Every Mountain calls you home in different ways. St. Helen’s is a mountain of contemplation & rebirth. The felled forests enables one to see out in vast distances. The ghostly backdrop enables one to project your thoughts and hopes onto. Engulfed in barren rugged crust of Earth. In fact the desolation of Mt. St. Helen’s…
Category: Canon Photography
Sunshine Laundromat
Columbia Gorge has finally reopened. The river itself a glacier’s million-year pet project eroding earth out to the Pacific. Call it Nature’s version of “will they or won’t they?” (Sorry Sam and Diane.) The Columbia feels ancient and powerful perhaps because this river wasn’t “supposed” to be here. It was carved into the marrow of…
The Long Ride Home pt. 1
In 2017 I told myself, “When I move to Portland, I’m going skiing after work.” I moved here one year ago, and for the past 2 months I’ve been gratefully skiing on the Earth’s mirror, scarcely believing this is home now. It was one of those dreams we all have like building a house, visiting…
Nothin’ But Time part 1
It’s almost been one year since embarking on the eloquent adventure/disaster that changed the landscape of my life. I keep coming back to Mount St. Helens- a mountain who is no stranger to spewing new effigies upon the land. It’s the geographically closest and most accessible of the great 5 mountain peaks of I now…
Running Up That Hill
She spoke out of the side of her mouth on a sunny Seattle morning, “I lost 4 kids to the state. I was the one who wasn’t supposed to make it, but I did. It took two decades and finally my fifth child to get it all together, and now I help parents who are…
It Ain’t Over Til It’s Over
Waterfalls offer a perfect metaphor for the continual impermanence of existing. Still they perpetuate the illusion that this beauty, this earth, that life will last forever. The technological achievements of the modern era have allowed humans to live in inhospitable regions in deserts, remote space, Antarctica, inner-city neighborhoods and rural get-aways. A flipped switch sends…
Within You Without You
Joseph Campbell explains the hero’s journey as a circular cycle of polarities common to all human beings. The call to adventure spurs one to leave their home and travel into the wild. The hero encounters many obstacles on the journey to their destiny. Traversing through the dark roads filled with various real and imagined terrors…
Is There Life on Mars? Life Begins Again
All planets start devoid of life. Where did life come from? We all began somewhere in small towns and through generations of lifeforms. We’re never really starting over. Appendages are tethers traded in the course of evolution. The adjustment is awkward and barren, but free to become something different. In the end you take with…
After the Goldrush/Lost inside the Forest
True to nature I chose the complicated hike that found me lost and turned every which way around. Stuck for hours somewhere in a long wilderness loop in the Rocky Mountain National Park. Colorado keeps calling me back, an unintended disciple. The lessons becoming easier to learn as I let myself be broken to the teaching. It’s like we’re always on the cusp of knowing, like that point in your day drinking a coffee and laughing with your best friend, or on that cerebral scatterfying acid trip when you figured out the universe, or close to climaxing- the constant verge of almost knowing. Then all is ephemeral again. Wisps of genius flowing back into the void. The curse of peering into secret ethers is forgetting all we weren’t supposed to learn.
