Bucket List

02/24/2026

Update: Tomorrow’s hike has been canceled due to weather. We’ll try again next month.

THIS IS THE SAME PIECE OF GROUND.

To your eye, it’s grass.

From magnetometry, you see houses. Posts. Hearths. Structures that have been hidden for centuries. Places where people once stood.

We do not have to dig to learn this.

Non-invasive archaeology lets us read what lies beneath without disturbing it. Magnetometry has changed how we understand Caddo Mounds. This field isn’t empty. Some of the most important stories here are the ones you cannot see.

Saturday, March 7th, we will be leading an in-depth tour of what these tools are revealing about the ancestral Hasinai Caddo landscape.

Details are in the Events tab. First Saturday of the Month Guided Hike

03/25/2025

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's litetime.
- Mark Twain

09/05/2024

I've never been skydiving... but I've zoomed in on Google Earth really really fast.

08/24/2024

08/02/2024

WELCOMING BLESSING
by Jan L. Richardson

When you are lost
in your own life.

When the landscape
you have known
falls away.

When your familiar path
becomes foreign
and you find yourself
a stranger
in the story you had held
most dear.

Then let yourself
be lost.
Let yourself leave
for a place
whose contours
you do not already know,
whose cadences
you have not learned by heart.
Let yourself land
on a threshold
that mirrors the mystery
of your own
bewildered soul.

It will come
as a surprise,
what arrives
to welcome you
through the door,
making a place for you
at the table
and calling you
by your name.

Let what comes,
come.

Let the glass
be filled.
Let the light
be tended.
Let the hands
lay before you
what will meet you
in your hunger.

Let the laughter.
Let the sweetness
that enters
the sorrow.
Let the solace
that comes
as sustenance
and sudden, unbidden
grace.

For what comes, offer gladness.
For what greets you
with kindly welcome,
offer thanks.
Offer blessing
for those
who gathered you in
and will not
be forgotten -

those who,
when you were
a stranger,
made a place for you
at the table
and called you
by your name.

08/01/2024

Monet Refuses the Operation
BY LISEL MUELLER

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue v***r without end.

07/03/2024

You start dying slowly ;
if you do not travel,
if you do not read,
If you do not listen to the sounds of life,
If you do not appreciate yourself.
You start dying slowly :
When you kill your self-esteem,
When you do not let others help you.
You start dying slowly ;
If you become a slave of your habits,
Walking everyday on the same paths…
If you do not change your routine,
If you do not wear different colours
Or you do not speak to those you don’t know.
You start dying slowly :
If you avoid to feel passion
And their turbulent emotions;
Those which make your eyes glisten
And your heart beat fast.
You start dying slowly :
If you do not risk what is safe for the uncertain
If you do not go after a dream
If you do not allow yourself
At least once in your lifetime
To run away from sensible advice
Don't let yourself die slowly
Do not forget to be happy
~ Pablo Neruda♡
Chilean poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971

06/02/2024

These pyramids in Peru are older than the ones in Egypt, and predate the Incan Empire by roughly 4,000 years.

05/28/2024

I was in his blog!

5/12/24 – Bastrop, LA – Bhante’s Morning Coffee Wisdom – “Be careful to keep your mind and body in the same place.” Happy Mother’s Day to all the Mothers out there! One of the things I miss in San Antonio is Waffle House...