It’s not quite 04:00. I’ve been awake since my Traveling Partner woke me around 02:10, unable to sleep, struggling to breathe. I don’t have any help to offer, and everything I say seems likely to start an argument. I dress and leave the house.
I sigh to myself, grateful to have a good therapist.
There’s really nothing to do but keep walking. Stumble, fall, begin again. Incremental change over time adds up. I can count on that. Impermanence? That’s real, too. Change is. We are each having our own experience, too. What feels like a reasonable question to one, may feel very different to another. Practicing non-attachment feels hard, sometimes. Walls and mirrors, and humans being human.
… The real motherfucker is that I only have the power to change myself or my own choices, regardless whether useful or necessary changes could be made by another person – that’s on them and entirely out of my hands…
I get all up into my head in the wee hours, thinking about values, character, boundaries, acceptable behavior, relationships, choices… We walk the path we choose. We become what we practice – whatever we practice. I sigh to myself in the darkness. Almost an hour yet until daybreak. Maybe I can nap for little while? Later is soon enough for beginnings and choices.
… Until then, I’ve got this path to walk and a bunch of thinking to do.
I breathe in the sweetly scented summer air on this trail between a vast meadow of clover and the broad silent river on the other side of a strip of trees and brambles. Beautiful morning. Sunny and cool, for now, some heat in the forecast later.
No AI here, only a human being and a camera phone.
[No AI is used in writing or editing this blog. This is human content for human readers.]
I woke this morning feeling recovered from whatever sickness laid me flat yesterday afternoon. It was a delight to water the lawn at daybreak and to watch the sunrise as I drove to the trailhead.
Sunrise by the river.
I sit on a rock near the river, enjoying the mild summer morning. It’s beautiful. I don’t need more than this right now. I listen to birds singing and chirping. I take a couple pictures, wishing very much that the pictures could also capture the scents. Wildflowers and clover. Nice.
… I let my mind wander contentedly, feeling free…
Weeds or wildflowers? It depends on your point of view.
When I say I don’t use AI to write my blog, I’m very serious. Another kind of freedom worth celebrating. No AI editing the pictures. No AI generated images. No AI authorship or editing. No choices to turn over my thinking to an algorithm or LLM. No AI research. My spelling mistakes and weird grammar and syntax are my own. My limited knowledge is my own. My thoughts are my own. My lived experience is real and human and messy. I’m okay with all of that. I don’t think my position on AI is at all unique; I get more comments and friendly feedback about my AI disclaimer than any topic I actually write about. I feel amused – and vindicated.
I keep to the path I’m on; there’s real freedom and independence in saying “no” to the AI slop and unnecessary “tools” being shoved into every app whether it’s helpful, or desirable, or not (“not” seems generally to be the case). I don’t need it. I don’t use it.
… AI is not capable of understanding the human experience…
A small bird sings to me for a few minutes.
I breathe, exhale, and relax. The scents of summer wildflowers fill the air. It’s a lovely morning. I feel free. That’s worth celebrating.
Free your mind. Live your life. Go outside.
I think about the day ahead. I’ll fly my drone. Fold some laundry. Maybe paint. Read awhile. The day is mine to live as I choose. I hope I choose wisely.
I was up too early. It is another gray day. I’m tired, and I’ve got a headache I would describe as “my third eye hurting”. I’m tired. I walk the loop around the vineyard, and I’m back at the car before dawn.
[No AI is used in writing or editing this blog. This is human content for human readers.]
So… I nap in the car awhile and wake to heavy gray clouds and a stormy forboding sky.
Say hello to a new day.
I sit up, groggy and a little dizzy, surprised to have actually slept. I take my morning medications with a swallow of cold black coffee left over from yesterday. I yawn and stretch. The morning seems unremarkable. I’m fine with that. Another day.
…I’m grateful… but I’m also thinking about coffee 😆
It is a payday. Later I’ll do all of the budget stuff. Pay bills. Buy groceries. Ordinary mundane activities. Routine. Unexciting. I’m fine with that, too.
I sit listening to my tinnitus and the HVAC on the roof of a nearby building. Robins hop about, singing their cheerful song. I take time for meditation. I eye the gray clouds overhead. Looks like it might rain, later.
I sigh to myself. I really want coffee. I stretch and yawn, and decide on a course of action. I click my seatbelt into place, and get started on this new day. It’s as good a beginning as any.
It is a gray rainy summer morning in the Pacific Northwest. Nothing particularly unusual about that. The temperature this morning is a mild 14C/58F. Comfortable. A muscle up the back of my right thigh is aching painfully. I mostly ignore it, but approach a favorite weekend trail from a different trailhead, with fewer hills. The more level ground is an easier walk.
[No AI is used in writing or editing this blog. This is human content for human readers.]
What’s your moment like? I wonder briefly how it is we each have our own experience, living our individual “now” moment, like pages in a book; so similar at a glance, such differences in the details, and still so common and familiar we are able to understand each other.
I walk with my thoughts, feeling a delicate spatter of occasional raindrops on my face. Not enough to call it “raining”. The marshy places are barely damp now, replaced mostly with meadow until the heavy autumn rains return. The tall grass is already brown. Most of the wildflowers are fading, dropping seeds for next year’s Spring bloom. The trees in the distance are many hues and shades of green, looking fresh and lush from where I stand.
Doesn’t matter where you are, you’ve got to start somewhere, and that somewhere is where you are.
There’s a delicious spicy herb-y floral scent that I specifically associate with Oregon. I don’t know what it is. I love the scent of Oregon. Meadow, marsh, forest, dunes, desert, savannah…it hardly matters to me. I love the places I have seen and been and traveled through. Oregon is special to me, though I have trouble being clear as to precisely why. Of all the places I have lived or visited, Oregon is one of only two that draw me back again and again (the other is “the Eastern Shore” region of Maryland, with her marshy flatlands and peaceful coves). It’s not that I don’t like (and even love) many other places, it’s more that these “two” (Oregon is pretty vast to be a single place) call to my heart to come on home.
I get to my halfway point feeling a soft gratitude just to be alive, existing, and able to experience the simple joy of a summer morning. Uncomplicated. Unbothered. From my perch on a fence rail, I watch a multitude of little birds flit about. They have their own way of enjoying the morning. I breathe, exhale, and relax. This feels like enough. Right here. Now.
…I am, of course, overlooking all the corruption, drama, and harmful bullshit going on in the US, and around the world. I’m ignoring, for the moment, all the violence and genocide. Drone warfare. The bombings of civilian targets. The fuckwittery of our gerontocracy. The obscene greed of billionaires. The commonness of hate speech and incivility. It’s much. We all need to take steps to preserve our individual peace, and our resilience; the future of humanity may depend on our persistence and endurance. This isn’t a sprint. I sigh quietly and let all that go, again, for awhile…
I spent a couple hours in the studio this weekend. I may go back for more. Painting fulfills something for me that nothing else does. It is soul-nurturing, healing work.
“Summer Sunrise, McMinnville June 2026”
I gaze across the meadow observing the changing light and thinking about palette choices, shade, tint, and hue. How best to capture a misty rain drenching a summer meadow, I wonder? I sit watching until the rain reaches me, then laugh with delight when it finally does, as if surprised. It passes by quickly, leaving me a bit damp, glasses spattered.
I grin at my happy predicament. I don’t mind the rain. I get to my feet and stretch. The trail through the meadow beckons me, and it’s time to begin again (already?). This, here, now, is as good a moment as any to take a next step, to choose, to walk on, and to begin… but really, anywhere is, it’s simply necessary to begin. To walk on. The clock is ticking.
Feeling stuck? It happens. Been there… not lately, but once upon a time it was pretty common, even chronic. I’m sitting at a different trailhead this morning. Almost wilderness, but not really. It’s simply unfamiliar, and the novelty feels wilder and more remote than this little green space really is.
A well trodden trail leading to an unknown destination.
[No AI is used in writing or editing this blog. This is human content for human readers.]
I passed through the gate, which just stands there not attached to anything, preventing vehicular traffic passing through, into the big clover meadow encircled by trees, bounded on one side by the silent broad Willamette River, and on the other a forest that extends to a quiet rural state highway. This early on a chilly Sunday morning there is no traffic, nor are there other visitors.
Care for a swim? 😆
Available data suggests that the river is relatively shallow here, between 7″ and 10″ deep, but it’s deceptively calm surface manages to suggest caution, and anyway it’s much too cold for swimming, at 41F (7C) this morning (air temperature that is, I expect the water is maybe a bit warmer, based on the mist hanging above the river, but it wouldn’t be enough to coax the average person into it).
A meadow of clover, a moment of joy.
I start down the trail. Even this hard-packed dirt trail is much easier on my ankle and my foot than pavement ever is. I still have my cane, but my stride feels easy and natural. It’s a nice change and I ask myself why I don’t come here more often? It’s a lovely spot, and only 17 miles from home. The view of the sunrise over the river is quite splendid. I sigh contentedly as I walk. The air smells of Spring flowers, clover, blackberries, wild cucumber, and spicy scents of various wildflowers less familiar to me. In rainier seasons most of this trail is too muddy to walk safely. I enjoy being able to reach the far side of the meadow and circle back around.
Wild cucumber blooming among the thimbleberries.
I get some great pictures as I make the loop around the meadow. There’s something vaguely nostalgic about the scent here. Something that hints at childhood visits to my grandparents’ house in summertime, or weekends working in the garden. I breathe, exhale, and relax, pausing now and then to soak in the scene and the scent.
I find a spot to stop a moment, to write and watch the river flow past. It is so quiet here, it’s hard to imagine I am close to a city at all, but Salem is only 7 miles away. Doesn’t matter at all how close it is in miles. Measured by the experience of this moment, it may as well not exist at all.
Watching the sun rise from a new vantage point.
… I’ll definitely be coming back to this trail more often…
I sit quietly enjoying my time in this place. The light through the trees changes as the sun continues to climb higher in the sky. I reflect on conversations with my beloved Traveling Partner over recent days. He’s been helping me quite a lot with putting more explicit focus on my self-care and it has been making a difference.
Bunnies!
Motion catches my eye; a rabbit with baby bunnies has ventured out into the grass near the trail. She’s far enough from this rock I’m sitting on to be fearless about my presence. I watch the bunnies hop into the open space of the trail, then dart away, when a shadow passes overhead, returning to continue munching and playing. I watch them for a long while, contemplating consciousness and intelligence, and the arrogance of human primates and our delusions of our special place in the world. We know so little of everything there is to know, and even less about the vastness of what we don’t even know we don’t know. Are bunnies self-aware? Do they reason? Do they feel and experience emotions? (Why would we think they don’t, other than to make ourselves feel better when we kill them?)
As I watch, one rabbit with bunnies becomes several, all hopping and playing at the edge of the meadow in the sunshine of a new day. Some of the bunnies roll in the dust of the dry packed trail. A variety of songbirds flit about. I feel fortunate and delighted to see all of this. I fill up on the feeling of wonder and joy.
I sit with my thoughts awhile, then walk a trail that heads the other direction from the trailhead. There’s more to see. The morning is mine to enjoy as I will. I think happily to my Traveling Partner encouraging me to make something of the day for myself. “Do something for you,” he said. This is me, doing that. I breathe the scented Spring air deeply and walk on. It’s a lovely moment for it.
Strange fruit. What might you see if you slow down and really look?
There’s nothing in the news more worth my attention than these quiet moments in the real world. There is no app on any device that offers me more than I’ll find on this trail, in this moment, here, now. Look up from your scrolling long enough to see that there is a real reality in which you exist, with much to see and do and choose from. Your choices matter. There’s a reason all these apps want your attention, and more and more businesses have such apps; your attention has real value. Spend that on you – choose where you put your attention with care.
…Be here, now… Be present. Moments are fleeting, and our mortal lifetimes are brief.
I smile to myself like I know something. Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t. My results definitely vary. I’m having my own experience – and it’s real. I get back to the parking lot, which is filling with people and dogs. This is not my idea of a great time, so I wrap up my notes and my put my gear back in the car. Coffee would be good right about now, and it feels like a good opportunity to begin again.
Travelers on the same path are nonetheless each having their own experience.
