No bike or dog left behind

Friends

Top of Mt. Ashland • 5,000 ft. of blow-your-shocks-out descent. Two shoulder injuries this summer on this chunky beast

Finished reading (2021): Small Wonder: Essays by Barbara Kingsolver 📚

Been picking at this one for well over a year now. I’d like to think that this book is a good indicator for how much I have changed. Fifteen years ago, I could not, even just dispositionally, have read this collection—or had any interest in it, at least. Now, I think these essays are just dandy. 🤓

I’ve never read any of her fiction, but here Kingsolver writes with the heart of Wendell Berry. (She may even say as much.) It’s the sort of thing I wish came to people’s minds when they heard the word “conservative”: to live simply, deeply, and to conserve and consciously nurture what is good. And for me, there was also a line from Chesterton that came to mind almost every time I picked up the book, from his essay “A Sense of Proportion”:

“They say it is Utopian; and they are right. They say it is idealistic; and they are right. They say it is quixotic; and they are right. It deserves every name that will indicate how completely they have driven justice out of the world; every name that will measure how remote from them and their sort is the standard of honourable living; every name that will emphasise and repeat the fact that property and liberty are sundered from them and theirs, by an abyss between heaven and hell."

Finished reading (2021): Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver by Mary Oliver 📚

I don’t know a poet who was ever easier to pick up and enjoy, without fail, every time. And yet she also never fails to confront some part of your ego or to call you out for sleeping-walking through life. I’ll probably just start reading it over again.

But now we learn, as season followed season
And no one plants upon these hills,
How poor a gift is freedom to the spirit
That loved the labor.

Thoughts from Jack • “Are you guys done playing Euchre card game yet?”

Little Bear, Wee Bear, and Jack

Camping at Big Bear Lake, Trinity-Shasta National Forest

On the way to Bear Lake • “Are we there yet?”

Mt. Thielsen