Photo Friday: Get Thee To Antelope Island
It is a strange phenomenon when people who live very near to something extraordinary pay it no mind. I call it local’s apathy. I myself have suffered from local’s apathy. I lived in New York City for...
View ArticlePhoto Friday: 11 Shots from Oz
Years ago, I took a trip to Australia for my friend’s wedding. I took a month for the trip, so I’d have time to go climbing and exploring the countryside. I rented a Subaru in Sydney, learned to drive...
View ArticleNo Time To Waste: Memories of Garrett Smith
We meet a lot of people in a lifetime. Most of them we forget within hours or even minutes of a first encounter. Those who stick with us are woven into our neurons by repetition, over the course of...
View ArticleYou Haven’t Heard of Mary Oliver?
This isn’t my first blog post about the poet Mary Oliver, but it’s the first to see the light of day. I abandoned the others because they kept straying into the realm of dry, academic analysis. When...
View ArticleThe Doodanglies of Spring
I’m walking my blue heeler, Bodhi, through the serene grass and pavement matrix of our Salt Lake City suburb, when some creature issues a short, high cry from up above. It’s a mysterious call that...
View ArticlePhoto Friday: Living Creatures
As an aspiring photographer, science and nature lover, and generally curious fellow, I find few things more fascinating and aesthetic than the forms of living creatures. They are at once alien and...
View ArticleA Moon for Halloween
The night before last, I was standing in an empty field just as the full moon rose through the branches of a tree. I took this picture. A grand, pale orange form as it mounted the horizon, the moon...
View ArticleHueco Lessons
I tendered my resignation via email from the computer in the Hueco Rock Ranch. The year was 2007, and I found myself stranded in the Texas desert. My flight back to Ohio, back to my job writing words I...
View ArticleThe Importance of Respect
The first precept of karate is that it begins and ends with a bow of respect. If you respect your opponent, you respect yourself. If you respect yourself, you respect your opponent. Similarly, one of...
View ArticleBouldering Alone
When from our better selves we have too Been parted by the hurrying world, and Sick of its business, of its pleasures How gracious, how benign, is Solitude — William Wordsworth, The Prelude For the...
View ArticleWalking on Lava: A Pedestrian Lesson from Hawaii
Take the helicopter tour, one friend suggested. You can hire a boat that takes you right up to where the lava meets the sea, someone else offered. But when the guy at the hotel info desk mentioned a...
View ArticleA Trip to the Zoo
I went to the zoo this weekend, and as always I departed feeling a little ambivalent. When you see creatures like leopards, lemurs, elephants, and apes in those drab enclosures, mere simulacra of their...
View ArticleHiker’s Zen
I like to mediate in the morning. I don’t have a shrine or even a particular belief system that I’m meditating for. I just get up early, sit down on a pillow on the floor of my dimly lit living room,...
View ArticleInside Out
The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough. —Ralph Waldo Emerson I stare into the glow. My mind races. Images and words scroll by without end....
View ArticleClimbing Community
At the end of the song “Cliff Hanger,” by Blackalicious, there’s a sample from a 1968 Stokely Carmichael speech. It goes: “Wherever you go, the first place you go is to your people … And once we begin...
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