During a short camping stay, I had the delightful chance to sit between paddling around.
Words don’t really do the feeling justice. I spent decades sailing (beginning in the womb). For many years we went every weekend to the nearest lakes. Lakes, rivers, the Caribbean even. My dad was really into it. Once, my father excitedly got us to the lake for the first, Spring-sailing outing of a season (think: fr-fr-fr-frigid water, rubber wetsuits, die-hard sailors) only to discover the entire lake was STILL FROZEN. Too soon, dad. Too soon. Much fun. Endless stories.
On a whim, I’ve recently being trying to get into canoeing. I’m surprised to discover that I’m quite good at paddling a canoe… but I’m not sure when/how I ever learned. Seriously. This strikes me as very strange.
A short 1/2-hour walk from my house is a scattering of boulders. I try to remember to come up here as often as possible. My friend Mike once called bouldering “pebble wrestling” (visualize a relatively tiny person, trying to wrestle an enormous rock—hopeless! …but oh so fun) which made me chuckle and has stuck with me.
I call this face “Green Garden Wall” (my riff on a classic, named “Red Garden Wall” in Colorado) on what is usually called “Obvious Rock” (sometimes we call it “Blob Rock”). This little wall is about 10′ tall, and there’s about 30′ of width; There’s an offset nearer that tree, so this little “wall” even has a small inside and outside corner to fiddle with. It’s absolutely covered in various mosses and lichens and… shhhhhh… someone seems to have been here many times with teeny tiny wire brushes to expose a myriad of little places for fingertips and toes.
This caught my eye on a bright sunny day, as we approach the cold of winter (here in the Northern Hemisphere.) Sure, the blue of the sky and the orange of the leaf is a nice found-composition. But what I really like is the implication of the leaf being captured by the already-dead whatever-that-plant-was. As always: questions, connections, and open loops to ponder; no clear conclusions though.
For several years I’ve been attending the Art of Retreat events in North America. Originally they were held in New York City, but the latest three were held outside of Seattle. I’ve been recording conversations for Art of Retreat’s own podcast over the years. If you’re interested in what goes on behind the scenes, I tried to unpack some of it over on a topic in the Podcaster Community, Field Recordings at Art of Retreat 2022.
I have a habit of trying to capture interesting photos from airplane windows. Often it’s solar or weather phenomenon, but on this trip out to Seattle I was surprised to see these forest fires. Fortunately, they weren’t very close to where the event was held, but “fire fog” was thing during much of the time I spent in Seattle and all of the time at the event.
Photos from the flight out to Seattle WA.
A few shots from the location where the event was held…
View from the bunk-house porch, and from the lake shore.
And one last random shot from a cool, mushroom–infused coffee spot in Seattle, Wundergrond Coffee.
This photo is both the calm after, and the calm before, the storm. I was recently in New York City for a long weekend. (Contrary to what you may have heard, it was not the End Times as far as I saw. Things were more expensive, yes. But otherwise it was the NYC I recall from my last visit.) This photo is from late at night, shortly after some thunderstorms had passed over. And it was the night before I did a bunch of volunteering to help with an event on a rooftop on the lower east side.
And quite often, I’m not using screens at all. My journal writing recently rolled-over into volume 18, and in recent years I’ve been copying my oath into the front of each new volume.
Sometimes I take photographs, but usually not many.
A few photos from Watkins Glen, NY.
I flipped over the way I think about taking photographs: I only take a photograph if I have a plan for doing something with it. When I took these, I was thinking that they would be good to share as a blog post—if you’re far away from Watkins Glen, you’d enjoy a bit of a virtual visit. I’ll also capture a photograph if I know someone would appreciate receiving it; at someone’s 90th birthday party, I corralled 50 people into a group photo—and then had it large-format printed, framed and delivered as a gift. …and I printed smaller copies for others, and one is framed and hanging in our house. I’ve set up multiple digital photo-frames, to which images are added by my emailing them to special addresses. The one in my sight has 500+ images that span my photography as well as selections from my father’s vast slide-film collection. There’s an enormous collection on my blog in the Photos category posts, and the best-of-the-best are on my featured photography page.
I have vast processes for everything related to my images. Custom software for managing them in archives, including automagic duplication and checksumming to protect against data degradation. (Hint: A backup of a corrupted image is also corrupted.) I have backups to the “cloud.” I have a recurring “maintenance” todo item that prompts me to go through the photos I’ve taken and move them through all my processes.
And I’m fully aware, that shortly after I die, this small eddy of organization where I’m pushing away entropy will be swept away. That’s precisely why I work so hard (although not actually that often) at doing something with the images.
Wherever you go, there you are. But I think Marcus Aurelius’s two-millenia-old version is better. The tranquility is to be found within.
What I like—if you ask me, which I know you didn’t—about going to the beach is the very fact that precious few of my normal behaviors are even possible. The photo above was taken just after sunrise, (that’s the Atlantic Ocean,) during a micro-getaway to a beach campsite. It was hot; cool enough to sleep though. It was vault toilets and cold showers in semi-enclosed stalls with no electricity, (I mean no lighting for the “bathrooms” and “showers”,) and there were plenty of biting bugs in the campsite and on the beach. Everything takes longer when camping; “bathing” and changing and preparing meals and even trying to do a little bit of morning mediation and reading. There’s nothing to do either. You can sit at the camp site or sit at the beach or go for a walk.
And all of that is exactly the point. Is exactly the thing I like about going to the beach. When I go there, there I am and there is nothing else.
About a month ago, I was lamenting the loss of some of my Movement mojo. After some soul-searching, we started with a simple change: Rather than waiting for movement to happen as a part of our day, we began asking a simple question, every day:
“What are we doing tomorrow?”
For fun, we set this chalkboard-wall up to encourage activity and to let us savor the decreasing number of days to American Rendezvous, a Parkour event held in Somerville, just across the Charles River from Boston.
These small “Skipper” butterflies aren’t particularly rare, but I don’t believe I’ve ever noticed them before this season. On the other hand, I do spend a lot of time working at the table—the end of which is in the photo. And this year, in the bed adjacent, Tracy planted two plants about which all pollinators are passionate. It’s an unending air show of Lepidoptera and Apoidea.
Sitting on the patio one morning, in the cool humidity and calm air of what was going to be a blazing-hot summer day, this single down feather drifted down. It skimmed along the tabletop and disappeared off the edge taunting me to chase it.
