wild: taproot magazine

The WILD issue of Taproot Magazine arrived in my mailbox yesterday.  Oh, I have been waiting for this one. The cover art by Phoebe Wahl is just gorgeous and so rich and lush and, well, wild looking.  The kids reached for the magazine and stroked the cover as though plunging their hands into its depth as soon as it came out of its packaging.

I am so pleased, so honored, to have an essay in this issue, entitled Becoming Sasquatch.  It is an essay about a family trip, a day that began with a hike along the Appalachian Trail, beside a forested river, cut short by a severe storm barreling through that untamed and remote woods.  And later in the day, heading home, in the coming darkness, I spotted a moose and pulled over, hopping out of the car to snap a picture.  The essay is about what comes next, about our family's experience in this wild, this new shifting terrain of raising our three growing children, and of how as parents walking along this trail with them, or perhaps following along behind them, we are thrust into a new wilderness whose demands are so very different from the woods we have just walked through with younger children.  The light is different in this deeper less tamed woods, the sounds seem unfamiliar, and I find the map hard to follow at times.

And of how those unexpected adventures, in their unsettling, challenging, and frightening moments when everything is shifting and our children's aware eyes are watching who we are, how we respond in this wider, more complicated, and unruly nebulous wilderness, are some of the most important moments in our days as parents of growing children.  I feel challenged, and so very fortunate, to be walking along with them, growing myself, reinventing myself, and in awe of how our children are developing their own gait and stride, stepping forward while still wanting us to walk along with them.  For now.

The issue is a very good one.  I have a plan that involves a chair in the sun this weekend with the magazine in my hands.  To step into the quiet, thoughtful, and earthy wild held within its pages.