Some years ago I took a photography workshop at the New York Botanical Garden. At the end of a day spent shooting the vast array of flowers in the perennial gardens, Allen Rokach, our teacher, told us to come back next morning with two favorites to share. Everyone else brought in pictures of flowers at their […]
One of the things that is constantly, and wonderfully, borne in on me as I travel is how utterly beautiful our world is. Everywhere I go, there is beauty easily at hand. And for someone who spends as much time driving from place to place as I do, the gorgeous scene along so many roads is
At some point in the recent past I realized that daylight has a different sound than night does. Not the usual distinctions, like birdsong, crickets, traffic. When the sun rises, I hear a difference in the world, a tone — very, very subtle — with more vibrance in sunlight than the velvety sound of night.
The Place Where You Go to Listen Read More »
There is a great mystery on this journey: the fact that I seem to choose some places to go, and that others call me to come. Alaska called. Before leaving home in 2011, I never gave any thought to going to Alaska. In the mayhem of leaving I barely gave thought to where I was
If my passion were for fishing, or climbing mountains, or volcanoes, or glaciers, or mighty rivers, or wildlife, or liquid carbon geology, I might have chosen a different icon: salmon, Denali, Mt. Redoubt, the Matanuska Glacier, the Yukon River, the grizzly bear, the moose, the bald eagle, or even the Alaska pipeline. But, though I
The Alaska icon: fireweed Read More »
I fell in love with Homer as we drove down the uninspiring last slope of Route 1 into the town, but I have no idea why it happened then. I’d been driving along the Cook Inlet for the last hour, with one magnificent snow-capped volcano after another looming up across the water, so Kachemak Bay,
In love in Homer, Alaska Read More »
The first thing that happened in Alaska was that we lost our sense of time. There were three of us at that point. George and I had picked up our friend, Guy, in Whitehorse, in the Yukon, where he’d flown up from Vancouver. We drove to Destruction Bay the same day, staying the night
Timeless in Alaska Read More »
I so hoped it would be another year, even a few more months, before I wrote this. But great spirits come in their own time, and leave in their own time, and Splash, my companion and spirit guide, has left in hers. She turned 14 in April, and then, in May, we found out that
This essay was updated and republished as ‘I have located heaven.’ Please enjoy it here: https://thesouloftheearth.com/waterton-lakes-national-park/ (More images are in the Waterton wildflowers gallery, which is here.)
Latitude 49º 6′ 33.63″, Longitude -113º 50′ 58.92″ Read More »
There are moments that tilt life, even if we don’t know it at the time. Not the big moments, when our paths take sudden and dramatic turns, like locking eyes with the stranger who will become a great love, or taking your child in your arms for the first time. The quiet ones. Moments that