Los Angeles, San Francisco, on the road and on the trail

2011.2017

​

"Their beauty was of a magnitude that touched a threshold of pain.  I spent all of my summers beside them, not in the alpine or foothill country but at mid-elevations, amid blankets of mustang clover and bracken fern, manzanita, oak, and the first stands of incense cedar and ponderosa.  For hours, sometimes days if I had backpacked to a remote place, I would stretch my limbs across a smooth beige boulder beside an emerald river and listen to the water find its way down the mountain.  I took from the river a calm primed by something explosive, which, in those days, was precisely the kind of person I wanted to be.  Breathing, it seemed to me, was a proper attribute for the mountains that knifed through California's heart, mountains that quietly functioned as a single thing with a rhythmic inhale-exhale I could feel whenever I lay facedown on the warm granite, arms outstretched and heart pounding, surrounded by Muir's 'glorious array of white peaks deep in the sky, every feature glowing, radiating beauty that pours into the flesh and bones like heat rays from fire.'"

- Ellen Melloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise

​

​

"A good mother grows into a richly eutrophic old woman, knowing that her work doesn’t end until she creates a home where all of life’s beings can flourish."

 - Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass 

​

​