New Year Energy

On the winter solstice of 2020, I was driving through the dusk-purpling snow of northern Utah. The way was cold and calm, lit by Saturn and Jupiter — so close in the Southwest sky that if you squinted they became one doubly bright celestial body. An auspicious alignment: the “Christmas Star” of lore and legend. 

It got me thinking about those Three Wise Men who used the same chilly light to find their way across the desert in Jordan. “Good news!” they proclaimed when they saw the “star,” or so the story goes. I was looking for my own good news in this dark season, and I remembered that the Three Wise Men, as well as The Grinch Who Stole Christmas (which also features the Christmas Star), teach of reprioritization and hope. A big ol’ lesson of 2020.

After a hermetically sealed drive through the Western United States, I spent the winter holiday season in Colorado with my family. It filled up the reserves. It provided the change of venue I needed — out from under the Willamette River Valley rain cloud where it can get dark, too dark to see at times.

The calling of our generation is no longer the perfectly orchestrated Instagram post. Look I’m just a hypocrite like everyone else but on my better days I’m here for the radical connection. Not to stay locked away, but rather to show up. My family bond has never felt tighter. My connection to the world has never felt weightier. When I meditate once or twice a week at five minutes a pop (no mindfulness high horse here, just an attempt-at-an-examined-life mini pony), I try to send it out to everyone I can think of. “It” being vibes. “It” being rays from the core of my tissue. “It” coming from my biggest artery — straight to you. 

Dylan once said: When you’re surrounded by love, you can do anything. 

It’s the new year and I want to do something. 

3 Things My Old Dog Taught Me About Adventure

I wrote this a while back, about a dog I had a while back. With so many new pet adoptions happening these days, I thought it was worth another mention that dogs change your life: usually in all the ways it needs changing.

Road trips rule. 

As editor for an international snowboard magazine, I used to spend winters on a plane hunting stories and following storms. Dirty laundry notwithstanding, my bag stayed packed and ready to deploy at all times. Eventually I left the magazine to become a freelance writer, but I still lived for immediate adventure gratification. Step on a plane in Portland, step off in the Alps or the Adriatic. Boom. 

Suddenly, enter a dog with severe separation anxiety who didn’t think he could live without me. Instead of flying home from Oregon to Colorado for the holidays, I would road warrior through 3 states in the grip of winter so he could come with me. On those trips, the alpine passes were treacherous at times, but I saw grand moonrises over the Idaho sage and once a bobcat slink off into the dark. I camped in Arches National Park, and by the warmth of a cedar-wood blaze worshipped the austere beauty of the desert under new snow. 

The airports were not missed.

With a dog, the road is longer and more winding. You stop a lot to walk, wiz and sniff the wind. Off the highway, you encounter so many beautiful and unexpected wild spaces. And while you can’t go on as many adventures at this speed, nor can you go quite as far, prizing quality over quantity and rejoicing in the journey—that’s a Lefty lesson I’ll never forget. 

Snow demands some solitude.

When I was 2, my parents (both ski instructors at Vail) plopped me into a set of skis and sent me down the bunny hill. For 2 decades after that, the sharp scent of snow and the hum of chairlift cables felt like home to me. 

At a certain point, though, ski-resort riding stopped giving me what I need, and so I stopped setting aside time for it. I moved to the city. The drive to the mountain sucked. The crowds sucked. The lift-ticket prices sucked. Worst of all, I couldn’t bring my canine accomplice. 

So I procured a splitboard, and that changed everything. Armed with skins, poles and dog, I became powerful. I could explore in the deep snow what had before been inaccessible. 

The first time I went splitboarding on the flanks of Mt. Hood, the simplicity made me happy. It felt more like “play” than any snowboarding I’d done recently. Free from set agenda, from reliance on chairlifts or runs. Just me and a quiet ecosystem of powder dollops. And it was fabulous exercise. My body grew warm and my lungs worked hard. My face steamed into my goggles, and I sent a prayer up into the trees that my muscles would continue working—my heart keep pumping. They did. It did!

At the top, I felt that excited flutter for the descent. An old forgotten feeling. And just like that I was off, dipping through the trees with Lefty hot on my tail.

Walking is noticing. 

When you have a dog, you walk a lot. The same routes, the same roads, through rain, sun and ice. And you can’t hurry on a dog walk. You have to stop and sniff, pause and pee. Slow and contemplative is the pace to take. 

Walking this way every day for years with Lefty, I began to notice the world in a new way. I learned the local greenery and flowering fauna. I observed bunnies living in the tall grass by the baseball field. I identified a bush that would honey-bomb the neighborhood every January—the perfume sending my winter-weary brain spinning off into spring. Before I knew it, I’d become a naturalist in my own neighborhood.

I always feel a little bad for people without dogs, because they miss these walks. It’s the first thing I do every morning—a better wakeup than a shower, just as grounding as meditation. Now, 4 years later, I’ve got a new dog and a few new neighborhood routes. But sometimes I wander the old path past the elementary school and down to 54th Street. On those walks, I’ll think of Lefty and all the adventures we had together. I still remember them well. I hope I always do. 

Vivid November

The major hit movie of summer 2020 was My Octopus Teacher … at least it was in this nerdy household. Watching that strange, beautiful docu-memoir, transported beneath the ocean, I learned that octopuses are colorblind—so how does their skin ecstatic-ly change color to match the hue of their environment? A paradox. A lesson to negotiate? Are we all not creatures blinded to what’s around us? And can we not look inward, toward intuition and unconventional wisdom, to show us the universe in its truest pale of light? 

In early November Mark and I drove out to our land in Three Rivers, where we’ll finally break ground on a homestead in the young days of 2021. It was a cold weekend, snow forecasted in the high desert. We were excited to see the new sand-filtration septic system we’d just cut a check to install. The place for our sewage—a low-key cause of celebration in this strange year. 

Arriving in the late afternoon, we nosed the truck into the driveway. Something was off—too much daylight. Our discovery was: the septic company had felled a handful of trees, much more than I expected. In the bleak pre-blizzard light, I wandered around what used to be grand forest but was now torn dirt. My arms dangled, mouth gaped. I didn’t know it would hit me like that. I believe I was suffering from a form of heartbreak. 

I spent the rest of the afternoon harvesting wispy blond desert grass from untouched corners of the lot and transplanting it onto the gouge of earth that held the septic tank. Mourning that grand old lodgepole grove. Whispering for forgiveness that to stay here, we have to disturb the land. Sending prayers up into the purpling clouds that a season of snow would regrow all this flora.  

As I coiled and tossed the last length of hose in the dirt, snowflakes began to fall and so did the darkness. 

Me At 43

This is me at 43. I make my living thinking and writing. I still got it. I still want it. I was a little girl who grew up big. I’m a kid inside, but I’m not the same person as when I was a kid. Life’s interesting and continues to astonish me. And I like gettin old. 

As the years go by though, I miss my family more and more. There is a couple days’ highway between me and them, out where they are in the Rocky Mountains. But at least the distance isn’t further. At least I can cross it now and again. And hey, I do see them often in my dreams, which is a cool kind of consolation.

Last week’s dream: We were in Glenwood, Colorado — an old-western town at the mouth of a chasm where the Colorado River rages through. My sister had wild long black hair that caught the light as she rode a prancing black stallion. She was a kind of powerful warrior I think. 

Me, I was tasked with saddling up a soft and friendly bay mare. I had to ride it through the canyon eastward to our old home, alone. At the mouth of that canyon, there is a tunnel, and I was afraid to parade my poor horse through it amidst the rushing interstate traffic. Dad was there, and he dreamsplained to me: “Just keep her in the median.” 

“Sounds like something I would do,” he said the next day when I texted him CliffsNotes to the dream. 

Sooooooo anyway, here I am, at the mouth of my 43rdyear on earth, ready to clip clop through the tunnel of winter and endeavor to carefully “keep it in the median” as a pandemic/recession/social unrest/fiery apocalypse all rage by in the lanes around me. Dad, I’ll give it a try. 

American Summer

If I decided to rank them, the most memorable scenes from my summer would involve deep-water swimming holes. Lucky me, no less than three times I found myself floating on my back with ten toes poking out and staring up at landscapes carved by glaciers. The water is cool but not cold. My mind is empty. 

As the country, the United States of America or so it’s called, unravels not unlike an 80s-era Soviet Union, we the people go on living. 

There’s this paradox afoot — everything’s happening at the same time. Existential dread and blackberry season. Civic heartbreak and summer sun tans. Boarded up businesses. Beers on the beach with your buds. Riding bikes home through the soft summer air, getting passed by riot wagons full of Portland’s finest, headed off into the night with dark intentions.

To the questions I’m always asking, there’s an answer in here but it’s not something I can negotiate with right now. Just have to let everything wash over me, like that cool water, and hope something meaningful floats to the surface.