On the Day You Were Born...

I wish you could have seen your mother when I arrived at the visitor center. She was wearing her park service uniform with an olive green cardigan buttoned low and tight across her swollen belly. She smiled as I walked up to hug her and I saw the excitement in her eyes. She had started feeling mild contractions just a little while before I arrived, but she wasn’t yet convinced that you were on your way.

We took our lunch out to a picnic table in the sunshine and enjoyed the unusual December warmth. A hermit thrush hopped through the underbrush near the edge of the steep slope that dropped down to the Kaweah River. Your mom lamented the fact that they only sang their beautiful song during the springtime in the forests higher up the mountain. The small contractions continued as we talked and laughed under the bright blue sky.

I ended up driving your mom home early from work, as the contractions become stronger and more frequent with each passing hour. We walked into an empty house and I admit that I felt a little scared of what was to come, but your mom was all strength and confidence. She assured me we had many hours still ahead of us and that your dad would be there soon.

One by one they all arrived. First came your mom and dad’s curious friend from down the street, whom your dad had just called with the news. She was a neonatal nurse and a mother of three, and we were grateful for her guidance. Shortly after, your dad rushed through the door from his job at the hospital and seamlessly transitioned into making preparations for your delivery. Then your grandparents and your little brother stopped by to cheer on your mom through the first part of her labor. The only person yet to arrive was the midwife and it was quickly becoming clear that she might not make it in time.

Ten minutes became five and then two as the frequency of the contractions increased and still no midwife. We sent your brother and grandparents on their way and brought your mom out into the living room to lie down on the bed we had prepared. There was no longer time for worry or apprehension. We put all our energy toward becoming a team, each assuming the role for which we hoped we were most qualified. Your dad and family friend took over the responsibilities of the midwife, which left me to comfort and support your mom.

As she entered the depths of her labor, she began calling out the sound that would carry her through to the end. "Hass, hass, hass," she repeated with changing volume and intensity as the contractions built and subsided. She gripped my hand and squeezed down tight, letting her other arm wave up and over her head in an expanding motion as she focused on allowing her body to do what it needed to do. During the short breaks between contractions, I gave her small sips of water and marveled at the fact that she was the one reassuring us throughout this process.

Your dad was so strong. He held fast to his training as a critical care nurse even as he choked back excited tears the first time he saw the top of your head. The midwife provided instructions over the phone, telling your mom that it was time to put all her effort into pushing and so she gripped both my hands tight and we pulled against each other as she gritted her teeth and pushed. Once, twice, three and four times. With each contraction a little more of your head became visible, until finally you emerged into the waiting arms of your overjoyed dad. Within a few seconds you turned bright pink and let out a strong, healthy cry. We sighed with relief as we let out shouts of joy. Your dad placed you on your mom’s chest and we covered you up with towels warm from the dryer and suddenly there were five people in the room.

Every moment that came after was filled with quiet joy. Your dad dimmed the lights and put on some classical music. Your mom cuddled with you as you nursed. The midwife finally arrived with little fanfare and assured us that all was well. We helped you and your mom into the bedroom and straightened up the living room, so that by the time your grandparents and big brother arrived you were swaddled in a blanket and both resting peacefully on the bed. While they visited with you, I made your mom scrambled eggs and toast and standing there at the stove I could not believe that such arduous and life changing circumstances could lead to this moment, which felt so utterly and completely normal. As if you had been here all along and the past few hours were only a dream.

We all took our turn that evening holding you and fawning over your tiny fingernails and pouting lips, each time returning you to your mom’s waiting arms. From across the bedroom I caught a glimpse of your parents both peering over the blanket at you as you slept. They looked at each other and exchanged a million unspoken words about all that had transpired earlier that evening and all that was still to come in the years ahead. She gave him a tired, contented smile as she nestled you into the crook of her arm and then closed her eyes to rest.

A Year in Photographs

JANUARY brought an opportunity to share the winter beauty of Yosemite Valley with my whole family...

FEBRUARY provided moments to appreciate the coziness of a warm house on a cold day...

MARCH saw some much needed rain and a profusion of flowers...

APRIL was full of visits with family and friends in both Yosemite and Indiana...

MAY allowed time to reflect on the past and ponder my path into the future...

JUNE foreshadowed the forest fires and home repair projects that would persist throughout our summer and fall...

JULY offered an escape from the intense California heat to the cool shores of Lake Superior and a chance to hang out with my sister and nephew in Minnesota...

AUGUST afforded us a break from home renovating to explore the Monterey coast and Sierra Nevada high country...

SEPTEMBER was full of fun times with good friends in the Tetons and Oakland...

OCTOBER was a challenging time of transition and loss for loved ones back home in Indiana...

NOVEMBER made me grateful for unexpected moments of beauty and relaxing family vacations...

And DECEMBER has been filled with winter wonders...

Happy holidays to all and best wishes for the coming new year!

Sunrise Over Sanibel Island

I opened my eyes in the dark bedroom and noticed a trace of morning light reflecting off the walls. Quietly I slipped downstairs to the living room where out the window I saw dark grey cirrus clouds streaked across the eastern sky, their undersides tinted a deep raspberry pink. I ran back upstairs to throw on a sweater and grab my camera, and then headed out the back door and down to the boardwalk with high hopes for a colorful sunrise.

A fresh green scent mixed with the salty air as I walked along the trail through the dimly lit stands of sea grape and oat grass toward the ocean. Osprey in flight called to each other from the tops of the tall pines. I stepped beyond the shrubs and onto the soft, silvery sand. The tide was low, exposing a vast expanse of beach fringed along the shoreline with shallow pools of water. A glowing band of coral light across the eastern horizon cast a subtle glow all around.

Waves crested lazily onto the beach and spilled into the shallow pools, creating small ripples that traveled across the water. The rebounding ripples interfered with oncoming waves, exchanging energy with each other and filling the surface with a geometric dance of infinite troughs and crests. Out beyond the pools, sea-going birds alternately plummeted toward the ocean and soared across the sky while fishing for their breakfast.

All at once, the coral pink color of morning began to seep from the horizon onto the clouds above, except for where a distant thunderhead cast two conspicuous streaks of gray shadow. A spectacle of iridescent light began to fill the sky as the long rays of morning sun stretched across the Earth's curved surface.

With the increasing amount of daylight, I began to notice ripples of sand at the bottom of the pools which mimicked the movement of the water that formed them. Some of the sand ripples broke the water's surface creating linear chains of tiny islands floating in a sea of pink and blue. These ripples looked very much like those preserved and hardened in the sandstones I collected as a geology student in college. Layer upon layer of wavering sediments deposited over hundreds of millions of years under the same sun and perhaps on a morning just as beautiful as this.

Further up the beach I saw a banded sea star on thousands of tiny, undulating legs slowly making its way toward the water, its appendages leaving long furrows in the wet sand. A small crowd gathered around to watch the progress, until a knowledgeable man stepped in to say that the star would die if it remained on land too long. He gathered up the creature into his hands, its arms threading through his fingers and trailing down the sides of his palms, and gently carried it to the rippling shallows as the sun peeked over the horizon.

Everything Changes

“When you open yourself to the continually changing, impermanent, dynamic nature of your own being and of reality, you increase your capacity to love and care about other people and your capacity to not be afraid."
-- Pema Chödrön

You've probably heard the saying "the only constant is change", but how many of us let that truth really sink in? So much of the fear, anger and pain manifested in this world comes from not fully accepting this reality. I'm not saying that it's an easy thing to do, or that people who don't accept it are wrong or bad. But as with any fundamental truth of human existence, when we argue with it we will lose - every time. How frequently and for how long are the only variables.

I'm beginning to think that acceptance is the key. Not to happiness exactly, nor to never feeling fear, anger or pain again. It's the key that opens the door to whatever comes next. When I accept my reality for what it is without all the blame and judgement (aimed at others, at God, but also especially at myself) I gain the ability to see more clearly the path that is in front of me. We cannot navigate freely into the future by constantly looking through the lens of the past. What has happened cannot be undone and what is to come is wholly unknown, and therefore directly influenced by each choice we make from this moment to the next and beyond.

"The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.” 

-- Howard Zinn

Change, acceptance, choices - three forces that will dance in lockstep with each of us throughout our entire life. This concept can seem overwhelming at times, even daunting. Especially when the change is particularly jarring and choices appear to be undesirable or nonexistent. This again is where acceptance comes in. I've had to get over the idea of equating acceptance with liking or condoning the situation. I used to think that if I didn't resist that which offended me, I would just give up or give in. But what I missed in all of this was that by resisting, my perception of the whole situation was blurred and so any solutions or alternatives I might try to apply were incomplete. In order to accept my present circumstances, I've had to cultivate a lot compassion and patience, particularly for myself. I am, as they say, my own harshest critic.

With patience, compassion and an absence of judgement, the world is a much kinder place than I once perceived it to be. I realize that I may not get to where I thought I was going, but everything changes and when I accept that fact, I see choices open up to me that I did not notice before. When I begin to feel fear and apprehension, I will meet those thoughts with compassion and wait patiently for them to dissolve. Slowly, slowly, I am returning to myself and I find that by doing that, I am better able to embrace the gifts I have been given and then share them with the world.

"Dissolution is needed for new growth to happen. One cycle cannot exist without the other."

-- Eckhart Tolle

One September Day

Autumn arrived on the afternoon breeze.

I heard it approach as it threaded
Through the tops of the dusky gray pines
Lacing between their densely needled boughs
With the lilting ebb and flow of a hushed roar.

It softly touched my cheek before slipping
Down the length of my bare arms
Taking with it any trace of accumulated heat and dust
As a coolness spread across my skin.

The scent of the sea was carried in its gusts which swept
From the coast and across a wide valley to these hills
Conjuring memories of damp salt tinged days
Along the cloudy shores of Monterey.

I watched it glide through the weary oaks who sighed
As they released their pale summer scorched leaves
Lofting them into the reinvigorated air
To celebrate the moment the world changed.

Life in Bloom

August is a brittle, dusty month in the California foothills. All the wildflowers have long since gone to seed and the once lush green stands of grass now glow with golden yellow light, their stems rustling in the hot afternoon breeze. During the monsoon season when thick, billowy cumulonimbus clouds pile high on the mountain tops, only a few storms will stray down to lower elevations. More often than not, they bring with them wind and lightning, but precious little rain. Even the native trees and shrubs take on an ashen pallor, stalling their growth to divert all their efforts into simply surviving.

Earlier in the summer, a multitude of long thin leaves sprouted in patches along the lower parking area in our yard. I was charmed by the presence of such vibrant life bursting out from the layers of last year’s sharp, crisp oak leaves. As the weeks passed, the leaves turned leathery and yellow, eventually curling into wisps of plant fiber. I lamented the fact that the plants never had a chance to bloom, but was not willing to haul buckets of water down the driveway multiple times a week.

Imagine my surprise when almost a month later, out of the arid August ground began to emerge fleshy slender stalks topped by thick pink buds. It turns out the Belladonna amaryllis, a native of South Africa, requires a period of dry dormancy between leaf growth and flower production. Within days the pale green tips peeled open and clusters of trumpeting flowers erupted forth, wafting their sweet scent around the barren yard. They stood tall and proud, defying logic and daring me to utter one more complaint about the heat or the lack of moisture at this time of year.

And so recently I’ve remained silent, as well as a little more observant. I notice that the nights are cooler and the morning sunlight comes a bit later. I remember that there is a season to everything and the trick to living is not fighting against, but adapting to these changing rhythms. With patience and resilience, one never knows what miracles might emerge.

Precious Stones

I take slow, deliberate steps along the shore of Lake Superior with my head cast down, gaze sweeping methodically across the ground. Thousands of small pebbles are scattered in tiers on the sand, some glistening at the edge of the ebbing waves, others pushed further up the beach by past storms. They create a colorful earth toned mosaic punctuated by bright flecks of mustard, terracotta and slate blue.

My eye is most easily drawn to the layered nuggets of maroon and gray, which glow like hot embers in the shallow water. These rocks known as banded iron formations were created in the region two billion years ago when oxygen first became abundant in the atmosphere. This element combined with dissolved iron in the oceans to form iron oxides. The oxygen was produced by photosynthesizing algae, thus preserving the first breath of plant life in stone and laying the future economic foundation of this entire region.

I spy an oval shaped slip of white rock scored with telltale tubular striations contrasting against the grainy brown sand. It is a piece of fossilized coral from the ancient shallow sea that covered this land 400 million years ago. I imagine a watery world blanketed with coral reefs. Sea lilies sway in the current as the perfectly spiraled shell of an ammonite jets by, squid-like tentacles streaming in its wake. Trilobites scuttle across the sea floor over and around clusters of brachiopod shells. A seagull’s call brings me back to the terrestrial present, but thoughts of geologic time and transformation continue to swirl in my mind.

I am determined to collect a rainbow of rocks. Oranges and blues are mostly igneous rhyolite and basalt deposits from a 1,200 mile long rift through the heart of North America that opened up one billion years ago. It extended from modern day Ontario down to Kansas and branched over into Michigan. A large basin formed at the junction of the northern and eastern arms of the rift, which was ultimately filled with water by retreating glaciers to form Lake Superior just 10,000 years ago. I add them to the metamorphic green epidote and yellow chert already in my pocket.

Red, brown, purple and white sandstones represent deposits from ancient rivers and streams that flowed off the volcanic mountain ranges in the region 500 million years ago. The brown sandstone was particularly prized by architects in the late 1800’s as a building material, referred to as Lake Superior Brownstone, and was used to construct many stoic buildings and residences in the towns that ring the lake. These sandstone formations were also carved and smoothed by wind and waves to form the Apostle Islands.

The individual colors of rock all blend to steely gray as twilight approaches. I sit on the beach listening to the hush of the waves lapping onto shore, holding the accumulation of two billion years in the palm of my hand. Sunset casts its glow as the lights of Washburn begin to twinkle in the distance. I dig my toes down into a confetti of geologic time to feel the lingering warmth of the radiant summer sun still in its grains.