The other day, I drove up the canyon to “check if it’s still there,” or so I told my daughter on the phone as I accelerated.

I didn’t have a question in mind as I drove. There’s always something waiting at home—unfinished work, loose worries—and lately there’s even the broader concern of what the winter hasn’t delivered up that way. But none of that explained the drive. It happened almost without forethought or consent.

“He does this daily,” my wife might say.

That possibility hadn’t crossed my mind until I reached the end of my favorite side canyon and turned around.

That turn was familiar. Too familiar.

I didn’t linger. I didn’t get out of the car. I simply pointed the hood back toward home and headed down-canyon, the way I have so many times before. And that’s when it surfaced—not as an accusation, just as a noticing.

I come here a lot.

I first learned to read the clock in abouts.

Half past. Quarter till. Top of the hour. About nine o’clock.

Before atomic time and the internet, even the first digital watches got ahead of or trailed exact time. You adjusted them by feel. A minute fast. A little slow. The clock wasn’t wrong; it was close enough. Time was something you read, not something you obeyed.

It’s harder now for many people to know what the big and little hands on a clock are trying to say. Exactness has become the way we tell time.

Nature, meanwhile, never made that switch.

Seasons arrive early or late. Storms hesitate, double back, or come all at once. Rivers don’t keep appointments. Even light bends, scatters, and arrives with variation. The natural world works in ranges and thresholds—not because it is careless, but because it is alive.

So are we.

A few weeks ago, I was with my family up the canyon, wandering along a shallow creek. Jack had already tried to jump the creek three times before we arrived. His boots were soaked, pants dripping halfway up his waist. The water was cold—mountain-runoff cold. But he wasn’t bothered. He was delighted. He kept talking about the third jump, how close he’d been, how next time he knew he’d make it.

The discomfort didn’t register; the possibility did.

Watching him, something in me stirred—not envy, but recognition. I remember what that felt like.

It made me think about what it means to play—not the structured kind, not hobbies or recreation, but the unfiltered movement and curiosity kids access without hesitation. I see it every time I’m around anyone under twenty. They move freely, as if their bodies and the world are still in active conversation. Their prefrontal cortex is still developing, dopamine still hits like rocket fuel, and risk exists mostly as a concept—not a barrier. They live one step from a flow state.

I had just flipped a U-turn at the top of South Fork Canyon and started heading back down when I saw it—first only a lazy V of a large, dark bird gliding above the road. Its slow, effortless steadiness convinced me it was a raptor. I watched it, curious, until it banked. That’s when the light caught its tail: a bright white flare against the darker mountain slope.

My heart lifted. My foot eased off the gas.

“Look at its tail lights,” my wife said—her perfect name for that bright white patch announcing exactly what we were seeing before the head ever came into view.

It rose and settled on the top of a tall spruce—a bald eagle perched like a sentry where we’d least expected it. It sat for a long moment, fully revealed: white hood, yellow beak, dark body, white tail, yellow talons. No hurry. No fear. Just quiet sovereignty.

Then it launched.

Trees don’t grow from the ground—they grow from the air.

Here’s how: leaves pull in carbon dioxide, and sunlight breaks the molecule apart, sending the oxygen back into the sky while keeping the carbon.

Step by step, the tree stitches that carbon into sugars, then into cellulose and wood. It’s a slow, steady assembly line powered entirely by light—sunlight turning into substance.

And it raises a curious question: which came first—the carbon dioxide or the leaf? The leaf can’t exist without carbon, yet the carbon doesn’t become anything without the leaf. Life seems to answer by moving in circles, not lines—a continual exchange, each step borrowing from the one before.

Someone recently gifted me this perspective. I was struck—no, dumbstruck—with one more example of Nature’s full-circle nature. Pun intended.