A flower by a creek,
swaying like a metronome.
Its bright and bulbous head
sits atop a skinny stalk
Oh, are you counting time?
Or is time foreign for you?
Your scent rides on the air.
Your petals flame bright yellow.
Your every aspect
is a call for attention,
and yet you bow your head
like a dog caught in the act.
Taken in August of 2016 in Nubra Valley
Each step through the scree field must be judged on: angle, stability, slipperiness — but the flat, dry, and robust rock is the one that will roll on you — heaving you headlong, rolling over brick and boulder.
Crossing the glacier, each step is taken both like it won’t fail and like it inevitably will.
The former because one can’t fear one’s hips will slip out from under one, but the latter because one needs to be ready to stab an axe into the snowpack without the other end puncturing one’s ribs.
When you reach the altitude at which stepping is a series of singular activities — not a seamless sequence — you will love breathing like you haven’t since that time you were dangling upside-down outside the womb being smacked on the bottom by a masked man.
Taken in Himachal Pradesh in the Summer of 2015.
Taken in the summer of 2019 in Kazakhstan.
The forest floor —
strewn with damp leaf litter
&
slightly twisted twin-pronged needles.
Fungal fruiting bodies,
caps sprinkled with grit,
stand sentry over the rich, black loam.
The musty smell at life & death’s edge
reigns subtly supreme.
We call it decay, and think it a death stench,
but that ground echoes the ouroboros —
the mythical serpent consuming it’s own tail —
eater and eaten are one —
life and death are thusly intertwined in that dark soil.
Taken in April of 2011 in DeKalb County, GA
Taken on July 3, 2020 atop Ramanagara Hill
Tiger Riding for Beginners 