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My goal here is not to write prose of which I’ll later be proud…oh sure that would be nice but right now I can barely remember the alphabet. My goal is to keep track of this never-to-be-repeated year in my or my children’s or grandchildren’s lifetimes. Hopefully. A couple years from now I want to leaf through my blog book for 2020 and say ‘you know that wasn’t so bad…I learned x… Read More
Day before yesterday was the Fourth of July. Never my favorite holiday. Dedicated to noise. But what if it’s 2030 and life’s memory stash is all muddled…what if I need to remember July 4, 2020? I’d better make a post for just that eventuality. Black Lives Matter; rampant racism; out-of-control cops; dt shooting off his pouty smarmy mouth, and fireworks on sacred Native American land in environmentally-dangerous circumstances; oh yeah…and there’s the… Read More
How to love New Mexico again…with the passion I felt for this place the first years I lived here. Sometimes it’s easy. Yesterday morning for example. Steven and I walked from the river crossing above Rio Bravo south to Rio Bravo and back. Five and one-half miles. Starting just before 6 am and winding up at Modelos for a burrito and pineapple Fanta breakfast. Perfect. The bike path going down, right along… Read More
Yesterday I said my mom loved god, my dad loved the woods, and my school told me to love America. Sorry mom…couldn’t go the god route, and certainly nothing in my history as an American has convinced me that this country deserves unqualified love. While I treasure the geography of my land, I find it much harder to feel love for a number of my fellow Americans: the racists, the greedy, the… Read More
More time on bosque walks. Many delicious quotes and poems. Many photos. Many miles. Another morning in the woods tomorrow. This pathway through the pandemic. “With the first step, the number of shapes the walk might take is infinite, but then the walk begins to define itself as it goes along, though freedom remains total with each step: any tempting side road can be turned into an impulse, or any wild patch of woods… Read More
“That’s the best thing about walking, the journey itself. It doesn’t matter much whether you get where you’re going or not. You’ll get there anyway. Every good hike brings you eventually back home.” (Edward Abbey) “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” (Friedrich Nietzsche) “I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want… Read More
Our world is taking on a bright golden hue…our natural world, not the human or political one unfortunately. Fall is beautiful in temperate zones and we snap and post endless photos of the gold and the red and the glory of it all, and repeat the process year after year. Here is my annual contribution to the too-muchness of autumn photography. It was quite a week, starting with last Sunday’s marathon,… Read More
I began preparing for the first of two consequential 2016 trips this morning. I used ‘big’ for the 2015 adventure—time to expand my vocabulary—’consequential,’ meaning trips lasting over two weeks. The reason I am preparing for May 2016 is because I did not feel immediately perfect upon getting up at 7am and because it made me tired to walk 1 1/2 hours. This is the last slow weekend before writing classes start… Read More
The Itinerary. The Arrangements. The Payments. The Luggage. The Endoscopy. True, the latter was not part of the initial pretty picture of the Big15Trip, but dudu occurs, yes? The endoscopy was simply to rule out any serious reasons for my stomach’s frequent ‘acting-up.’ And it did…rule out the bad stuff. Now a consistent regimen of prilosec for awhile will enable me to eat Norwegian, Swedish, Latvian and Belarusian prior to getting… Read More