January 26, 2018
I wished to dive into some deep stream of thoughtful and devoted life, which meandered through retired and fertile meadows far from town. I wished…to lurk in crystalline thought like the trout under verdurous banks, where stray mankind should only see my bubble come to the surface. I wished to live, ah! As far away […]
October 15, 2017
I had always thought that when I died, my children would scatter my ashes under the pines beside Davis Lake, where we have camped for twenty years. But it’s all ashes there now. Wildfire flared up along the road behind the east campground. Driven by 25-mile-an-hour winds, the firestorm charged across the road and ran […]
June 28, 2017
The answer is never the answer. I’ve never seen anybody really find the answer—they think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer. —Ken Kesey […]
June 12, 2017
Several years ago, Congressman Raul Labrador (R- Idaho) proclaimed that “nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care.” * My experience has been different. When I heard his words I thought of a sweet young woman whose body and community both turned against her. Somehow, I was supposed to be her last hope. […]
May 02, 2017
Passing through steeply descending terrain amid dramatic peaks in the Hindu Kush Mountains, south of Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan, with treacherous cliffs dropping abruptly only yards to our left, my driver and I saw before us a disturbing scene of near disaster. A public bus had crashed into an enormous rock on the right hand […]
April 17, 2017
SPIRIT OF PLACE Out of their loneliness for each other two reeds, or maybe two shadows, lurch forward and become suddenly a life lifted from dawn or the rain. It is the wilderness come back again, a lagoon with our city reflected in its eye. We live by faith in such presences. It is a […]
April 16, 2017
I own some land, in the western foothills of the Ochoco Mountains in Central Oregon. Somewhere or other I have a packet of papers indicating that I have title to it. I pay yearly County taxes on this property; if I stop paying them, the County will claim the property, and eventually auction it off […]
Can anyone tell me the names of some famous bears?” A pause. “Yogi?” a woman in a halter top asked. I nodded, “That’s right.” “Smokey Bear,” came from a nine-year old in a ball cap. “Yes, that’s a good one. Any others?” I waited for an answer, as a good naturalist should, but when much […]
The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety… and to do something without knowing how or why…. The way of life is wonderful: it is by abandonment. Circles, Ralph Waldo Emerson The night before my first ballet class, I pace up and down […]
When I was growing up in Seattle, my father, who’d come from Maine, one day asked whether I expected to live in Seattle as an adult. “Of course!” I replied, surprised he’d ask. “Then you should consider going east for school,” Dad said. “Easterners have a lot of influence in society. They make the rules. […]
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