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See the mats of clematis running across the trees like mangled telephone wires; notice the dry dirt beneath the ivy, how gray it looks, how it is sickly compared to the rich, dark mountain soil that is gossamered with those little flecks from the edges of fir cones, and peppered with roots of things,…
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Yesterday was the winter solstice. Today, it feels like the sun didn’t even rise. There’s the residue of it, the low-seeped daylight behind the clouds, but there’s no warmth; no casting of light upon the pavement. Just a gray sky the color of wet stones. We live in the Pacific Northwest, but I find…
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In the night there is a certain silence; a vacant hum under which everything is neatly muffled, all the sounds buried low amongst the mushrooms and the pill bugs and the white rot that leaks from decaying branches. And then, rising from the stillness comes the owl’s great stutter. The sound hangs there, an…
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The water pulls in all directions, folding and unfolding, layered with white foam that spreads like spider-webs. It flickers against the cedar trees, painting dappled sunlight over their trunks, bathing them in the same milky quality as light threaded through fog. And on the shore there are fine-haired stalks of cow parsnip, and spiraled…
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The wind folds through the grass, turning it over, sculpting it, and, if you listen closely, you can hear the grass as it bends. In the distance there is the ever-present hum of the river, a muffled noise pressing in on you from somewhere far off, somewhere beyond the crest of the hill, and…
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These are the scatterings of the wind—hemlock needles, and fallen branches, and hive-shaped cones, all blanketed in snow. Our steps are strange and lumbering, and, above us, the sky is heavy. It’s rain—the kind of rain that seeps out from tree branches and hillsides, the kind of rain that is somehow, in itself, green.…
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The mountain is here. It hides in the silhouette of the morning sun, its gray rock softened to the color of the moon, and it watches me as I walk the streamside plains. This is a place of blue rapids tossing beneath fir branches, and dense, dark clouds gathered like flocks of starlings. Today…
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You have been here since before the light. Back then, the air tasted like brine, and smoke from village fires. There was no petroleum haze; no asphalt riverbeds. You were far from the ocean, but you knew it was there, just beyond the hill, sparkling with bioluminescence each night. You liked to think of…
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We walked along a stream, the grasses short, almost silver, interspersed with red-leafed huckleberry and the tall, puffed heads of pasque flowers. Beyond the rush of the stream there was the drone of insects–bees, or mosquitos, somewhere far-off but omnipresent, in our chests like the thump of a bass. Suddenly the ground began to…
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I could feel the cold moving up through the ground, winding blindly through the soil, through the dark narrows, the tree roots, the embedded ant tracks; it was the cold of a tired and sleeping earth, just there, beneath my feet. The night was quiet–no birds trilling, no cars in the distance, just the…