I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to our Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Krissy Kludt’s reflection and poem Of Dust and Water.
Several years ago, I texted my father from a snowbound house in Tahoe, where I was spending a weekend away from my Bay Area home: “I miss winter so much it hurts.”
“Of course you do,” he told me. “You have a deep sense of place, fully integrated with your sense of self.”
Wisconsin-raised, I’d known lakeshores, streams, and maple forests from childhood. I was born in the middle of a Midwest thunderstorm, welcomed to the world by lightning. Though I had spent a decade in California, that land was not my home. The oak-dotted hills and chaparral were beautiful, but strange.
My father’s words revealed my need to connect with the place I lived, were I ever to feel at home. I wove weekly hikes into my rhythm. I read the land and books about her with the curiosity of an aspiring naturalist. I came to know where the deer bed down at night, where vultures ride thermal winds on an autumn morning, where the first poppies raise their flaming heads. I learned the names of the grasses.
All this corresponded with a creative awakening. The more time I spent upon the land, the more words flowed out of me. This became a contemplative practice for me. I asked questions of the hills. I pulled at the divine threads that tied me to the land. I found more than metaphor; I found deep connection and real meaning. I discovered that I bloom in poems.
OF DUST AND WATER
by Krissy Kludt
blessed is the one who
lays her body down upon the rock
and breathes the breath of the mountain
she spreads her limbs in a great X
thirsty lichen rough against her back
the rock still holds the coolness of night
scent of sagebrush hangs
in the air
if I know one thing it is this:
resurrection is the water from which the universe is born
do you not see?
dust we are
and to dust we return
have you not heard?
we are star dust
every atom of our bodies
comes from earth which comes from sky
we are such dust
as greens the eons
and our little life is grounded in the deep
From I Could Walk Forever and Know So Little (Green Writers Press, 2026).
Poet Krissy Kludt is the founder and executive director of Writing the Wild. Her debut poetry collection I Could Walk Forever and Know So Little released March 5, 2026 from Green Writers Press. Her work appears in anthologies The Nature of Our Times (Paloma Press 2025), Taking Liberties (Cutthroat 2025), and Stories from the Trail (Wayfarer Books 2024), and in other publications. She is most at home in the hills; after two decades in California, she now lives in the Driftless region of southwestern Wisconsin.
