Deception Pass will get you

Wobbly knees, anyone?

Surprised myself when my knees got a bit wobbly and I clutched my phone/camera in a vise grip sure I'd drop it 200 feet to the swirling water below. This is Deception Pass Bridge connecting Whidbey and Fidalgo islands in Washington. The two-lane motor bridge is more than a quarter mile in length with a three-foot pedestrian walkway. We walked over and back, having already hiked trails along the forested cliffs.

At one spectacular moment, two bald eagles soared right over our heads mid-way across the bridge. What a thrill! The nearby Upper Skagit River Valley has one of the largest populations of wintering bald eagles in the continental U.S.

Look closely and see the steel arch of the bridge through the trees. The trails, some quite narrow and rocky, are breathtakingly close to sheer drop-offs but the jade color of the water is equally breathtaking. The area was carved by glaciers and is a deep channel connecting the Strait of Juan de Fuca with the Saratoga Passage.

Before the bridge was built in 1934 by Civilian Conservation Corps and local farmers, travelers would hit a metal saw with a mallet to call a ferry operated by the first woman ferry captain in Washington, Bertie Olson.

Travel+Leisure lists the Deception Pass bridge as one of the scariest in the world.
It is certainly also one of the most beautiful.

Deception Pass State Park has 35 miles of trails with almost 15 miles of saltwater shoreline.

It was a most excellent day, which I recommend to anyone visiting Washington.

The things I see

Surprise, surprise. While hiking in a wooded park by Puget Sound, we came across a happy face drawn on this mossy tree stump. The beautiful scenery and fresh air already had me smiling, but this made me smile even wider.

Despite all the bad news in the world, life on this incredible planet can be mighty fine.

Another day, walking along a huge lake I wrote a haiku (the birds were too speedy for a photograph)

warm March on the lake,
'whoosh' of coots make a rooster
tail of white water

Where my feet take me

Between rain and a threat of snow in low-lying Southern California, I walked up the little mountain in town to an old stone tower. It makes me feel I'm in another land, one I visit for escape, even the dark kind.

Lots on my mind--death of loved ones, uncertain future, fear that I will never get where I'd hoped to go. I spent considerable time on this walk intrigued with stone. Watching newly-released, underground springs glisten over granite boulders, finding soil and rock slides that will continue as long as the ground is saturated, marveling at the varied moods even stone can trigger.

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Is it inanimate? I think not.

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As I stood under a stone bridge, I noticed the picture-perfect scene of freshness it framed--lively, scudding clouds, tender new grass (this is February in SoCal, remember) and, again, the punctuation of jutting, sprawling rock.

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I once heard piles of weathered boulders described as woolsack, presumably for a resemblance to sacks of wool. I'm not a geologist, but they sometimes do look like a jumble of sacks.

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Stone gives the world texture, substance, history--forged in the beginnings of earth time, breaking down to allow new life.

There is so much going on when you look closely.

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Late in the day, I saw this

but took no photo:

white ghosts of mountains

flicker in and out of the

drifting cloud bank

and this:

bare branches, storm-stripped.

through the lattice of their limbs,

piles of dusty-pink clouds
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And, as it always does, Nature pulled me to my feet, gave me a staff and said get on with it.

A day in the life

Yesterday, I climbed the little mountain in my town, as I do, and found rejuvenation waiting--the sky scrubbed by wild winds the day before, the earth sprouting where last month's deluge had soaked in, unseen birds singing. So words popped in my head to form haiku.

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a sudden trilling,

wild burst of exuberance

on a still morning

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ancient granite

yields a foothold to fragile

wild grasses

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Today, I have a crit group meeting all afternoon. Our stories will take me to Wales and India and the rural South. I will climb mountains with them and find hope along the journey, because that's what writing and writers bring to my life--a sense of new beginnings and wonder, words developed and shaped to form worlds where we make sense of ours.

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And, today, I remember a man of tremendous courage and foresight, who brought hope and rejuvenation to the world. May we all learn not to judge by the color of skin or country of origin or religious belief or physical impairment or anything except the content of character, the goodness of spirit. And may we all, someday, be free at last.

In memory of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Random haiku

silent pair of crows--

scraps of black velvet soaring

on an updraft.

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That's it. A random haiku written in my head while walking. Now back into the land of my fairytale to see where the updrafts take me.

Catching notes on the wind

Hiking a boulder-studded hill, I heard lonely, haunting musical notes on the breeze. Where were they coming from?

Then I saw him, a flute player perched on the highest rock of the hard-scrabble hill, playing his echoing sound to the sky and wind and birds. And me.

At this distance I could only imagine his fingers moving over the instrument's holes to alter the pitch, the resonance.
Like a gentle sigh, I could feel his breath in the length and clarity of the notes. I was flying, floating upon them.

Did you know that flutes are the oldest known instruments? One made from a bird's bone about 35,000 years ago was discovered in 2008 in a cave in Germany.

I was still smiling from my close encounter with the wild flute player when I rounded a bend in the trail and came upon a man singing.

The world is alive with music and joy. Sometimes, we're lucky enough to stumble upon it.

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That was about a month ago. When I returned to that same area yesterday, I didn't find a flute player, but I was amazed by the splashy abundance of brittlebush.

The hill--from base to crown--is covered with this desert member of the sunflower family.

Brittlebush is a tough survivor of southwestern deserts. It's light gray leaves reflect sunlight to keep the plant cool during the hottest months, and the hairy surface of the leaves act like a blanket against extremes of heat and cold. In springtime, it is a common sight along roads and canyons, but I have never seen such a widespread carpet of the plants on this hill before.

It is a fine spring. Even the birds say so.

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fantail of orange

across blue sky--red-tailed hawk

kissed by sunlight

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There's been a lot of chat lately on blogs about what writers should blog about, why we blog, what's the point, what's our focus, etc. I like to visit blogs that both inform and entertain, that are extensions of the blogger as a writer. Beth Revis started a fantastic discussion about writing love triangles and what makes them work or not. It's worth your time to read her posts and the comments. That's my favorite kind of blogging--where writers interact, share ideas.

What do you enjoy about blogs you read?

What comes next or snippety snippets

I saw this boy hiking past a favorite boulder of mine on the local mountain I haunt. The light was

in the magic zone when gray and beige granite turns golden as the sun sinks toward the horizon.

I shot the picture (on my uber-cellphone) and remembered a character from my YA fantasy currently in revision repose. That's my new terminology for: I had to put it aside or go bonkers.

The character's name is Samuel and he is a 12-year-old with little education, strange speech patterns and a gift for storytelling. One of his tales is about a place called Thane's Tor. He and the novel's protagonist, Fiona, are searching for it. She asks why he is certain he will recognize that particular outcrop of boulders in the rocky terrain they are traveling.

"Simple as flatcakes. Ma telled me Thane's story many a time, and sometimes I took charcoal and drawed the creatures. That's how much I likes it."

Samuel settled back against a fallen tree trunk, ready to spin his tale.

"Once't long, long ago in the far, far-away north lived Thane, a giant amongst men. Now, Thane was a warrior-mage. He could heave boulders big as houses on his enemies and squash them like a worm underfoot."

Samuel stopped to tell Fiona an aside: "Me Ma never said that worm part. But I figured it out."

I'm interrupting this snippet to condense the story: Samuel describes a battle Thane has with goblins. Thane defeats them by turning boulders into beasts that crush the goblins "flat as slapped flies." The creatures, whom Thane changes back into rock, include a dragon-sized snake, enormous wolf, a bird-headed toad and a bunch of gingermen that resemble baker's treats.

"Now I gives you that gingermen do not sound so scary, but methinks if you had an army of gingermen tall as cottages, you 'ud get out the way."

(So on my hike, I think I saw the gingermen. Do you?)

When Samuel tells Fiona the beasts are still guarding Thane's Tor, she says it's just a story.

"Never is just a story. Ma was always a'tellin' me, 'Samuel, remembers you that a story is the bones of the past, and worlds are built upon those as was and ever will be.' The stories be all around just waiting to come alive, can't you see?"

Obviously, storytelling is on my mind. I loved a comment Neil Gaiman put on his blog. Someone asked what quotes he would like to see on library walls, and he said it would be the one every writer loves to hear from reader/listeners:

"...and then what happened?"

Laughing at clouds

My day was about pretzel-ing into my sporty but low-slung Miata, extricating myself to pump gas and push a wobbly-wheeled basket through a supermarket. It was all about ho-hum until I took the magical sunset hike.

The sky fairies spun cotton-candy clouds, and I laughed.

Because when I see pink clouds I remember my friend, Kevin, who died too young. After one of his many surgeries he told me that he stood on a wind-whipped cliff and gazed at a pink cloud and laughed in delight. We should always laugh at the gorgeous silliness of our world as if we had bought just one more day.

As I hiked, the sun sunk deeper beyond the horizon and the mountain silhouettes turned slate-gray and then black. Coyotes ripped in high-pitched hysteria from the river bottom. Have you ever noticed how frenzied they sound compared to the haunting howl of wolves?

The sky became so saturated in color that it reminded me of a character I wrote for a story that never got finished. So I'll give him a little spotlight here:

A man appeared with skin the color of rainbows. Around his waist was a belt with hooks that held a clattering skirt of paintbrushes in all sizes and shapes.

"Now that's a sky worthy of Tiepolo or Veronese, although, you know, I taught them how to do it," he said to me.

I was too astonished to ask what he meant.

He dipped a brush into pigment, using himself as a palette. Then he lifted the brush, which grew so long it reached the sky, and he dabbed a swath of coral, hot as the Caribbean across the clouds.

"Where do you get such color?" I asked, finally more curious than awe-struck.

"It's all around! Purples from amethyst, teal from amazonite, emerald-green from diopside. For blues, there is lapis lazuli or azurite. Malachite gives deep green. Did you know I can make superb storm clouds from blue apatite and forests from the green?"

I shook my head, watching his paintbrush gild the edge of a cloud.

"You don't see skies like this too often any more. Mostly, they've faded," he said, his brush hand dropping to his side.

"How can that be? You are painting this one."

"I was drawn by your desire to see the setting sun. There was a time when people honored sunrise and sunset. They held ceremonies. Their shamans chanted. They burned sweet herbs and played music. There was the miracle of a new day and of its close. But now, people barely notice. It's as though they've lost their connection to the cycle of days, to the wonder of it. Nobody cares anymore, and so it is fading."

Okay, that's the snippet. I've got no more. So what do you think--have we lost our sense of wonder? Or are we the ones to keep it alive.

Give me a little time

There is a hike I take frequently up a boulder-riddled hill within the city. It's a three or four mile walk with lovely views, especially at sunset.

One of the cool things is it often leads to ideas for my fiction. I keep a pen and little notebook in my pocket for those thoughts when they come out of nowhere. It reminds me of a meteor streaking so hot and sudden in the sky that you gasp. And if I don't write those ideas down, they can fade like those falling stars.

Hiking today, however, I found inspiration for this blog. Two women in front of me were chatting, and I overheard, "I get so bored, I've got to kill some time."

All I could think is if you have time you don't want, GIVE IT TO ME. Sorry for the shout, but time is the most precious thing any of us have. There is never enough to do all I want to, and I fear running out of it. Part of this, no doubt, is that I am a cancer survivor and that tends to make you greedy to hang on to every minute. Part of this is that I am a writer and there are so many stories I'd like to have time to tell.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate 'down' time when we visit with friends, see a summer movie or just stare at a sky filled with stars, but that is not the same as killing time. I say, savor it, embrace it, make it count. I'd love to hear your reaction.