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: Forest
Paved Paradise: Earth Day
Walking in the mountains is like walking in part of your soul. This Earth Day feels like we are collectively rediscovering our connection to the Blue planet and the strange fragility upon which we live. Just being able to go outside of our homes has become a luxury. Maybe we needed this time out to…
Fast Slow Disco
To leave everything and start over is part of the excited human collective dream to succeed and evolve. Coming from Texas the Pacific Northwest is continually unimaginably magical. A place where borders were created by volcanic mountains and glacier fed river instead of flat gerrymandered land, county lines blurred by bureaucratic inequality. Flashes of false…
The Great Soul Kitchen
This year of chosen solitude has been a solace- a beautiful clearing in the wake of abandoning attachments. To walk in mountains is to walk in part of your soul. Returning to your breath is a returning to your life in this present moment. Everything else is an adornment distracting us from the real essence…
Reflecktion of Reflections
The reflection of a mountain lake is changed by ripples of kayakers, canoes, fish, and wind. Mirrors cannot be fully trusted, even in nature, for they do not present the subject as it truly exists. What we see is the inverse reflection of an image but not the actual image itself. In that way we…
“Nothin’ But Time” part 2!
A young forest is now growing 39 yrs after Mount St. Helens’ destructive eruption. New ecosystems have begun flourishing. Wetlands now dot the plains and valleys within the blast zone of St. Helens- becoming home to frogs, amphibians, water fowl in species and numbers that did not occupy this area in the past. Some wondered…
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…
