Welcome

Amy M. Hale writes about the place she inhabits. Her innate ability to distill ideas appeals to readers who are aspiring to dwell in the sacred everyday. She cowboys on a ranch in Arizona where she dwells with both the wild and domestic.

I drag my feet when leaving creature comforts and connectivity to start gathering and moving cows,
but this has happened so many times...

I've risen from a bedroll on the ground, built a pre-dawn fire, set coffee on the grate, made a one-skillet breakfast, and by the time I can pour my first cup, I am scrambling for my pen... the ideas coming in fast and hot, not to be denied. The bones of an essay rattling onto the dirt- and soot-smudged page, or a poem singing its way into my life with cows-chewing-hay percussion, coyotes howling harmony.

I'd say it is nature that is the catalyst, but the same phenomenon happens to me in hotel rooms and airplanes, in coffee shops, over sushi in a desert town in the middle of a day full of mundane errands… post office, feed store, hardware store, groceries, pick up the hopefully repaired flats before I leave town.

I simply love my work; I see myself as a translator.

It is my job to translate the world around me into a concrete graspable story.

Am I a talented writer--or simply faithful?

I know the answer deep down inside--just as I know I am not a talented cowboy or a good hand with a horse. I am just "handy," not as in adept, but as in available. I am here to ride and I know this country like some know city neighborhoods or parks or their own backyards. I know the cows and the horses and the “how.” And I like them, find an affinity with them and the wild things, an empathy with most of the world around me… dirt and weather and life and death and song and season and personality and shift and turn and ebb and flow and scarcity and abundance.

I am here,
taking up my space and filling the hole, taking ownership of the role, the job. Same goes for writing. Maybe it isn't so much talent or gift so much as showing up, location, presence, desire, love and that thing that can't be taught... experience. Just as yesterday I brought in a group of cows with some mavericks in the mix, so today, before dawn, I write about work with cold fingers and smudged reading glasses while feeding the fire at my feet.

Until it is time to saddle up.

(Private writing coaching available.)