Poets have a bad reputation for staying up all night and missing dawn — at least I do — but the sunrises at Necedah are tremendous, so I’ve really been making an effort to get to the studio, or be somewhere out in the Refuge, by the time the sun comes up!

Turns out, of course, that dawn in a slough is slow and tranquil and filled with the wisdom of bird conversations, so I’m rather enjoying my new schedule.

For the umpteenth time, I am rereading A Sand County Almanac. Aldo Leopold is a poet as much as he’s a prescient voice for land stewardship: “At daybreak, I am the sole owner of all the acres I can walk over. It is not only boundaries that disappear, but also the thought of being bounded. Expanses unknown to deed or map are known to every dawn, and solitude, supposed no longer to exist in my county, extends on every hand as far as the dew can reach.”