WILD splendid life is a personal journal inspired by the world outside. Through memory and reflection, it honors the ways in which our inner lives are enriched by and reminiscent of the outdoors--its "magic things" and grand diversions, its distant corners and discoveries close at hand. Adventure in the wild features prominently here, rounded out by the comforts of home, good food, and strolls through the city. Colorado, as well as destinations around the globe, provide the setting. Like life, publication frequency ebbs and flows.
Read moreShe pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net.
Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder,
so much of life in its meshes!
She called in her soul to come and see.
Mt. Kilimanjaro – Tanzania. I’d never given much thought to my lungs. Their synchronized expansion and contraction. The seamless and automatic exchange of gases. Silent, heaving, spongy bags filled almost a thousand times an hour with sterile, conditioned air; exhaust…
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Medicine Bow Peak, Snowy Range – Wyoming, U.S.A. At eight years old, disaster was being assigned to the fourth grade classroom of the most reviled teacher at Sheridan Road Elementary. Dread held me tight. Life was over. But when I…
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Boston Mine, Mayflower Gulch – Colorado, U.S.A. A passed note, an invitation to a tête-à-tête, between classes, amid firehouse red lockers. A surge of backpacks, books folded tightly under arms and against chests, carry me there, racing against the tardy bell….
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Fowler Trail, Eldorado Canyon – Colorado, U.S.A. Jabu and I once tried to ring in the new year among the heaving, confetti-dusted crowds of Times Square. It was cold and blustery that night. We’d traveled from Washington, DC, to be…
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Denver – Colorado, U.S.A. I want our home to smell like the holidays, however that smells. Sweet and spicy and warm, I think. Friends laugh when they learn that we do not usually keep sugar in our cupboards–only a small…
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Denver – Colorado, U.S.A. The shimmery balsa wood rocking horse was always my favorite ornament. Ma found it, years ago, at the Christkindl Market in Frankfurt’s Römerberg Platz. Ten years old at the time, I adored its smooth, blue body and how…
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Albuquerque International Balloon Festival – New Mexico, U.S.A. Hundreds of hot air balloon burners flare just before dawn, tall flames licking the darkness. I point frozen cheek bones and a bare, numb forehead toward the nearest. On a frigid desert morning,…
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Mts. Democrat, Cameron, Lincoln – Alma, Colorado, U.S.A. Honestly, I had never heard of a “fourteener.” That time on Deer Mountain, three months after I arrived to Colorado, when the members of my hiking party sounded off their fourteener status–“I’ve…
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