Holiday Destiny | East Wenatchee, WA | 2018
Today I’m dishing up four classic riddles (OK, they’re really stupid jokes) for Thanksgiving Day. Use them as childish distractions whenever anyone tries to talk politics at the table …
-
Mooring | Moses Lake, WA | 2018
American author James Baldwin once wrote, “People can’t invent their mooring posts — their lovers and their friends — anymore than they can invent their parents.” At lake’s edge, I stood pondering my own life’s moorings — spouse, siblings, career, home — and how their rooted placements have (more…)
-
Drifter | Chelan, WA | 2017
The solo traveler escapes the social influences that tug him out of shape. In daily life, family, friends, work, Internet, household chores and a hundred other hooks grab, pull, stretch until he sometimes doesn’t recognize himself. Alone and free, his habits, his thinking, his very soul, reconstitute into core qualities of stillness, silence, simplicity. He floats along, mildly curious about where life will take him.
-
I Am Batman | East Wenatchee, WA | 2017
If we all have secret identities, as some psychologists suggest, then perhaps our truths are revealed best in shadows. My bat soul emerged while I pumped gas at a local station; my essential nature shaped by (more…)
-
Power Line/Contrail | East Wenatchee, WA | 2017
The thin line between matter and vapor — the physical and ephemeral — begs occasional acknowledgment. At the edge of sleep, we often flutter back-and-forth from one world to the next, one state of consciousness to another. In nature — atop mountains, in deep forest, gliding underwater — we can sometimes glimpse (more…)
-
Volcanoes | Cascade Range, Washington and Oregon | 2018
Airline pilots often point out America’s wonders: the Rockies, the Grand Canyon, the Great Salt Lake, the Mississippi River. On a recent flight, the captain suggested we take a peek at some peaks — a line of volcanoes comprising the central Cascade Range. I think that’s (more…)
-
Restroom | Twisp, WA | 2017
One of life’s great gifts is the unexpected bathroom. I speak of ones hidden amid the urban maze or installed miles into what we all thought was wilderness. The ones for which some sympathetic soul — a highway engineer or Forest Service ranger — decided that (more…)
IrwinFoto 