The root of sustainability is love

The following quote is the final entry in Philipe Burseillr’s book, 365 Ways to Save the Earth. With each entry corresponding to those on a 365-day calendar, it’s titled “December 31.”
Keep hope. To fully implement every change detailed in this book could take far longer than a year. And the suggestions here are just the [...]

What Life Has in Store

I climbed up the mountain to touch the sun,
But the mountain topped out before I was done.
I went to the desert to look at the waste,
But mystery and beauty is all that I faced.
I paddled the river to look me inside,
But the more I looked in the more I could find.
When the teardrop of fear [...]

Mountains on my mind

I woke this morning with mountains on my mind.
I’ve spent the past four days in a feeverish delirium beneath a white down comforter. I write, sleep, read, sleep, edit, sleep, walk around the block, sleep, call my boss, sleep. And on the cycle goes. Until this morning.
I woke this morning with mountains on my mind.
There’s [...]

Yellowstone National Park by boat

A moon-just-past-full cast silver edges on clouds slung across the east, and long hoary shadows worked through a small strip of lodgepole pine nestled between a willow-filled marsh and the sandy southern shore of Shoshone Lake.
The muscles of my shoulders, arms and stomach were sore. We arrived in this remote corner of Yellowstone National Park [...]

Thompson Peak, Sawtooth Mountains

Voices. I hear voices.
Roll over…Tussle about…Sleep.
Voices. Wandering into my resting conscious. Forcing aching muscles to move.
Roll over…Fuss with the cuff of the sleeping bag…Sleep.
Voices. Still going. Really? Still going? What on God’s green earth could they be talking about at this hour?
I succumb to the inevitable, roll over and gaze from the open tailgate of [...]

Kipukas: discover the hidden landscape of yourself

How often we look but don’t see, sniff but don’t smell, listen but don’t hear. Indeed, who have we become when we have learned to touch without feeling?
Sometimes when my vision blurs and I seem to fail at these fundamental tenets of living there’s a Hawaiian word I ponder: kipukas. Literally, it means “openings,” [...]

Summer light shines on Bruneau Dunes State Park

Bruneau Dunes State Park near Mountain Home, Idaho, is a unique topographical feature in a state renowned for its unique and wild character. This corner of southern Idaho desert is defined by basalt and rhyolite lava flows, sage brush, deep canyons and granite batholiths that have upheaved the earth into a small handful of alpine [...]