I look out from the top of the planet where the highest paved highway in North America winds precariously to the height of Mount Evans in Colorado. Mountain ranges rise up from meadows before my very eyes. I am speechless. My breath is stilled. Panoramic views of 360 degrees surround the summit at 14,271 feet. The vast expanse of land masses and waterways and trees and open sky humble me in an instant. I feel … Read more

The old preacher-woman silently held a story in her weathered hands on a bench in the Kawuneeche Valley of Rocky Mountain National Park and looked up from the page. “Did you see the moose?” she said to me as I drew close to her in the meadow. “She won’t let the calf near the water.” Not far from where we spoke grazed a cow moose and her calf at the headwaters of the Colorado River … Read more

Sometimes it’s difficult to discern what’s beneath something directly in front of us. Cracks of thunder and blinding flashes of lightning bolted me out of bed in the night. Pea-sized hail teemed against my window and I feared for the delicate petals of flowers I had planted the day before and the supple leaves that had newly emerged on the trees. By morning though, the storm had cleared. I looked out my window over the … Read more

Sometimes you run into messengers or they run into you. Two of them happened to appear in my life on Wednesday of Holy Week before Easter. One had two legs, the other four. A young man probably in his late twenties or early thirties ran up behind my husband and I as we were hiking. He was running with a white mixed-breed Labrador Retriever trailing on his heels. Immediately, I noticed the young man’s bright … Read more

There’s always a mountain. When disappointment comes, lineages fray, tragedy breaks a heart . . . what to do? Sometimes what you need to see, when you need to see it, becomes visible before your very eyes. Four Peaks – I looked over my shoulder and saw something that literally took my breath away. A mountain I’ve known since my childhood in the desert, four glorious peaks rising up to the clouds, was cloaked entirely … Read more

“Gonna hear the beat-heart.” When my daughter was about one and a half years old she scurried ahead of me into the obstetrician’s office with a snack baggie of teddy grahams and all the determination she could muster to listen to the beat of her not-yet-born brother’s heart. An ultrasound is a useful tool to access the pulse of life and she was intent to hear that beautiful sound. Years later, I walked into the … Read more

The month of January often invokes a reset of sorts and many people become aware of internal nudges signaling a deeper desire, a sense that something more exists in the way of fulfillment. Perhaps that nudge(s) at the deep-down core of a person is actually a calling right smack in the heavy shuffle of daily living. Or maybe that nudge arrives not in a heavy shuffle at all, but rather in the slightest shuffle of … Read more

There’s something holy in the blue-black night. I feel it every Advent when the heavens darken earlier and longer in the rhythmic cycle towards the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere and in the circular dance of earthly clocks sweeping analog hands round the face of the dial. A sense of longing beckons me back to something eternal and I find myself mesmerized by the shimmering stars and to “Love” bestowed to our broken world in … Read more

Something suggesting travel or passage from one place to another. This is how Merriam Webster’s Dictionary defines the word journey. I looked out my kitchen window this month and saw a flock of Canadian Geese flying in formation out in the distance. They positioned themselves as a perfect arrow in the sky flapping their wings in consolidated purpose. Eventually, I began to hear their playful honking and barking as they neared my home and flew overhead. … Read more

Oh, there’s something beautiful in the foothills! The hogback and the foothills near my home are ablaze with the deepest hues of spices and herbs this autumn. The air is cool and fragrant with earthen scents. The beauty whisks one’s breath away. Something resonates deep in my thoughts while hiking in that glorious palette of color…. I remind myself no human scheduler or logistician programmed the mountain’s transformation from summer green to autumn sienna. The … Read more