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Craig Childs

@waterpocket.bsky.social
3K followers 141 following 66 posts

Writer, crawler, earth-sniffer.

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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 28/01/2026
For those feeling the cold, I don’t know if this helps, but here’s a bougainvillea growing off water fed by the outdoor shower I’ve been using down the Baja peninsula. Take heart, spring is happening somewhere.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 03/11/2025
Sometimes I turn her around so she can look out the window.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 03/11/2025
I sat along the Gila River with a writing student, a scientist who studies virulent diseases, and she gave me a dire warning. At least she did it in a beautiful place. It's in my post today for The Last Word on Nothing.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 14/10/2025
Workshopping in the Gila in southern NM last week, that’s me on the left trying to pull words out of the air.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 26/09/2025
Who even dreams?
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 03/08/2025
Sweet spot, getting the work done.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 24/07/2025
For those near to us, that’s the North Rim of the Grand Canyon you’re breathing right now. From 250 miles away, it smells like trees on fire.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 22/07/2025
The way to the lonely mountain.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 02/07/2025
Mountain shrines at night teeming with unseen spirits the place is alive.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 01/07/2025
Bashō in my hand Along Oigawa River Fishing for words
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 22/06/2025
Look into my eye.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 15/06/2025
Last shed of sunlight an hour from home.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 11/06/2025
A month after running the Grand, one of the writing students on our trip, an artist, obviously, put her pencil work in the mail. You remember these rock angles? And the way the water goes calm for a mile or two before the next roar rises? This is what I love about human art. It takes you there.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 08/06/2025
Holed up at the library in Steamboat for a couple days writing, I had a conversation through a window this morning with a fledgeling crow while one of the parents cawed and cawed from a nearby branch, telling the kid to stay away from those damn writers.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 28/05/2025
In the numerous seasons of the year there’s this one, the late end of spring, past the cross-quarter of Beltane, more like summer but still like spring when the wild irises bloom. It’s one of my favorite fractional seasons, blink and you’ll miss it.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 21/05/2025
Taking the slow road home.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
Today is the official publication date for my book on the night sky and if you’ve got a hankering for a hard, wild journey into the stars while firmly attached to the Earth, I urge you toward your nearest independent bookstore or Torrey House Press (avoiding Amazon for obvious reasons).
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 15/05/2025
I’ve got a kid graduating high school today and the feels are significant. Yesterday we hiked to a sunset ridge and for at least twenty minutes, remaining unseen, we watched a lanky black bear and its cub amble along a ditch below us.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 11/05/2025
For the last week I’ve been holed up with my ma working while she got out her easel and oils and painted. “Progress?” I asked. “I put pencil to paper, yes,” she said. To the mothers lost, the mothers found, and mine touching her canvas with a brush on a sunny spring afternoon, happy Mother’s Day.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 08/05/2025
At the foot of a sagebrush, good morning. (spotted towhee)
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 07/05/2025
Gates of Unaweep Canyon the rain.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 04/05/2025
Out of New York City, past the end of the Long Island Rail Road, the coast feels celestial with bright, polished marbles.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 03/05/2025
Hello, Atlantic Ocean.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 30/04/2025
Midnight foray in Manhattan: I got a first hardbound copy of my next book this evening from my publishers/editors (Torrey House Press) who also happen to be traveling to New York City. I’m hoping it might end up in yours, and also under curious circumstances.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 26/04/2025
A line of text in some ancient, geologic tongue…what does it say?
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 17/04/2025
Word from deep in the Grand Canyon. Sound on.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 08/04/2025
Southward bound across the Navajo Nation, putting on the river tomorrow into the Grand Canyon with Amy Irvine. We’re teaching writing, tumbling words downstream till they all turn to sand.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 04/04/2025
Some people have skeletons in their closet, I’ve got skulls.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 02/04/2025
Ten below this morning, watching a heard of more than 500 elk cross the basin through a dazzling ice fog and here comes the sun!
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 30/03/2025
First of the season.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 30/03/2025
From the other room I hear my love say, “You keep bringing in branches and sticks.” I feel in my hair and beard as a precautionary measure.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 28/03/2025
Resistance is elemental.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 26/03/2025
Every time or two I go out looking, I find sign of mountain lions. Yesterday brought good tracks and plenty of scat, the freshest I’ll describe as oak barrel stank. Yesterday also brought the first bear tracks I’ve seen this season adding a tingle to the air. The wild things are moving out there.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 25/03/2025
The Earth is a window on the sky.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 17/03/2025
When I went to find my kid this afternoon I came upon this animal curled up sleeping in a juniper nest, and yeah I can be proud of grades or upcoming high school graduation, but mostly it’s this.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 15/03/2025
The dark is getting smaller, the light bigger. Best be careful or the stars will go out. This is the subject of a new book of mine, “The Wild Dark: Finding the Night Sky in the Age of Light,” with Torrey House Press. Booklist gave it a starred review, calling it “enchanting, mournful, yet hopeful.”
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 10/03/2025
Ligneous rock.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 08/03/2025
Morning in a draw, I-70 humming in the distance, fine people of the world racing this way and that.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 01/03/2025
In other, finer news today, meltwater trickling under ice in the high desert, sound on to hear the commentary.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 01/03/2025
A couple years ago when I was in Lithuania, the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag was flying all over the country. Ukraine is the firewall for the Baltic nations, so you can see why the flags were up: solidarity. Pic from last week at a protest in Utah: Ukraine should be showing up everywhere.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 24/02/2025
Standing at the gates of Zion.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 17/02/2025
Timekeeper, elk and snow.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 06/02/2025
We are experiencing what is called an extinction event. This is a foundational shaking that haphazardly pulls pillars of support. It impacts all living things regardless of color or creed. Red state, blue state, doesn’t matter. Fight it by flourishing and by being involved.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 30/01/2025
Gulf of Mexico on this sunny afternoon. The name first appeared on maps 475 years ago. In a country as freshly minted as ours, it’s a name that has lasted, carrying the imagination into the cup of the Yucatán, an arc of deep tropics that holds history in its hand.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 29/01/2025
A day that became hard to tell up from down, southern Florida.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 19/01/2025
This morning’s sunrise, Sea of Cortez, not a building, boat, or trail of a plane in sight. Just for a moment, tabula rasa. What would you do with a first breath?
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 14/01/2025
It remembers an older sea.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 03/01/2025
Then there comes a day when you’re just about sick of yourself and you crawl out of your too tight skin hoping that this time you’ll be a raven or a sea turtle and you realize, again, this is exactly the animal you are.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
Shovel like it means something.
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Craig Childs @waterpocket.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
Some days you’re looking for the way and it’s just a wild mess.
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