Archive for January, 2012

I love February.  In the Pacific Northwest it usually means spring is right around the corner—unless, of course, we get one of those La Niña winters. Then forget it. I’ll be sporting rubber boots and long underwear until June.

February also usually means I start eyeing my waistline, assessing the cumulative effects of good food, wine, and months of long rainy days spent indoors sitting at a computer without even thinking about the gym let alone cracking a consistent sweat in spin class.

Following this vein I was going to write about the “D” word this week. But I just couldn’t face it. Dieting after a Holiday Season full of good cheer (which I can easily manage to extend well into January) is rather like ending a luxury vacation at Hôtel Le Meurice in Paris at a Super 8 in Fort Wane, Indiana. Letdown doesn’t begin to describe it. Read more…

The recent snow and ice storm that paralyzed the Puget Sound region, putting almost 500,000 people out of power, was the first time I ever experienced a power outage with no alternative heat source to electricity.

It wasn’t the worst winter storm I’ve been through. The worst was in 2006 when the power was out for two weeks. But then I lived in the country. A wood stove heated my house and firewood was stacked high in the woodshed. A 500-gallon propane tank fed my gas stove and oven. I had a generator hooked up to my well. The only thing missing was Internet.

That time around I’d called Puget Sound Energy on an old-fashioned non-battery operated touchtone phone to get an update on likely restoration times and—unlike the 487 other times I’d called (remember? No Internet!)—got a live human being on the line. Read more…

There are many faces of devotion.

I scanned through hundreds of pictures of men kissing women’s feet and breasts, women kissing men’s hands, and Golden Retrievers staring adoringly up into their master’s faces before I found this particular image on Photobucket titled “Devotion.”

There were some pictures of people praying to various religious icons. But these were few and far between. Even more rare was the picture depicting sacred devotion as an internal event based on no “thing” at all.

Human beings don’t like fumbling around in the dark, swooning after ungraspable ideals. Most of us like our icons to be concrete and measurable. In fact, that’s what an icon is: an object that symbolically stands for something more abstract like God, spirit or grace.

We lose track of the fact that the Holy Grail—the ultimate icon of Christianity—was granted to Parcifal, the most simple of the Knights of the Round Table. The others, Sir Galahad, Gawain, Lancelot, Bedivere and all the rest, were too busy running around chasing Queens, ladies-in-waiting, battle glory, lands and titles. Parcifal was only man who lusted after the ideal of the Grail and not the Grail itself. Thus, he was the only Knight deemed pure enough to be its Keeper. Read more…

Is it possible to resist a subject line like “salmon sex” in your inbox? I couldn’t …

Which meant that a few mornings later I donned rubber boots and rain slicker to join several women friends on a difficult upstream trek to watch thousands of chum salmon beat their way up a tiny waterway feeding the Nisqually River close to my home in Washington State.

Having survived the fishermen and nets of the Nisqually Indian Tribe far down river, it was an awe-inspiring and brutal sight watching them drive for the finish line. For every salmon managing to propel its body uphill over the rocks and logs to gain access to spawning nirvana near the creek’s headwaters, dozens lay dead or dying in their wake.

Eagles sat in trees, eyeballing the moveable feast below, too glutted to fly. Herons stood on the banks, leisurely pecking at the buffet of salmon roe lying amidst slick pebbles and sand. Read more…