Exploring my roots on two wheels

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Have you ever arrived in someplace new and felt like you have been there before? I think we carry memories of our ancestors in our genes. Given what people are learning about how environment and behavior affect how genes are expressed, and given that expression of genes might affect how people pass them on to their offspring, I think it’s no longer a big stretch to say that we carry bits of the environment of our ancestors in our DNA. I felt it in Scotland. In Ireland. And in Germany. And I definitely felt it in the Netherlands.

Cycling the pathways that connect Dutch villages sometimes felt like riding a ribbon through a series of fairytales featuring my great-great grandparents.

Based on my 23andMe results, about 50% of my DNA originated in people who came from northern western mainland Europe, in the region that is now western Germany and The Netherlands. (The other 50% is a mix of ancestry from Sweden, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales). This is not a surprise. My maternal grandfather was born in and spent the first 10 years of his life in the region that now forms the western border of Germany and the northeastern corner of Holland. My maternal grandmother’s family also originated in northwestern Germany before they became farmers in ‘South Russia’, what is now the Ukraine.

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Ghosts In the Shadows

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I’ve lived long enough on this earth to know ghosts. I’ve felt them, seen them when I close my eyes. Heard them when I block out all other noise. Ghosts are real. In my experience, they’re nothing like the ghosts depicted in Hollywood, which usually resemble something out of Dickens novel – ragged clothes and chains and dangling teeth.

They are times gone by. They are faded memories that suddenly adopt a splash of color. They emerge from somewhere deep inside you, dance around, then fade back where they came from. Ghosts are not necessarily scary, creepy, or lonely — at least my ghosts aren’t. They just need some attention now and then so that you can remember to live the way you’re supposed to live.

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Seeing through the smoke in my eyes

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You might think that as a meteorologist who gets a rush from watching the summer sky light up from brewing storms that I would be excited to see lightning in my head. But no. I was just about as terrified as any of you would be.

On a Saturday last December I suddenly found a big circular jelly-fish-like blob floating in front of my face. The jelly fish had long, wispy tentacles, and floated in a sea of dust. I closed my eyes and shook my head, but it was still there when I opened my eyes. A few minutes later, the flashes began. Long curved bolts of lightning streaked across the peripheral vision in my left eyeball. With my eyes closed, I could see branching and arcing. With eyes open, it was like someone was flashing a bright light in my eyes.

I had AI try to make a picture of what I saw…But I only gave it one attempt. No need to waste more energy trying to make it more real.
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Tending to your inner landscapes

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This is a post about gardening. Sort of. I started writing this post years ago, but like many of my posts, it was abandoned as I pursued more pressing needs. But some of those half-completed posts are ready to get hosed off and sent out into the world – especially as we begin a new season of tending to growing things.

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A swallowtail enjoying the red valerian.

You might know an old lady who’s crazy about her garden. She’s that lady with the wide-brimmed straw hat and strands of frizzy gray hair hanging out in all directions. She wears floppy, long-sleeved shirts, cushy, mud-covered crocs, and always has dirt beneath her fingernails. She’s out there every day when the weather’s nice enough, tending to her garden, chatting with passersby as she digs up another bed or pulls out another patch of weeds.

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Saving NCAR: Why Climate Science Matters

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At the NCAR Mesa Lab in Boulder, Colorado on a sunny autumn day. The NCAR Mesa Lab has been slated to close with the dismantling of NCAR and the end of support for climate change research in the USA.

Deleting the word climate change from thousands of government websites will not erase the fact that we are in the midst of a global change that threatens every aspect of our civilization. Deleting climate data will not stop the Earth from getting warmer. Current federal policy around climate change is tantamount to covering your eyes and ears and singing at the top of your lungs as you pretend gravity doesn’t exist and step off a cliff.

In December, the current US government announced plans to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). NCAR has long been the global flagship for climate research. Nearly every one of my colleagues in climate science has passed through there at one time or another – for conferences, seminars, summer research opportunities, and professional development. The NCAR Mesa Lab in Boulder, CO, has led the world in helping us understand the impacts of global warming.

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In the footsteps of the dinosaurs

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The desert always help me step deep back in time. I love that I can walk in a place that has been shaped by wind and water and deep earth processes more than by life itself. These landscapes were sculpted long before there was even a whisper of human evolution in the global gene pool.

Arches National Park in southwestern Utah in late May is sunshine and blue sky and bright red rocks that cast long shadows in the mornings and evenings. It’s also small white puffy clouds and heat that bakes you from all directions. We are in the park before 7am and out on the trail not much later, so we can be done before running the risk of evaporating right off the sand and rock.

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Radio Silence

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I guess you could say it’s writer’s block. There’s certainly no shortage of things to write about. But the words are stuck in my throat. I have a dozen half-completed posts drafted over the summer. Half-formed ruminations on everything from travel to climate resilience to fascism. But nothing feels like the right thing to say.

I realize there is no ‘right’ thing to say at this time. I can only tell my own story. But that’s a challenge when it feels like you’re drowning in everyone else’s voices. When the news and social media feel like a firehose of voices – most of them angry or scared. I’ve questioned whether to add my own voice to the stream. Especially when I’ve found myself wanting to disengage from the stream so that I can hear the thoughts in my own head.

It’s good to hide in a box sometimes, to recover from the onslaught.
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Protecting our National Parks is an Act of Patriotism

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Some of my first memories involve riding on my Dad’s shoulders as we hiked past stinky geysers that shot mist and clouds high above our heads. I also remember staring into the abyss of a yellow-walled canyon, while water foamed and gurgled nearby, then raced over the rim. At night we had the thrill of sleeping in a log cabin with bunk beds – but Mom said I was too small to sleep in the top bunk. I was almost three years old the first time I visited Yellowstone National Park, on a road trip with my parents from California to visit my grandmother in Ohio.

Returning to Yellowstone’s stinky glaciers at a much later point in life.

We also took a helicopter ride over the Badlands (which were several years away from becoming a national park at that point). I remember wearing headphones that pinched my head as we swooped over a landscape that, to me, looked like a layered ice cream sundae.

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The voices that hold space in my head

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“It wasn’t meant to be.”

Mom said that so often, the words still play through my head at least once a week, even through I’ve always had a very different take on the world. I don’t believe things are meant to be or not. They are what we make them. Mom was not a religious person. She never talked about a god (unless she joked that maybe there was a goddess?), but she was raised in a religious family, and there was an element of faith and preordination that was deeply ingrained in her. It came out in her way of speaking. And now her voice is forever in my head. The things she said again and again will always be with me.

My mom in 2013, visiting Alaska.
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Neck deep in mud: how we move forward

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“There is the mud, and there is the lotus that grows out of the mud. We need the mud in order to make the lotus.” ― Thich Nhat Hanh

(As a reminder, from my Disclaimer page: this site is not an official site of the University of Northern Colorado. The views expressed here are entirely those of the author, and do not represent the views of the University of Northern Colorado, the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Science at UNC, nor any other program or individual at the university or elsewhere.)

No time to read? Here’s the summary: We need to act as a collective to battle authoritarianism and climate change. We need to act now. White people, especially, have a responsibility to act. This is a clumsy, chaotic, stupid coup – there is still a chance our democracy will live another day. I have to hope that a lotus will grow from the mud. See the bullet points at the end calling for action. And continue to exercise your First Amendment right whenever you can.

The lotus emerging from the Mekong Delta.
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