I read somewhere that in his first expedition down the Grand Canyon, John Wesley Powell (a one-armed Civil War vet) had about 40 pounds of coffee and some moldy flour left over when he finished his trip. That was it. There was no other food. Like John Wesley Powell, I had some useful hindsight about…
Freedom and Failure
(At the north end of Lake Chelan, Stehekin, WA) We can leave. We can begin again, and again, and again, we can fall in love with new gorgeous places, we can try a million different things. We can kick out the cobwebs in our dark dusty selves that accrue after a bad day, a week,…
Photographing Birth
Birth is an incredibly beautiful, powerful, humbling thing to witness. But I didn’t always think of it that way. Like many people, I had been pretty shocked by the graphic depictions of birth I’d been forced to sit through in 8th grade health. If I had to think about birth, I’d mentally reference this scene from…
Going
There is some serious poetry in the act of leaping into the unknown and beginning something wildly new and leaving everyone and everything familiar behind to set foot on a new continent feeling the whole time like you might burst if you stay and go crazy if you go so either way… Everything I told…
The Heart of the City
The heart of every community in Ghana is its market. In Accra (the capitol), the main marketplace is this cavernous, sprawling maze of life and activity and color and chaos and HEAT. My first time there, I’d had no idea what to expect, I’d simply gotten into a cab and been told we were heading to the ‘heart…
A Hike Up Purple Point
I’m looking back through photos from my summer in Stehekin, photos I took and then forgot about. Amazing how these were just a few of the thousand beautiful things I saw. Beauty that just exists and is ours to go and have, if we want. This kind of beauty fills you up, from your toenails to…
Autumn in the Alpine
Fall is long behind us. We’re thinking about the cold months ahead, snow and slush and getting back to the gym. Resolving to eat more fruit and put more into our savings…. and get all caught up with our blogs. Which brings me back to writing about my fall. After my contract at the Stehekin Valley…
Journaling in the North Cascades
Journal posts from a summer working in one of the most remote locations in the lower 48. This summer I lived and worked in Stehekin, a tiny community in the lower North Cascades National Park. What with there being no cell service, barely functional internet, and definitely no TV, I had plenty of time to…
A Little Summer Poem
Little Summer Poem Touching the Subject of Faith (by Mary Oliver) Every summer I listen and look under the sun’s brass and even into the moonlight, but I can’t hear anything, I can’t see anything — not the pale roots digging down, nor the green stalks muscling up, nor the leaves deepening their damp pleats,…
The Root of the Root
At the summer’s beginning, I was incredibly excited to blog about living ‘off the grid’ in the North Cascades. I hoped to document a simple existence in the woods, but quickly found out that such an existence made blogging– surprise!– quite difficult. After my first couple of weeks working at the North Cascades Lodge, the satellite internet…
Bossy Boots 