Lake, winter

When waiting for the midnight sauna

One eats an extra bowl of chili

At dinner, eats extra early and spends

The evening stoking the fires

Of digestion and wood stove:

Because this is a winter sauna

In northern Minnesota, and the hole

In the ice has already been cut

And cut again an hour ago where it refroze.

You spend your time warming

Your mind, readying for the plunge.

 

After twenty minutes at one-eighty

One feels one has to go—

The hot cedar, the sweat, the looming

Losing of consciousness—

So you slide on your wool socks

Run down the frozen hillside under full-moon light

Grab the ladder, take the plunge.

In a moment, no breath no light no weight or thought or dream.

Just your heart, pounding.

Just your lungs, contracting.

And when you scramble out onto snow

Blanketed by winter, it is all

Warmth all glee all giddy all joy all dream.

 

The night is a vanilla gelato, frozen and still and sweet.

You stand naked in soaked socks

Stoking the fire from outside

The sauna—you are all this at once

A lunatic

A rambling sage

A silent monk

A single star.

Walk along Cook Inlet

At the edge of Kincaid Park in Anchorage, ice floes trace the current of the Knik Arm in Cook Inlet. On their migration out toward sea, the flows nudge one another like animated packs of suspended boulders. The inlet water is dark and full of mud mixed with miniscule flakes of gold over which prospectors have drowned. I walk down a winter ski trail with just enough snow to reveal moose tracks and fall’s leftover grasses. A bull moose grazes by the edge of the trail.

Across the inlet is the Sleeping Lady, a flat-topped mountain draped in a thin veil of snow, like a gatekeeper to the Alaska Range. All around me hoar frost clings to the forest of bare branches: stalagmites of ice crystallizing in the most intimate geometries. I hold my breath as I look close, not wanting to melt their shapes. On this stroll of near and far distances, ice melts and mountain ranges appear through the fog of my own breath. The edges of the body are traced here by a seasonal stillness. In the quiet I let my heart, tangibly warm against the cold, rest in the cupped hands of the afternoon.

Behind the clouds, winter’s sun spends all day skimming the southern horizon and conjures an everlasting suspense of its setting. Shadows change angle, not length. Despite the bookends of darkness, the day is held by light.

{View of Cook Inlet taken a ways north from Kincaid Park.}

Blogging powers temporarily diverted to new Delta blog

Just wanted to let you know I have not abandoned this blog, but rather have been diverting my blogging energies to another site we just started for my work on the Colorado River Delta. We’re just getting it going so there will be some changes, but if you’d like to read some more content of mine on the Delta, our partners, and what we’re up to, check out this link and click on the “Colorado River Delta Blog” tab. I’ll be back to the water logs soon enough…

(Unfried) green tomatoes

The growing season never stops in Tucson. It does, however, still roll with the  seasons. So when a frost threatens, valley farmers scramble to bring in their remaining summer crops: tomatoes, chili peppers, sweet peppers, eggplant. That’s how I spent Saturday: bringing in the fruit. My coworker, Joe, and a handful of extremely bright and busy PhD students, farm about a half acre right here in the city. I join them when I begin to orbit beyond the sphere of reality and need a little dirt under my nails to remind me where earth is.

As I was reentering orbit yesterday, this is what happened:

Whoa holy green tomato. One amazing thing about farming in Tucson is that you still have tomatoes in December. But when frost comes knocking you’ll end up with plenty of green ones ripening on your coffee table. They don’t taste like they did in August, but at least they weren’t bred to endure conveyor belts and cargo shipping. I still smell like a tomato vine.

There were all kinds of peppers, too. Some might make your ears burn.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Which brings me back to many a summer meal. How those luscious cherry tomatoes and giant ribbed heirlooms could really tie a meal together.

Scrambled eggs, fried eggs, meaty tomato sauce, pasta. There were days when tomato and basil were a part of every meal. And all minus the pasta–tomatoes, basil, eggs, olive oil, alliums, carne, bread–were Tucson-grown.

So, green tomatoes, how are you gonna stand up to your summer cousins?

Gratitudes

Friends and family

Friends and family on couches with wine glasses and laughter

Wine glasses and laughter; and couches

First glimpse of gentle snow falling under yellow light

Movement of light and shadow across a wall

…

Ground Thanksgiving-leftover sandwiches

Massaged kale salad

Cats in baskets

…

Flicker of fire, candle or bonfire, animating dark spaces

A simple note from a loved one saying, You are dear

Abundance

Love

Comfort

Twisted side-angle pose; the human spine; so much capacity

And headstands

…

Quiet; solitude; steam rising from hot tea

Dreaming of the woods, feeling a sense of peace

Returning to the desert, feeling a sense of home

Winter bringing in its sweet retreat

And then the next day…

And then the next day, it poured…

Ode to Monsoon

The night smells of peppermint and sage. I hold hot tea and rub my fingers over the bellowing herb pot, evening fading into twilight, the summer smell of charcoal swirling in the palm fronds. Heat lightning taunts the end of the monsoons. I see fire at sundown. I am starting to learn where the water runs.

Captured inside a blue kiddy pool is a lizard forearm’s length. That was in June. I saw him many nights in a row, never moving, but when I crawled up close he blinked. I imagine he stayed until the rains filled up his world and swept him across the sandy yard. He never paddled, just floated, limp and forgiving, assuming nothing, simply blinking.  Blinking at torrents of incredible force.

Then the intersections all filled up and cars became boats with headlights, making wakes that sloshed against the boulevard, sweeping dead nopal fins and dried dog shit into the clogged gutters, under the two wheels of my melting bike. Standing water to shins on the down-pedal. Lightning on all sides. An uncontrollable laughter lifted from the emerald pond of my solar plexus, so wet clothes became skin and skin folded to meet bone and bone merged with the touch of water and the wheels drove themselves into the V of the wake, like a raft on a river: whitecaps folding over bare legs. Edges of lips curled to ears as waterfalls plunged down into eyes. Moving without effort, swimming in air, blinking, blinking, all the way home.

Smell of rain, nothing more. Creek is full. I see where it washed out part of the walkers’ bridge. I avoid the debris. Cottonwoods exhale pheromones of abundance, but on the way back it is all gunpowder: creosote. Water sneaks back underground, slithers offstage while the principal–that fiery sky–steals memory of monsoons, births the first and last generation of mosquitoes, shakes in a cool wind, inhales all the gunpowder.

Rains: till next time.

Delta films

Here are the two films I promised. I had trouble embedding them in the blog so you’ll just have to follow the links. I promise they won’t disappoint!

The first is a documentary by award winning photographer Pete McBride. He captures the Colorado River as his friend Jon Waterman paddled from source to sea. McBride has worked for National Geographic, NYTimes, the Smithsonian, and many other organizations in over 60 countries.  This is TOTALLY worth a few minutes!

http://video.patagonia.com/video/Chasing-Water

~~~~~

This second film is one we had made for Sonoran Institute’s Colorado River Delta Program (the program I’ve been working for since March) and does a great job at outlining our work in the Delta. If you want a real life glance of the infamous leather-skinned Guadalupe, coworker extraordinaire, here’s your chance! (Video is on the SI homepage and is titled “Hope for the Colorado River Delta”)

http://sonoraninstitute.org/

~~~~~

AND…thirdly, that guy Jonathan Waterman who paddled 1,450 miles from source to sea, he has just written a call-to-action piece in Patagonia’s fall catalog, and another on Patagonia’s blog, The Cleanest Line. The latter has links to the SI site, which I’ve been helping work on the last few weeks.Check it out below!!

http://www.thecleanestline.com/

~~~~~

Sonoran Institute’s Colorado River Delta Program is launching a massive fund raising campaign in order to purchase water rights for the use in restoration and conservation. The second film speaks more to that. If you’re feeling charitable please consider giving! (sonoraninstitute.org)

Below is the link to Waterman’s piece from the Patagonia catalog:

http://www.patagonia.com/us/patagonia.go?assetid=62630

Cheers!

Rush

In the desert water is urgency. It comes without notice and leaves before dinner. It sweeps through canyons and crags, hurls cows and cars and tree trunks and boulders through narrow gaps in the landscape. All this mass as trivial as pine needles spinning in a flooded ditch.

High plateaus shiver beneath behemoth thunderheads, sending a small ripple of shadows to undo the skin of the earth. At last, sandstone opens up secret passage ways and lets in the rain. Waterfalls emerge from solid stone. Even rock bows to the urgency of water.

Then you have the river. At times roaring and pounding its fists like ice in a blender, at times the laziest of all. It carves, it leaches, it slowly erodes, it lets you drink. It gives you a sense of the eternal, in the comprehensible scale of millions of years. Rivers shape rock–rivers run without stop–for millions of years. Rivers build fertile soil. Rivers bring life to near and distant places.

And then there is a place, a place where you can walk,where the river no longer carves or falls or shakes the earth or replenishes the soul. In this place there is not enough water to fill the word “flow.” The last drops of a beloved Colorado River simply trickle to their new end: the desert which once was their estuary, their delta, their meeting with the sea.

~~~~~

Let the urgency of desert water speak to us like it does the sandstone. Let us open up to it, open our gratitude, know where it begins and where it ends and let ourselves feel joy by its surprise. What a gift to still have a river that can sweep us away.

~~~~~

 

Tomorrow I will be posting TWO new AWESOME videos on the Colorado River and its delta.

Come back and check ’em out!!!

Bookstore frenzy

This strange thing happens to me when I enter a bookstore. It can happen in any place where an overwhelming number of books lean against one another, their spines facing tantalizingly outward. This thing starts with a small, almost undetectable flutter somewhere deep down in my sternum, like there’s a puppy down there who just spotted his owner walking up the driveway and his tail tic-tocs against my ribcage. Then I notice my heart rate has increased slightly, my breathing has become shallow and I start to hear the ‘pop’ ‘pop’ of the hinges that hold that portion of my sane brain together flinging off into the ether. I have to keep myself from hugging the bookshelf.

I pick up a book, flip it over, and start to read its summary. But before long that almost undetectable flutter has welled up from my sternum, is penetrating that space behind my eyes and whacking away more and more hinges of sanity. For a moment I fear I’ve been drooling all over the page of this fine crisp work of art–even in a controlled state of mind I am awed we can bring such things  into the world. Maybe that woman with the baby stroller detects my tremors of suppressed yet internally unleashed tremors; or maybe she’s feeling them too.

How many worlds exist in this one room! on this one shelf! in this one book sitting in the palm of my hand! I want to sit down on the carpet and feed here. And the thing is, I would feed until I passed out, and even my unhinged brain knows this. I start to feel the burn of fried fuses sparking at my skull. I know this insane hunger cannot be satisfied; it can be fed like a fire but not like a belly–it will only burn more the more I stay in this god-awful hall of such profound beauty and potential!

So inevitably I extract myself from the situation. Put down the book, Kate. Say goodbye to the nice old lady, walk through the door with the little bell, and enter the sidewalk-world of squashed gum and sweaty bums and oblivious bikers and stinky exhaust. I breathe it all in. Then I notice some local rancher is barbecuing carne asada under a tent on the street, and I realize I’m hungry. I also realize my inevitable bookstore-induced inner frenzy wants a tangible end-product, and that such fanaticism only kicks me into exhaustion and despair. If I really want that excitement to come to life I need to sit down, chill out, read one book at a time, eat some tacos, and maybe put a few words on a page.