A Letter to You on How it Started and How It's Going: Everyday Magic, Day 1,124

After the first surgery in 2019

Dear wonderful readers,

I've missed you lately and have missed posting as regularly as I wish. There's so much to say and even more to understand or at least listen to in search of understanding. Speaking of listening without always understanding, there's also the story I've been writing (as my way of listening) about our 35 years aiming to save the land where we live, which overlapped with particularly rare cancer of the eye.

The Magic Eye: The Story of Saving a Life and a Place in the Age of Anxiety officially comes out tomorrow with the big launch party at 7 p.m., Thurs., July 17th at the Raven Bookstore (please join if you can!). I've been sharing these twined stories (with a pandemic running through them) with you for years so today, I'd like to land on four particular moments -- how it started and how it's going.

1. Five Years Later: A Cancer Story: "It's either an ocular melanoma or a brain tumor," the doctor told me five years ago. Ken, my brother Ravi, and I all gasped in unison. "Well, let's root for the ocular melanoma then," I replied. Read on to hear how we went from there to here.

2. We Just Saved the Land That Saved Us: Once we put the land in a conservation easement, a process that took years and so much detail, hard work, devotion, and pure love for land from many people, there was this post. "Nothing's changed from the vantage point of the darkening blue of another beautiful summer night, the rising heat of the coming day, the deer slipping from shadow to shadow, the indigo bunting bursting from the cedars. Our gratitude isn't changed either, just bigger, so much so that we continue to grow into it."

3. The Land is Still the Land: "I thought of calling this blog post, 'The tale of three closings,' but then I realized it wasn't about anything closing. It was the openings innate in this land staying this land. In an age and location where prairies and woodlands are so often bulldozed into property and housing developments, what happened here opens the against-the-odds future for this place flourishing on its own terms."

4. How to Write a Book Out of Love of Land, Cancer, Fear of Death, and a Pandemic: Here are 25 steps on how I wrote this book I'm surely leaving out hundreds of other steps and even more missteps. What do you do when life catapults you into a terrifying diagnosis and an against-the-odds struggle to save beloved land? If you're me (and many other writers), you write.

With the wonderful staff and president of the Kansas Land Trust.

Thank you so much for you being on the other end of this blog, whether you've just climbed onboard or have been traveling with me, post by post, for a while. I'm wildly grateful for your company, helping me find a little more light, clarity, humor, meaning, and connection.

P.S. This picture -- taken right after French toast to celebrate putting the land in a conservation easement -- includes KLT staff Patti Beedles (left) and Kaitlin Stanley (right) and president Julie Coleman (center), all rock stars for the good.