Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard is probably my favorite book—and it has been ever since I first picked it up in 1976, recommended by a friend. Nonfiction. Fabulously descriptive of her days spent in a cabin on Tinker Creek. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her writing—close observations and reflections on nature, on what she saw and encountered and discovered in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Valley. It’s a luminous, luscious, lovely book. And as I noted elsewhere here, she wrote “…beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”

Somewhere she quotes a couple of lines from a poem by Michael Goldman:

When the Muse comes She doesn’t tell you to write;
She says get up for a minute, I’ve something to show you. Stand here.

I think my whole life the Muse has been saying something like Come outside! Lookie here!

My biology teacher when I was a high-school sophomore–the lovely Sister Sheila– gets the credit for channeling the Muse for me early: a homework assignment, as I recall, was to go outside, find a place in the yard, and to look very closely to see what I could see…how many different things there were in a square foot of lawn…and to make notes about that. Best homework assignment ever! It was an invitation–no, an imperative–to look, see, notice, pay attention!

Now, living out here at the Ranchito, I have been awash in Lookie-heres. So many beautiful, strange, intriguing, puzzling, touching sights and revelations in the world out here.  And I mean to write about them–or at least some of them: The Lookie-Here Chronicles, I guess.