View from dunes above Salinas at sunset.

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We don't know monuments like the river knows. A more enduring stillness and still... more fluid sense of time. A sometimes violent vein of life in the landscape we, with little imagination, call arid. And leave to the cows and coyotes. Possessing a patience and faith that shapes landscapes, water carves ever deeper into stone until canyon walls tower overhead, blood red and beautiful. Iconic, silent and fragile. Red canyons seduce something in my soul. I am drawn out of myself as I am drawn in. Something familiar in them if not familial. The rocks rebound with stories that still echo from an age past, but alive here. Those stories, both soft and sinister will tell you the histories since before history. They will tell you the secrets that only stones can keep. They will sing you songs if you can find their rhythm in your own heartbeat. And they will weave your own mythology into theirs until you know no other belonging. We don't know change like a mountain d...
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Nurtured by Nature

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Back there, I walked barefoot through broken down barns where moss grew in blankets across cracked cement floors. I was told to wear shoes should rusty nails sprout instead of muddy water between my toes, but all I ever got was dirty. I never cared much for shoes and my feet will never fit into slender glass slippers now, but any prince who hopes to win me will not care for such dimensions. I had to feel the earth under my feet to keep my head out of the clouds that my heart reached for. Back there, lucky horseshoes grew on toppled brick walls and cinder blocks held secret treasures to humble shipwrecks. Back there, the brightest colours I've ever seen were lights that danced in the sky on a cold night. I lay on the roof of a great hall and watched as my heaven turned to stained glass. Back there, what it took to be a hero was to battle demons in my dreams and rescue my mother from milk snakes, even if I was the one who brought them in. I built grand museu...
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Small adventures

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I went West, as humans often do, onward and upward as it were. I had a hankering for some solitude and the scent of pines and maybe, if I was lucky (and I was) a little mist to reconnect me to my mystical roots. It had been a number of years since I was up in the Estes Park area, not since before the flood and it was apparent to me as I wound up the road from Lyons to Estes… either my memory failed me or the geography was much changed. Perhaps a bit of both. Just me, the dog, my trusty rusty truck and the mostly open road. It was a rainy weekend (snowy up higher) and the usual weekend mountain crowd was scarce. I couldn’t tell you exactly where I was, other than on the East side of the Estes Park Valley, because I wasn’t paying attention to the road signs. I was in one of those “in-the-moment” moments and my decisions to turn here or there were made in a flash and guided more of less by observations of “This road looks less busy than that road”. The roads got less and less busy, mor...
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