Step from sunlight into shade on a summer day, and your body knows the difference before your mind can name it. The air cools. Colors mute. Edges soften. You breathe more deeply. Shade feels so cool—but how much cooler is it, really? On a hot, dry day, it can be 15 to...
People around me often speak, but I don’t hear them—or at least not clearly. It’s not that I’m deaf. It’s that I’m elsewhere. My mind loops its own soundtrack—unfinished to-do lists, worries I forgot to shelve, or conversations I’m still having with someone who isn’t...
In the American West, water is never just water. It is inheritance, leverage, and law. It has been bought, sold, diverted, fought over, and rationed. “Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you,” Wendell Berry once wrote. In the West, that’s...
If you go north long enough, eventually you’ll go south. But if you go west forever, you’ll never go east. That simple geographic truth has stuck with me—and it turns out, it’s a pretty good guide for how we move through life. Some paths take us somewhere new. Others...
Wouldn’t it have been something—to have had an empathetic companion at every milestone? Not someone to fix it or tell us what to do, but someone attuned. A quiet witness with enough steadiness to say, “This is hard. You’re doing better than you think.” From our first...
One afternoon not long ago, I stood beside a pond. The light was soft, and the water mostly still—except for two ducks gliding toward each other. Unaware of the another, they just followed their own meandering paths until something changed. One veered slightly—maybe...
