On Iceland’s Glorious Nothingness

The human psyche panics when forced to sit with emptiness, the solitary process of creating something from nothing.

Monoglot

Of the many things that embarrass me about being an American abroad—that we’re so loud, that we take up so much space, that we’re so high maintenance—what most embarrasses me is my functional inability to speak anything but English.

Linguini

The skin of boulders holds onto our touch and tucks rattlesnakes into the earth. Waterfalls pulled the blue of our veins to the near surface as our toes submerged to rocks steamed with glacier water.

Walking Man

He moved swiftly, efficiently. Walking Man never said a word except “Hello” each time he passed, or each time I passed him as he sat drinking coffee at a café.

My Waterloo

I’m a one-hundred-percent-rational adult, but I feel delightfully off-balance as I realize I’m walking toward my destiny – the new horoscopes for the upcoming Year of the Rat.

A Bath in the Forest

For the last 15 years, I’ve been a city-dweller and I’ve started to feel semi-captive, a condition the naturalist John Muir described as “tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized.”