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. […]
I once met a bumper sticker that read, “Life is a mountain, not a beach.” For much of mine, mountains have been among other things, my favorite metaphor. But sometimes you can get too much, even of a good metaphor. Take, for example, the tragic events that unfolded high on the highest place on Earth […]
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