Category: Landscape
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Angel | Mold, WA | August 2019 Cemetery Visit #2 | A co-worker who spent most nights hunting raccoons pulled me aside one afternoon to confess he saw angels. “You find ‘em glowing in the trees,” he said. “Like fireflies, but bigger.” On a hunt the night before, one persistent angel clung to him through…
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Gravesite | Mold, WA | August 2019 Cemetery Visit #1 | My mother’s zest for living made her a perfect candidate for afterlife communication. Her all-embracing love, with a heavy dose of humor, seemed too big, too exuberant, too energized to disappear due to the mere technicality of death. We siblings figured her spirit would…
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Sliver of Moon | Twisp, WA | August 2019 “God is the friend of silence,” said Mother Teresa. “See how trees, flowers, grass grow in silence? See the stars, the moon and the sun, how they
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Forest | Republic, WA | August 2019 One indicator of a quality life is being surrounded by trees too numerous to count. A great sweep of forest soothes like an ocean view but with more warp and woof — a textured weave of wonder. One recent evening on Sherman Pass (our state’s highest), I overheard…
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Hives | Twisp, WA | August 2019 Some bee colonies create a buzz you can feel in your bones. It’s a sub-aural phenomenon, more vibration than sound, that pulses from certain types of hive architecture and hidden nests. For me, that buzz isn’t the joyful bzzt-bzzt of bee busy-ness. It’s more of a gut warning…
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Charred Trunk | Blewett Pass, WA | August 2019 Wildfire bad; wildfire good. Forests razed; forests reborn. Homes burned; home-building booms. Fire’s balance between awful and awesome continues to be veiled in smoke. No response suits every situation. Arguments for extinguishing, igniting, controlling, observing the worst blazes all have merit. What we know for
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Trees | Moses Lake, WA | August 2019 “I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree. / A tree that looks at God all day and lifts her leafy arms to pray / A tree that may in summer wear a nest of
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Leaf | East Wenatchee, WA | August 2019 With chlorophyll gone, this leaf’s true face emerged bright red and beautiful. It was always there, but hidden behind the green facade of photosynthesis. Buddhists refer to such a countenance as the original face, the one worn as an infant before society’s imprint. That face in adults…
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Sunset | Twisp, WA | August 2019 Some people are avid appreciators of a setting sun. Almost every evening for two years, my Dad sat on an overturned bucket to watch the sun go down at the edge of his new property. He later kicked aside the bucket, built a house on that exact spot…
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Roadside Pullout | Washington Highway 155 | July 2019 Landscape Week | I remind myself: Stop and step from the car when geology looms so large. Windshields diminish the wondrous. Stand at cliff edge and stretch — arms open to the sky, mind open to
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