Computer died more than a month ago, and I've only just recently replaced it and gotten things back in order. Following are some photos from a few weeks ago. The reflection photos are early morning at Phyllis Lake in the White Cloud Mountains, and the rainbow photos are of an evening thunderstorm dangling over the Pioneer Mountains, immediately east of Sun Valley.

    An early-morning hike in the Boulder Mountains late in June. We were looking for a wolf den but found only silence.

    It’s a gnarled and tortured form, charred branches angling, leafless, lifeless. These pathetic limbs sway in the afternoon breeze, a trunk protruding from patches of blackened earth, dirt that once fed this wretched remnant of a bush its life.
    Ten months have passed since fire swept this valley, choking the sky and ravaging the forest, driving out its wild companions. To the west, higher still in the drainage, are divisions of towering charcoal trunks, rank-and-file monuments to the sheer power of Mother Nature in her rawest of moods.
  My attention returns to the bush. It is quite dead, destined for decomposition, but there’s an unmistakable aesthetic to its form. It’s a beauty that’s accentuated by the life threading the encircling meadow. Slender blades of Great Basin wild rye grow in twelve-inch-tall clumps. Yellow bunches of arrowleaf balsamroot and purple bluebells crowd the blackened mat of ashen earth. The fire’s evidence is clear, but the beauty in the rebirth is stunning, a resurrection one might not have thought possible having seen the sheer scale of the flames that incinerated this place.
    The sun is slanting through an exanimate stand of timber, and my head rises to meet its rays. I shoulder my pack and work my way west toward the heart of the burn, wondering if it’s where I should go.
    There’s a nearby creek that twists and tumbles over a rocky bed and smiles into meandering oxbows. The waters play with happy momentum in the waking day, producing syllables that tell subtle secrets if one pauses long enough to hear. The verve surrounding the creek is unmistakable. It feeds sedges and willows, which are growing with more vigor than parts of the valley where water is more sparse. But, still, everywhere things are growing. Everywhere there is life. Everywhere it is beautiful, and that beauty is because of the vigor of the growth, but also the contrast in the landscape, simultaneously dead and reborn.
    Much of what burned will never live again. The gnarled bush near the canyon’s entrance is forever gone. But the land is resilient, and it flowers still, growing in new ways, in fact invigorated by its own destruction. So on I walk, plodding toward the center, smiling at my purpose, and wondering what will become.

I probably have some thoughts to write, but they're beyond me at the moment. Follow this link to a photo essay on Andy Post, who passed all too early last week. Here's a link to Andy's obituary from the June 26 Denver Post.

I'm working on another Web site, www.westernperspective.com, and my ideas are still really rough. I figured I'd post a page to try to get my gears ticking. It's little more than a brainstorm, and it doesn't link anywhere. However, I welcome ideas, visions or perspectives on content, design and/or overall purpose.

“The fear of emotion is closely coupled with the fear of self-revelation, which effectively silences most would-be writers.”

“I see few would-be writers who can’t write, but many who for various reasons can’t feel, see, hear or think … Lately, however, I’ve come to believe that powerful emotions are not as rare as they might seem to be. Most people have simply buried them so deep that they can’t find them when they look for them.”

“But unless a writer feels an emotion deeply, he can’t set it down convincingly, whether that emotion be worthy or unworthy. And the whole body of a man’s work is inevitably a mirror-image of his soul and mind. That is why writing is such a terrifying business, for after working mightily, a writer may find that he has finally succeeded in exposing himself fully a fool or worse. Some of the worst are in a sense some of the best writers, in that they leave no doubt ... about what they are—they don’t obscure the issue; they come right to grips with their sentimentality, their sadism or their other faults.”

“I once said that the way to write a love story is to fall in love and to have to tell somebody about it and to hell with the rules, if there are any.”

“Just as honest emotion isn’t enough for the violinist, it isn’t enough for the writer’s final draft, although it should be for his first one.”

“One should not try to be a writer any more than one should try to fall in love. The only good way to do either is in spite of oneself.”

“Young people take pen in hand to write about anything which they don’t know about or don’t care about, because if they know about it or care about it, they’re embarrassed to set it down.”

“In the classroom, I try to convince my students of something I believe, which is that no writer writes worse than he knows how to, and no emotion on paper can be faked.”

“All writing, whether it is autobiographical or not, is remorselessly self-revelatory in the same way that dreams are.”

“A man is what he writes, no better and no worse. Writers who are able to interest readers of any kind are invariably sincere, although some of them hate to admit it.”

“Writers of sentimental stories invariably turn out to be genuinely sentimental when you get to know them well, and it is impossible to write a convincingly sadistic story without having a real streak of sadism in one’s nature.”

“A writer cannot choose his audience; he can only be himself and let his audience choose him.”

“A fundamental modesty is one reason why many people can’t write. ‘If writing is really nothing but recording one’s own private view of the world, and if this is fundamentally nothing but putting oneself on paper,’ one student said to me, ‘why should I presume to think I have anything special to offer?’”

“…Regardless of their love of being individualistic, people are really much more alike than they are different. We are all drops of water from the same pond, and anyone who describes himself well, to some degree describes humanity.”

“People who talk about themselves at parties have acquired the reputation of being bores not because they talk about themselves, but because they lie about themselves, because they exaggerate their strengths and leave out their weaknesses. Anyone who could tell me what he loved, feared and hated most, what his hopes were, what his greatest triumphs and disappointments have been, would hold me spellbound. That is, after all, the only kind of person who has a chance of learning how to write.”