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Posts Tagged ‘hiking’

Why I Should Hike Every Day No Matter What

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on July 21, 2024| 10 Comments »


 
 
I didn’t know how trapped I was
in my own busyness until,
walking past a quiet lake
and up through a lush spruce forest
I felt how with each step toward tree line
more calendar squares disappeared
and all my lists dissolved until
I was nowhere but wading
through waist-high bluebells
with corn lilies rising above my head.
How still my mind was then, still,
as I traversed creeks and clambered
over fallen trees. Still as I climbed
to the place where the clear water
streams down gray cliffs and yellow
monkey flower flourishes on the banks.
I was bathed with gratefulness.
Is it true that to know this freedom
once is to be able to carry it
like a touchstone in my body?
Will the larkspur have any dominion
tomorrow while I’m trapped in a deadline?
Will the scent of summer’s last wild roses
return when I’m scrambling
for just ten more minutes?
Oh freedom, I long to contain you.
That thought makes me laugh.
Yet it’s true. I long to find myself
mid-hustle still linked to the gurgling stream,
its waters so cold I can’t help but gasp.

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While Hiking on Lizard Head Pass

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 23, 2024| 15 Comments »


 
I forgot, today, to be sad.
Perhaps, more truly,
the song of the hermit thrush
ringing through the alpine meadow
gathered me into its echoing
and lifted me out of myself
and landed me fully in the field
where the green corn lilies
reached up to my waist.
While listening to the thrush,
I forgot how things fall apart,
held as I was by the long
whistled song, haunting and rich,
flute-like and clear as it pealed
through the spruce, honest
as any church bell, urgent
as a gong, holy as a woman
set free by a song.

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Woodsy

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 18, 2024| 8 Comments »

somewhere above Telluride, Colorado


If you close your eyes and just breathe in,
then it’s sixteen years ago and we’re off the trail
roaming through damp autumn woods.
The duff is soft with needles, moss,
and the air is scented with resinous spruce—
fresh and woodsy, tangy, bright.
Sun filters into the evergreen glade
to kiss the clearing with light. Remember, love?
Whatever dreams we brought in with us,
they, too, came to smell of earth, forest,
musk and shade. The mountains
had their way with us that day.
We said little, but by the time we left,
shadow-drunk and gloriously map-less,
everything had changed.  

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Stopped

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on September 16, 2023| 8 Comments »



 
 
We walked for hours through cliff bands,
past old mines with roofs collapsed.
We sat on a huge flat rock in the middle
of a high alpine cirque rung with green.
 
The rosehips were fat and softened by frost,
and their skins tasted sweet and bright.
There was snow on the trail. There was gold
in the trees. The sky deepened bluer all day.
 
And there was one white seed that rode the wind.
I watched it rise and watched it fall again.
Somehow it feels essential to explain
that for that moment, it was everything—

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One Fast Track

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on August 5, 2023| 6 Comments »

glissading down scree fields
each step forward is five steps—
wishing this for your heart

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For Four Hours

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on July 3, 2023| 2 Comments »

Not that I was lost
as I climbed through
the rocks and meadowrue,
I just didn’t know
where I was going,
but every step felt
like a small arrival
and no one step
felt like a place to rest;
the trail was sometimes
too faint to trust
and my legs were tired
and dusty and I was
sweaty and sticky,
while on my face,
I could feel it,
the truest smile
opened like sky
above the horizon
as I moved higher
through each switchback,
the town below
smaller and smaller,
then gone.
 

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Untamed

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on August 21, 2022| 4 Comments »



We measure the afternoon in wild raspberries,
pulling to our mouths the abundant ripe fruits
like the feral beings we are.

Fingers stained red and lips stained red
and the moments stained red as love.
If it is not smart to speak of love,

then let me not be smart.
Let me speak of love that flourishes
like wild raspberries in a rainy summer.

Let me live into love as undomesticated
as these brambles that line the creeks.
Let me remember today

by the sweet and tart taste of wild berries,
how softly they fell into our palms.
Let me be eager for love

as the look on my daughter’s face
when she dragged me by the hand
back to the raspberry patch saying more, more.

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Burst

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on August 3, 2021| 6 Comments »




So full of sugar,
the ripe plums
on the counter
begin to split
their skin—a sign
they’re beginning
the journey
to wine.

Sometimes,
like today,
hiking through
spruce forests and
wildflower meadows,
past beaver ponds
and through
clearings of chanterelles,
I, too, feel as if
I could split—
so filled with
the sweetness
of life I almost
explode,
tipsier by the moment
broken open
by joy.

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Somewhere You Feel Free

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on July 26, 2021| Leave a Comment »


You belong among the wildflowers.
            —Tom Petty, “Wildflowers”


Standing alone
in a high and steep meadow
surrounded by a million million
pale purple asters,
a person might be,
at least for a moment,
a many petaled thing,
might know the blue sky
in a new blue way;
might want to visit the self
as curious as a bee
stepping into the golden center
of things. What luck
to climb into beauty,
to stumble into
the self greater than the self,
to forget for a moment that worry,
that burden, that loss,
and simply purple, to wildly
purple, to purple with abandon,
to purple without thought,
to humbly purple,
to purple.



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Porphyry Basin

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on June 27, 2021| 2 Comments »

so oh slippery flesh song
of skinny oh dipping
into oh icy clear
of blue oh in the high
alpine lake, oh and oh
how the shiver oh
breath oh is oh
such wild thrill in the oh
can you oh even dream
of how good it is oh
to be oh just a few
more oh seconds
held by oh liquid snow
so oh yes so only
right oh here
and so oh yes so very
oh nakedly
yes oh alive

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