During a recent writing sabbatical in Seattle, Washington, I spent many hours wandering the streets around Capitol Hill. Within this cultured environment of heritage homes and mature gardens spreads an unobtrusive, still-wild landscape of moss. Fed by the rainy climate, moss softens the hard angles of a staircase. It transforms rock walls into verdant mountains. […]
Leaf harmonics at Harrop Creek
The 19th century mathematician Jules Henri Poincaré was also a physicist, engineer and philosopher, aptly qualifying him to be a polymath, someone who knows a lot about many and varied things. In his writings, Poincaré spoke of a form of beauty that he believed to be more profound than that which strikes the senses. This […]
Planting Seeds
Redfish Creek flows into the West Arm of Kootenay Lake, close to where I live. This aptly named creek has long been a spawning grounds for the region’s kokanee, a sockeye species identical to the ocean version, except that it adapted to live in freshwater only when it was stranded here long ago by melting […]
Thank you, Mr. Sun
Today is the longest of the year in the northern hemisphere, the summer solstice. When I stepped out onto my deck, a small sun greeted me in the form of a Zinnia flower. I have been watching it for several days as it tried to open its bright face to the world. What a perfect […]
The Howling Wolf Moon
The moon is full today. I woke early to its light spilling in through La Tortue’s side window. Dellie was happy to rush down to the beach with me to watch the moon set in the west, just as the sun rose in the east. These moments of alignment — when sun-and-moon, yin-and-yang, and light-and-dark […]
Reversing Rivers and the mystery of Cones
Near the end of 2016, I rolled La Tortue into a nearly deserted campground at the mouth of San Simeon Creek, near Cambria, on the central coast of California. Surrounded by the undeveloped landscape of the Hearst Ranch, this place harkens back to a long-ago sort of California: uncrowded, more sparsely populated and filled with […]