“Breathing in, I know I am breathing in, Breathing out, I know I am breathing out,” —Thich Nhat Hanh After a week of real spring on the mountain—weather so warm it melted the two-foot drifts in the yard and opened the path through the woods where I hike with River in the summer, drying the six inches of mud gumming up the road—a mild, late-season snow settled in overnight and threatened my potted herbs and…
If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s how to prepare for and survive disaster. I’ve spent over twenty years living at elevations above 8000 feet in places threatened by fire and flood and I’ve had a bit of practice making evacuation’s hard choices: what to take and what to leave behind. During the 2003 Overland Mountain Fire—then the largest fire in Boulder County history–I loaded a bed and food for my dog,…
at the palms of surrender Blue ships disappear there swallowed by a red sun mouth closing around them in prayer. It’s grit your teeth time on the mountain—the season of no light and perma-snow. Even though the calendar says the light is returning–as does my good friend Tyler who first counts, then reports, the minutes on Facebook like announcing salvation–the 20ish minutes we’ve gained since the Solstice is not enough for me. Mornings, I…
On May 1st of this year—Beltane—Greg and I eloped. I’d settled on the day because on the pagan calendar it’s the time when “sweet desire weds wild delight,” and May is a month burgeoning with hope and dewy new things yet to reveal themselves. Even though we’d been together almost eight years, marriage seemed like a mysterious continent for me, the cowgirl who’d lived a solitary life for so long. That morning, we see the…
He who binds himself to a joy Does the winged life destroy He who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sunrise. —-William Blake I’ve been pining. Every day, I wake and think of some distant thing to lash myself too: PR events related to the paperback release of Rough Beauty (radio and print interviews, new website and blog, readings); an end of summer…