Thirty million years ago,
a number I can say but cannot
comprehend, the mountains
where we hiked today
were covered in a deep layer
of volcanic ash which somehow
formed the spire of Lizard Head Peak.
I am constantly stunned by this world
that makes and remakes itself
out of the same matter.
How complicated, yet how simple:
we all belong to each other—
a thought that, for a time,
made me feel like a crumbling mountain
walking among crumbling mountains,
like a dry stream bed walking
along the dry stream bed,
like a clover gone to seed
walking amongst fields
of dry, papery clover petals,
every step a reunion.
Posts Tagged ‘mountains’
Reunion
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belonging, Colorado, geology, hiking, Lizard Head, mountains on August 1, 2026| 2 Comments »
Eco-Grief
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged eco-grief, grief, hiking, mountains on July 17, 2026| 4 Comments »
My favorite alpine skinny dipping hole
a dry rock bed, an inverted monument
to drought—
as if I needed one more reminder
of how fragile it is, this world,
how parched our hearts
can become.
On the long hike home
I swim in the seriousness
of what is not here,
remember how it felt to slip
into the snowmelt,
how my whole being shivered in elation,
how the earth itself was so alive.
Something Missing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged being held, blessing, mountains, nature on July 9, 2026| 1 Comment »
We wandered through green gentians higher than
our heads. Vast fields of larkspur, monkshood, paintbrush.
Sour scent of hemlock, earthy scent
of osha. Stones upturned by bears in search
of grubs. A hundred times we gasped, enraptured
by the aspen’s greens. And every step,
a blessing. Every step a chance to praise.
Some days we can’t remember what it is
we wish we could forget, rare days when ache
can’t find us, days when we wade deeper in
to splendor, oh the largess of such days
when we know well the frailty of life
but feeling held, forget our helplessness.
Inner Landscape
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Colorado, inner landscape, mountains, paintbrush, wildflower on July 31, 2025| 2 Comments »
There is inside me a field of pink paintbrush,
lush and unbounded—a riotous blush
no one has planted. It’s rooted and spread
in the places where I am most open.
Nodding pink. Waving pink.
Glorious flourishing stems of pink.
Even when I’m walking concourse T. Even
when I’m at the bank drive through.
Even when I’m waiting at the stoplight.
Even when I’m dull, still I am filled
with lavish meadows of dusky pink,
mounds and mounds of soft dusky pink,
great mountainous expanses of deepening,
opening, surprising pink, the kind of pink
that becomes more pink the longer you look.
It survives even the harshest winters,
always returning with wild and unmanaged
beauty. No one tends it, and yet it thrives.
Not that I deserve it. It’s a damn wonder, really,
a meadow of pink so generous, so vast
I’ll never stop finding new paths.
What’s Really at Stake
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Cascade Mountains, mountains, nature, pine, scent, trees on February 22, 2025| 2 Comments »
I like to live in the scent of pine
on a thaw-some winter morning,
viscous tendrils of tree perfume
thick in the air, scent of evergreen,
yes, but a warmer scent, too,
like honey, like vanilla, like must.
I like the way the scent lives in me
as I move through the tussocks
of snow. I like pulling the tree-sweet air
into my lungs, like thinking of how
even now I, too, am becoming
more tree, as if my shadow side, too,
might soon grow moss. As if I, too,
might begin to grow roots right here
in the moment. As if I, too, might remember
how surely I depend on this earth,
how surely it depends on me.
While Hiking on Lizard Head Pass
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bird, grief, healing, hermit thrush, hiking, mountains, music, natural world, song 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.
Wilding
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cold, Corinne Platt, mountains, presence, swimming on August 5, 2023| 2 Comments »
for Corinne
It is always near-freezing,
this high alpine lake where
we slide into oddly blue water,
and bare strangled sounds
tear from our throats
as if our own wildness
is shredding through
manicured versions of self.
I crave it, this scraping away
of everything that isn’t
limb-thrash and lung-gasp
and skin-scream and heart-bang
and wild uncontrollable breathing,
crave the tingling after,
the feral laughter, the way
the world slips more deeply into us
when we dare to slip
more deeply into the world.
Somewhere You Feel Free
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aster, belonging, hiking, mountains, widlflowers 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.
On Red Mountain Pass
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged friendship, mountains, path on June 21, 2020| Leave a Comment »
for C, A, A, A and J
I want to share with you a trail with no map
and the clean scent of spruce and a clear Colorado sky.
I want to spend an afternoon above tree line
in a field of corn lilies and alpine buttercups
the pica chirping brightly in the rockfall.
Let’s not find the lake we were looking for.
Let’s stop where our feet say stop.
I want to share a leap and a shimmy,
a chocolate cookie, the mighty salt of love.
I want to slide down snowfields on our raincoats,
to find more paths to take another day,
to wade through the cold rush of change.
I want to take a bolt cutter to any door
that won’t let us in, to let the ears of my heart
attune to your words, to lose our hats to the wind
and find them again. And as the night
fills the room, I want to sing as the guitar
of friendship finds a new tune. I want to hear it
play on long after the day has gone.
With Any Luck
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged invitation, mountains, poem, poetry on June 17, 2016| 1 Comment »
Meet me in summer
when the mountains
are softened by fields
of blue lupine
and the creeks run clear
with the memory of snow.
With any luck,
we’ll get lost until
we, too, begin to bloom,
until whatever is cold in us
melts and races away
with a bright and bubbling laugh.
There are days we forget
how to make a fist,
how to speak any language
but praise. Meet me
in summer when the old
high trails are open—
what else might we find
behind the crumbling
mines—some share
of ourselves we’ve yet
to have met—something
so spacious we never
dreamt it would fit
inside our skin.
With any luck,
it will follow us home.