweetness of growing babies, the hazy late-afternoon light on an overgrown midwestern farm, and the taste of fresh-picked cherry tomatoes.

Our landlords kept a flock of sheep in the barnyard to graze the weeds down. I gathered buckets of their droppings and made manure tea to use as fertilizer. My tomato plants grew to be about six feet tall, and produced what seemed like bushels of cherry tomatoes that I couldn’t give away because, as you might suspect, everyone had a bumper crop of the damn things. What I wouldn’t give for a taste of one of them right now.

Here in Flagstaff, gardening is just a tiny bit more challenging than that. Because we’re high and dry, subjected to such wild temperature swings from day to night, and have such a short growing season, tender plants often succumb before they have a chance to bear fruit. Or the deer eat them, delighted to come upon such a tender morsel.

It’s not impossible to garden here; it just requires a lot more husbandry.

Last summer, we tore out our lawn and replaced it a ton of mulch, and native plants like Apache Plume, gallardia, and agave. I’m interested to see what survives the winter and this particular microclimate, but it could be June before we see bare earth again.

In general, I’m not inclined to pamper plants. I’m currently developing several strains of drought-tolerant houseplants, first forgetting them, then overwatering them. A few years ago I planted a bed just outside our front door. from which some of the plants mysteriously disappeared. I’m certain there’s logic behind all those disappearances, but if they required mollycoddling, it’s just as well they’re gone.

Lamb’s ear is one of the plants that grows extremely well in my yard’s microclimate. A few years ago, I made a piece of artwork about the bees that congregate on the lamb’s ear when it blooms. The benign disregard of the bees for me, as I weeded and dug in my wild garden, was at once both unsettling and comforting. They were going to do their work whether I was there or not.

With that artwork, I was mapping the uneasy relationship humans have with bees, and metaphorically, with the rest of nature. On one hand, our entire agricultural system breaks down when bees as pollinators are excluded. Though lesser substitutes are available, honey and beeswax are prized products.

On the other hand, we keep bees at arms length, knowing the power of their sting.

Regardless, we’re not victims of the bees or of the climate. Nature just is what it is, and behaves exactly as it should.

We often conclude that world comes at us deliberately, sometimes with loving, open arms and sometimes with a butcher knife, but I think the world moves forward and we’re simply in its way. Joy happens, suffering happens; we have no control over anything but our own reaction to events and circumstances.

Am I tired of snow? Yes. Am I grateful for the moisture? Not as grateful as I’ll be in June, but yes, I am. I can hold both those thoughts simultaneously, knowing that neither thought rules out the other, and that nature – bless her — is not personally targeting me with yet another snowstorm.

This piece was just recently completed. I love poppies and wanted to immortalize them because their short bloom makes their presence so fleeting. But the way poppies are fine and graceful, with their rice-paper petals and brilliant color, is in contradiction to their World War I symbolism of battlefield burials. They’re delicate and flirty, but also earnest and sturdy and purposeful. The natural world is fabulous at creating things that hold a balance between two contradictory qualities.

This piece was a commission for a private home, so the original is not available for purchase. We're considering doing a limited edition run of giclée prints of this piece, though, so stay tuned.