A Breath of Fresh Air

Yesterday we took a ride up to the Dixie National Forest in Utah. It’s the first time since my trip to Anza Borrego that I’ve seen trees with real leaves, like, oaks and pines.  And my first time by living water since the creek at the canyon in Arizona at the beginning of fall. I…

Van Life Meets Pandemic Life

This life is about freedom, exploring, community and nature. Much about van life though is naturally self isolating, or at least involves very reduced social contact within small groups. Yes, we stopped game nights and yarn-spinning around the campfire, even though no one in our camp had been sick.  We stay a few feet apart…

River Run

The title may be a tad misleading… There is a river, but no one’s running 🤣I do ride my bike beside the Colorado, though. As our camping group breaks apart bit by bit, the pace slows considerably. As folks move on, more arrive. Sometimes we have visitors for a few hours and then they mosey…

Pack and Play

After almost two weeks of talking mainly to myself, plants, and inanimate objects, I need some socialization. Yes, an introvert just wrote that sentence. I too, am surprised. I’ve figured out that introversion is how I process the information I take in over time, but it doesn’t really define my personality type, now that my…

Life is hard

The wonderful thing about Google photos is that it sends you reminders of where you were x years ago and what you were doing. Well, sometimes it’s wonderful; other times, painful. Today it reminded me of where I was five years ago. I was camping, alone, down in Florida, under another full moon. I hiked…

Morning Pleasures

I’m nearing the end of twelve work free days, a luxury I’ve not had in over five years. But today I had to start easing back into my normal sleep/wake patterns for work on my East coast timeline. So I was up at 0300 Pacific time. Music kept me company for a while, checking email…

“I’m all alone, with no one beside me..”(Donkey in Shrek)

And so it goes! After traversing Arizona moving south and westward, I finally arrived at the RVing Nirvana known as Quartzsite, or “Q”, as one mountainside proclaims visually. I had seen a video or three on this place. Seemed cool enough. However, after having the freedom of truly boondocking, this is just a leetle different…

Wish upon a star

It’s funny sometimes, how things happen. I stood in the chilly darkness before work this morning straining to see a falling star. It was breezy, quiet and dark. Only the sound of the wind in the junipers, the rustle of grasses, and the trill of unseen insects kept me company. But no such luck. Tonight,…

Falling in love

Falling for a place in our great big country.

Defining preciousness and value

  So, I bought a campervan.  Nothing big, nothing fancy, nothing new. Just new to me. I want to approach this kind of like a fiddler crab, edging sideways towards a new hole in the sand; or maybe a hermit crab, checking a new shell for a better fit, always remembering that it is me…

“Pooh hasn’t much Brain but he never comes to any harm…”

The Unexamined Life is Not Worth Living A decade. One hundred and twenty months. Three thousand six hundred and fifty days. And so on.  The pain of missing has diminished, except on the days when it has not. Those days have at least become less and less frequent. Philosopher and Poet David Whyte says of…

Sacrifice?

What does that word really mean?  The technical meaning is to slaughter an animal, or to offer a person or possession to the Almighty.  Yet I have heard that word related to what I am about to embark upon; the taking on of a six-year-old boy to raise for a while, to help untangle a…

How to Impersonate a Calliope and other sickly fun

Ah yes, I bet you thought the topic would be  more romantic when I caught up on the blog, yes?  Actually, I’ve been so mentally busy that the title choices were difficult to narrow down, but since I’m coming off of a serious (for me) illness, this was that one which stuck. I should back track…

Is there life offline?

So what, you may ask, can one DO when there is no internet to absorb, delight, educate, aggravate and titillate? If you are a geeky person like me, you read. Yes, those book things that we house in places called libraries and line up in bookstores filled with the intoxicating aroma of, well, probably glue,…

It’s Raining Frogs

“Plop.” The sound came soft and clear from somewhere in the fading dusk. I looked around for what it might be and there, unmoving in the dark, was the shape of a frog. As I approached for a better look it shook off the fall and hopped away. It made me smile. Back to reading.…

Notes from an RV Park

It has been a stretch of interesting days.  I’m not certain how my life always seems to amble along like a comedy, but it does most of the time. It could be that I am just silly 🙂 I ran up against a wall this week that I’ve not encountered ever I don’t think, since…

The Intimacy of Moving

Just like going to the Doctor for a check up is not intimate when compared with the touch of one who knows you, neither is having professional movers wrangle your stuff from one place to another.  But to have people who know me trail their fingers through my things is something quite different for me.  It is…

Memorabilicus – or The Umbilicus of Memory Found in Objects

Catchy and academic-sounding title eh? My brain works weirdly in sleep deprivation mode. I also love to make up words that have meaning probably only to me. Last night was a late night (morning) working as the next in line is out for medical assistance for his partner. That left me in charge of herding…

Thoughts from the week

I feel like I’ve joined the ‘writer’s abstinence club’ of sorts lately. I think of great things to write, but I’m busily doing something else, and then I have tasks to tackle or familial bonds to reinforce with listening, advice, interventions or the like, and a dog to walk and a job, and well, then…

Minimalism, life and hiking

When you begin to consider carrying all that you need on your back for a few months, the contents of your home begin to loom in the mind as well. The idea of ‘comfort’, ‘luxury’ or ‘morale’ items becomes a topic of thought. We really don’t think about these things day to day, just like…

Brrrrrrrrrraving the elements (or how to have everyone call you crazy)

So I am on site in the midst of the great Polar Vortex caper (hmmm, didn’t I mention flailing in the vortex a few posts ago…prescient of me eh?) I like to camp.  A lot. So in order to give the new widow some personal space I brought my camping gear since there is acreage…

Pampering, planning and the musical backdrop

Going to a salon is not really about vanity so much.  It is about going some place where someone takes care of you. I was reminded of this yesterday, as someone brought me coffee, I read magazines I normally do not see and enjoy human touch while having my hair washed. I don’t go any…

Minimalist

The Daily Post popped into my Inbox tonight, for minimalist photos.  This one immediately sprung to mind.

Stark. Past prime. Depth. Beauty.

In bloom, the Zinnia is cheerful, multi-layered, attention grabbing.  But even here, there is a shadow of its former life.

Beauty surrounds us, but usually we need to be walking in a garden to know it.~Rumi

Shabbat shalom.

~SE

Picking straws

Delicious Fall has fallen upon us for a brief spell and I am relishing it! Doors and sliders thrown open, fans positioned to bring all of that fresh, low humidity air in has really boosted my spirits. It makes working out an invigorating thing rather than a flirtation with heat stroke and misery.  I wrote…

Flailing in the Vortex and carrying my Rubber Ducky!

Okay, so there isn’t really a vortex in my life, but there are times as I stand beside my life and look at it that I could swear I can feel the sucking sounds at my feet and hear the power of the strength of the pull away from those things I desire to accomplish or…

Leave-taking and beauty in the wilds

Leave-taking is always bittersweet when it is a long-time friend who is often more family than actual family. I’ve spent a lovely nine days in the Midwest in marvelous company, been fed delicious food, gone out and about, and now am sitting in the airport waiting to return home via Chicago. The trip in was…

10.1.14 Wordless Wednesday – Can you find nature’s photobomber :)

Hint: Click to full-size. “In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.” — John Muir ~SE

Zany for Zinnias!

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9.24.14 Wordless Wednesday “A Moment in the Garden”

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9.17.14 Wordless Wednesday – The Overlooked Beauty of ‘Weeds’

A weed is but an unloved flower. ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox ~SE

9.10.14 Wordless Wednesday – Perspective

9.3.14 Wordless Wednesday – Alien Blues

8.27.14 Wordless Wednesday – Memories

   

Collage of the Mind

Quoting Berry from Word and Flesh: “The religion and the environmentalism of the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something that they do not really want to destroy. We all live by robbing nature, but our standard of living demands that the robbery shall…

8.20.14 Wordless Wednesday Hidden Stars After Rain

~SE

8.13.14 Wordless Wednesday – The Itsy Bitsy Spider

8.6.14 Wordless Wednesday Bee Wild

Be Rainwashed

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7.30.14 Wordless Wednesday – Two Bee or Not Two Bee

Nikon D100 – Garrett Lake, NW TN

7.27.14 Sunday Snippets

Just living is not enough… one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower. ~ Hans Christian Anderson Things on my writing mind… 1. Good gawd, could anyone come up with more things that women are ‘supposed’ to be? Badass. Baker. Power Executive. Mom. Construction supervisor. Submissive wife. Activist. Feminist. I get tired reading about…

7.23.14 Wordless Wednesday

Nikon D100 – Alley – 7.2014

~SE

7.16.14 Wordless Wednesday

~SE (who occasionally likes bandwagons…)

Mid Week Musings – Reader Thank You

I normally don’t post on Wednesdays, because it’s the most hectic work day of my week. But in a conversation with another blogger, a thought hit me today about all of you, my readers. Many of you are new; in fact, more than half of you, within the last six weeks. You don’t really know…

Sunday Snippets 6.28.14

I’m here cooling off after running around snapping shots in the humid heat for this week’s photo challenge over at my most recent newborn activity, my photo-focus blog: My Digital Eye Queue  I’ll still include shots that add value here in my writing, but some folks don’t want to slog through my verbosity, they just want…

Dating at past the half-century mark

Today I am imitating a sage, so, bear with me. Since I have removed myself from the dating world (not that I was ever really in it since widowhood), I find it is easier to think about.  It is akin to trying to think about grocery shopping while eating I suppose. It has come to…

On being read

Before I consciously decided to follow my dream of writing publicly as a concrete thing, I wrote primarily for me.  I wrote, as I mentioned to a friend recently, “… just to express, to emote, to get feelings out of me since I no longer had anyone even to listen to me, my dreams, my fears.…

The Birthday Hike – Finale

Can you tell I’m stringing this along just have another excuse to take these memories  out and immerse in them again 🙂  I hope you don’t mind humoring me in it. It is difficult to tear myself away from the old homestead and all of its treasures and imaginings. But I hear the wild turkeys…

Bits and bobs of thought, oh, and lizard sex photos

I’m rambling today, with thoughts flowing in and out of my mind as I sit in the briefly temperate morning out of the sun, watching the comings and goings of wildlife (used broadly) on the patio of the micro-haus.  Dividing the thoughts up into bits and bobs – penny for your thoughts? From the Observatory…

Deux Estrangers Familiers – a poem that fell out upon awakening

Poetry for me is not something that I can force.  It rushes out, tethered by a phrase or imagery in the moment and must be grasped and quickly captured before its elusiveness causes a slip through the fingers.     Deux Estrangers Familiers   I want to redolently float through your inner landscape, Collecting an…

The Birthday Hike – Part 2

The pace and intensity of work lately has left me primed more than usual for pulling out the memories of this year’s earlier camping trip.  It isn’t that I mind working (although independent wealth would be cool too, lol!).  It is just that often it seems that there is nothing really productive about my days…