Everything changes, constantly moving. Rivers continuously flow downstream, across landscapes, and through channels carved by their own persistent forces. Our lives are equally dynamic, as we follow our own course through time. When I started writing this blog over 10 years ago, it was from a very different place in the course of my life, and a very different landscape. I was raising young ...
The South Fork McKenzie River
The South Fork McKenzie River in the Oregon Cascade Range is a historically important spawning ground for native salmon and currently the site of a large scale floodplain restoration project to restore their habitat and the river ecosystem. For the first time in over 50 years, hundreds of Chinook salmon are returning to spawn in the waters where their ancestors returned year after year. The ...
Finding Those Moments
Sometimes life gets busy. Busier than you ever thought possible, where you suddenly find that you're putting all of your energy into just keeping up. The consensus of advice seems to always involve giving yourself small breaks, but it can be hard to figure out what that actually looks like for you as an individual. My greatest success with this as of late has been what I would call ...
The High Divide
My parents have always been great adventurers. They backpacked all over the Olympic National Park in the 70's before I was born, and I always enjoy looking through the photo albums of all the places they explored. This is one of my favorite photos of them on the High Divide looking out at Mt. Olympus and the headwaters of the Hoh River. My Dad asked me to needlefelt the photo for my Mom's ...
The Great Snowpocalypse of 2019
Having lived in the Pacific Northwest my entire life, I have limited experience with snow. I would describe a snow storm as something rare, fun, and fleeting. If you drove into town it might all have melted when you got back, and everything would be green again like it never happened. The snow storm that hit us in February was definitely not like that. On Sunday, February 24, we woke up to a ...
The Lantern Walk
Every November, the lantern walk was a tradition I looked forward to with my children at our Waldorf school. They would make beautiful lanterns in class, sometimes out of colorful paper or tin cans, sometimes out of jars and leaves, and we would all bundle up and meet on Martinmas to walk through the dark night singing cheery lantern songs. We did a couple of our own lantern walks at home when ...
A Mountain Hearth in Autumn
Autumn has finally rolled around again, and since I haven't posted in a while, I thought I would share a snapshot of what this hearth is looking like this time of year. In many ways it's a snapshot of my life right now. It's a little busy, and a little messy, but that's how it goes, and lots of good things are always in the works. Cider is fermenting away in three different flavors (plain, ginger, ...
The Farmhouse Clothesline
The farmhouse clothesline plays an important role in the grand scheme of things. Not only does it save energy and give you a handy place to hang up wet camping gear, it offers a few moments of peaceful meditation not often found in our busy lives. Pinning the clothes on the line and taking them down once they are dry and smelling like sunshine has always been one of my favorite parts of a hot ...
World Water Day
World Water Day is a good time to take a moment and reflect on the water that sustains us and where it comes from. One of the things I appreciate the most about my home in the McKenzie River valley is that we have some of the cleanest, purest water in the world. When a vacancy opened up this last year on the McKenzie Watershed Council, I was glad to take the opportunity to become a Resident ...
Spring Equinox
Spring Equinox is a time of balance. Darkness and daylight get their equal time, the seasons shift from winter into spring, and things reach an equilibrium between extremes. Just when you're surveying the landscape and thinking things look rough, a bud starts to pop out here, or a flower is suddenly blooming over there, and you notice birds singing in the trees where all had been quiet and still. ...