Mindfulness for those who would rather not
One Week
I do my best to keep things in check, balancing my highs and good times with probable periods of payback, the knowledge that nothing comes for free. I wouldn’t say I expect the worst to happen, but my habits over the years have laid the groundwork to be suspicious when the pendulum swings toward sunny…
Read More
Arrival 2
I’m desperate enough to be part of this land to put myself into financial distress, which has already been done. The lot that is for sale beside ours is a rolling clusterfuck of steep hilly terrain, high dead grasses after the drought and bushy sage that is crisp along the tips of the leaves. I…
Read More
Arrival
Big sagebrush in a field doesn’t just smell like turkey dinner, its got a whole lot more to it than that. When you twist it and crush it in your fingers and you bring it to your nose there’ll be something like eucalyptus, maybe some mint, the citrus of lemon balm. These aren’t faint scents…
Read More
The Small Warmth of the Sun
It was during the last of the good, warm days when Billy went to visit Dr. Duggleby, a check up before the seasons changed in earnest. Billy walked to the doctor’s office with the warmth of the sun on his back, with a lengthened shadow in front of himself and those things around him; the…
Read More
Doubletrack
Out back of our place is a little piece of trail that leads to some doubletrack. I don’t know what that doubletrack is or used to be, maybe an old mine road, or maybe the town put it in as some kind of service road. Back in the floods they used it after the fact…
Read More
Snippet
Billy watched the valley, and the clouds staggered their passage first on the western mountains and then caught again on the eastern ridge. In between was a space of very blue sky, and the clouds were lit from behind by the western sun that fell away as the world spun on axis in the other…
Read More
Kill Your Darlings
Much of what I do these days reminds that I’m drawing closer to the last time I’ll do these things. Our move from the Bow Valley is drawing in. We’ve started packing our things, and yesterday we received the building permit and submitted all of our paperwork to the bank for financing. On Monday the…
Read More
The Pull of the World
Before the alarm howls the morning is on their room through the blinds, lines of it against the closet door and into the bathroom. There are doves in the trees cooing, wringing night out of their feathers. Elk move through the park across the street and their wet fur steams in the earliest bits of…
Read More
Build Anchors
The image with this entry is of a #12 Black Diamond Stopper. This particular stopper, after blowing out two pieces above it, was the piece of gear that arrested my fall from the crux of Cat’s Tail at Mount Nemo. The crux is at the top of a 25 meter climb, so I came close…
Read More
Beginning Again
The more I stop to think about things, the more I realize that most of what I’ve figured out, I’ve known all along. I read once that the most important tool for a writer to use frequently is writing. That much seems obvious, right? But most of us that aren’t in the career of writing…
Read More