Category: Nature, Make Me Your Humble Servant

  • Sea-green helmets

    Telluride Daily Planet, Friday, September 6, 2019   By far, the two most important and far-reaching things we did this summer were tiny in the enormous scheme of it all: We spent $8 and got a hummingbird feeder, like millions of other people before us; and we borrowed “Devotions” by the poet Mary Oliver from…

  • Purple stain

    Telluride Daily Planet, Friday, August 2, 2019   Anybody from the northwest who likes a little sour in their fruits or is a sucker for anything that ends in “berry,” (thimbleberry, salmonberry, huckleberry, Marionberry and cloudberry, among others on a long list) will vouch for the blackberry’s true standing in the ranks. For one thing,…

  • Flash tale of a snowshoe hare

    Flash tale of a snowshoe hare

    Telluride Daily Planet, Friday, February 1, 2019   It’s late at night and we are driving down Dallas Divide, down a ribbon of highway into the valley, as we’ve all done a hundred times before, staring through the windows, alert for creatures. This is the place that feels most like a pure meditative state to those…

  • Aspenglow Wormhole

    Telluride Daily Planet, Friday, October 5, 2018   I arrived in Telluride in late August 1984 during a summer that saw more than 45 days straight of afternoon thunderstorms. Looking out the eastern bunkroom window at the Oak Street Inn (a youth hostel at the time, and the reason I drove into town in the first place),…

  • Ripespans

    Telluride Daily Planet, Sunday, July 24, 2016 A half pint of raspberries sits on the kitchen counter. These are the tiny variety, handpicked by someone who cares a lot, maybe someone deep in blissful connection to nature as the midsummer sun beats down, a heat interrupted only by the occasional thunderhead lumbering across the sky, laying…

  • How to build a house (part 1)

    Telluride Daily Planet, Sunday, July 10, 2016 At eight years of age, my best friend is a little girl named Minnie who lives not too far from our house on the shores of Lake Washington, in Seattle, a friend with whom I spend the majority of my days, outside, making stuff up. We make up a…