Is The Ocean In The Bone Vault Only The Bone Vault’s Ocean?

My friend from Asia has powers and magic, he plucks a blue leaf from the young blue-gum And gazing upon it, gathering and quieting The God in his mind, creates an ocean more real than the ocean, the salt, the actual Appalling presence, the power of the waters. He believes that nothing is real except […]

Being Alone With Style

I used to think having style was about how one appeared to others, something that extroverts needed to know about, not nerdy introverts like myself. However, style is more than just fashion, it’s the total way we express our inner being outwardly, whether it be clothes, accessories, speech or how we carry ourselves. Strangely enough, I […]

The Mountain Of Truth

One of my favorite fictional characters is “Doc” in John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row”. Not many people know that Doc was based on the real-life figure of Ed Ricketts who categorized specimens from tide pools and then sold them to schools and collectors. Ricketts was an interesting personality in his own right. His significance in marine […]

Whisky’s For Drinking, Water’s For Fighting.

Whenever I do some serious backpacking I’m reminded of the central importance of water to our existence, particularly here in the American West. The earliest articulate description of the problem was made by Colonel John Wesley Powell (1834-1902), the famous ethnologist and geologist who was the first to run the Colorado River through the Grand […]

Playing The Game Of Life

During a long career as a financial planner, I have had the privilege of looking through a window into the intimate lives of hundreds of individuals. Many of these have played the game of life with consummate skill and have achieved considerable success in their chosen endeavors, both financial and non-financial. However, it is also clear […]

Lessons From The Donner Party

The story of the Donner Party, trapped in the Sierra Nevada during one of the worst winters on record (1846), is too well known to require retelling. However, after reading the latest account of their journey by Ethan Rarick, which includes some new research, I realized that the story of the Donner Party’s ordeal contains some […]

The Backpacker’s Guide To Wealth

Having just returned from a few days backpacking in the Superstition Mountain Wilderness in Arizona, please forgive me for waxing lyrical about the unlikely connection between backpacking and wealth. The primary goal of backpacking is to survive a trip to places that are often difficult or impossible to get to by any other means than […]