Just give me a tree with enough shade for two, an acoustic guitar, and five hours that pass as a lifetime, and I'll play along to the serenading birds building a nest for our dreams to find truth in.

I don't count sheep. I count the curves of the swaying flamingos. I pause to watch them bury their heads in their reflections along the soft wet sand. As I count the just-hatched chicks, soft and white in a sea of pink, my heart closes my eyes. I count the days since I fell in love with Fuente de Piedra, hoping to return in my sleep.

RIGHT NOW will never happen again, so we compose our memory with snapshots of life's better notes. The melodies of what we hope for are forever stamped onto records, playing through the chirping of birds and the sounds of waves embracing us.


(photo Ventura Beach)

Some call it peace, some call it heaven. It's that space between the moments of collapse. Found between our ancestors wisdom that we choose to never follow, and those arms we only go to when we shouldn't. It's that place we learn from, but only realize its importance once we choose to forget it ever existed. Some call it peace, some call it heaven. I call it Los Angeles.

(photo San Pasqual Stables / Lower Arroyo hiking trail)

...the inspiring awe of a Teslin Lake, embedded into the curves of a simple smile. The fishermen have shown me the certain greatness that lies beneath the magnificent beauty of the still waters, and beside the restless trees that embrace them. A life so beautifully delicate and complex that even men yearn, as women do their families, to foster a particular process of sharing time with, and to better understand, what’s hidden below.

And now, perhaps in my journeyed existence as a young woman, I’ve discovered that even beyond this life in the waters, stirs an even greater purpose. As a clown disguises his sadness in his false smiles, the waters cry out to us, not as sadness but as proof, that a smile is what we should seek to take when we explore its robust, still body. A smile that reminds us that it’s the world that we should make happy, and we merely follow. Our lives belong to this world, and the essence of our being lay still in the water. It’s the all-recondite joy we should share and remember, without asking why. Happiness doesn’t begin or end with a view or photo of a lake, nor with the fish caught from it. Happiness begins with awareness of the fragility of our lives and our response to all that the Earth has given us, including that smile in the lake.

2013 memory of Teslin Lake, Yukon 2005