Fiery planet Mars turns up the heat on Leo’s roar, intensifying the drama. Fiery planet Mars turns up the heat on Leo’s roar, intensifying the drama. Whoa, can you feel the shift? With the Venus and Mercury retrogrades in our rearview mirrors along with the summer eclipses, we finally catch a break! Leo season is here and as the Sun embraces its home sign-making this a bright, passionate time of year, we can bravely march toward our goals. Outgoing and …
Blog Posts
Horse Butte is a small red cinder cone a mile from my house. There is a trailhead there, otherwise it would just be another one of dozens (hundreds?) of buttes that pop up from the ground for miles to the south and east of the Cascade Mountains in Central Oregon. It is topped with a scraggly ponderosa on the south and a row of healthier trees, mostly junipers, to the north. When I am out on the trails near my …
I live in a bubble at the edge of the forest, but that bubble still exists on earth and I am not able to write anything lately that doesn’t feel beside the point. But I do think it is appropriate to say a word of thanks to those people that have shown graciousness and generosity in the spring of 2020. A season when people went from months of isolation and fear of an invisible threat to rage and collective action …
I rarely run with anyone other than my dog, Mack. When I am getting dressed to run he doesn’t wait by the door. He sticks with me as I brush my teeth, pull on a jacket, get a drink of water, up the stairs and back down, until he is out the door, assured of going with me. He bursts to the edge of the porch and surveys the situation in the driveway and yard, alert to the smells in …
Spring in Central Oregon is untamed, unfriendly, and moody. Not just wild but downright grumpy. Like a cranky old man being woken from a too-short sleep, his dinner burning, his chickens being bullied by coyotes, neighbor cats pooping in his garden, and his truck with two flat tires. Still, he takes the time to walk to the fence line and ask how you are*. It snows even when it is sunny. Squalls are on and off for days. The wind …
With strokes of luck and intuition, RK and I ended up in the perfect place. We can observe the Milky Way in the night sky with owls and coyotes as the soundtrack. The forest is just down the street, where we know the trails so well we have even named some of the rocks. The neighbors aren’t always perfect, there are faraway gunshots heard from the buttes, but this is the wabi-sabi in our lives — something to notice and …
Recently, on a morning run, I used a stick to lift a dead kangaroo rat off the trail. The white belly fur was vivid in the dawn, long back legs outstretched, tail curled into a U, the body stiff and frozen. Later, at home, I lay on my back stretching and saw a small dark moth on the ceiling. As I watched, it released its grip and fell to the floor, much faster than a creature with wings should fall. …
Years ago, when I surfed, I was seduced by an empty ocean and paddled out to surf on water that was rowdy, powerful, and dangerous. …
We found Emma in a circus tent filled with border collies and “lab mixes” at a pet adoption event 12 years ago. While dozens of dogs barked, smiled, wagged, and encouraged us to pick them, she was curled up into a spotted brown ball in some wood chips, very much not into the situation. When she looked up at us with eyes that were a mix of white, blue, and brown (we soon learned that catahoulas commonly have such eyes …
Aside from the abundant wax current blooms, which count as flowers, of course, but as tiny and pale pink as they are, do not satisfy the flower itch, the first wildflower that I spotted this year was a scrappy little white thing alone in the dirt. I loved it! And was secretly worried that someone was going to tell me it was invasive, not native, not a wildflower at all. I did a little research and feel safe in my …
There are things to fear at the edge of the forest. A man on the road told RK to carry a pistol on dog walks in case of coyotes, bobcats, and cougars. A woman screamed when Mack startled her on the trail, she said she thought he was a bear. And, I’ve been told, you have to watch out for unsavory characters. Our neighbors, usually reticent at best, have been all a-buzz about a recent cougar sighting just down the …
The first time I ran on my current backyard trail was April 2017. RK and I went to central Oregon hoping to mountain bike and instead we went running in sideways rain/sleet/snow. There are two loops, stacked. Or you might visualize it as a big loop bisected into a small loop and a medium-sized loop. I guesstimated the small loop was maybe 5 miles and convinced RK it would be great! Back then RK had one bum knee and wasn’t …
Most of us remember connect-the-dot puzzles, moving a pencil around a piece of partially printed newsprint from numbered dot to numbered dot until a composition is revealed. I guess this is a way of teaching kids how to count because as we all know, in real life dots can be connected any which way and the connection does not always reveal anything sensical. My friend Lisa visited us in Central Oregon recently and after painting a mural so pretty it …