Music is my life. A large part of why I believe I don’t really live in the real world is because of music. I live it. There is nothing that can capture my feelings so completely. I am enraptured, enraged, elated, melancholy, inspired, desolate and hopeful, pumped up and relaxed. For every emotion, there is…

Mountain peaks are rarified. There is something very special about getting to the very top of a mountain. The vertex, turning point in its very most basic meaning, is a place from which you can only change direction. The amount of effort that it takes to get to the peak of a mountain may be…

Plants embody tenacity to me. It is the bravest act of an organism to commit itself to a single location through its life with no recourse or chance to flee whatever the world might throw at it. Plants set their roots, sometimes deep, sometimes superficially, but they are then constrained to that spot. They have…

Rippling water is scintillating motion. The appearance of rippling water is one of the most memorizing things, the constant change and near-chaos is somehow tempered to a calming pattern. There is in infinite variety of rippling water based on the constructive and destructive interference of the waves because there are so many origin points of…

Food with a view combines two of my favorite things: food and views. It is one of the few things that I will freely splurge on with money and not feel resentful at the extra spending. The reason this combination is so wonderful for me is probably because you can fill pauses in eating with…

Being good sore means that you have worked yourself, you have pushed the limits of what you can do, but you have not over-done it. Good sore is the sore of doing something you are just unaccustomed enough at to feel it the next day or several days. You have challenged yourself and every feeling…

Fires provide heat and light. They are hypnotizing, our best weapon, and sometimes our great peril. Fires can be made at home or camping. They can be big or small, hot or cold. I live in a house where the wood stove, and therefore fire, is the only way to keep the house consistently warm.…

Dragons are one of my defining characteristics. People often ask why I like dragons. They are the antagonists most of the time after all: evil, chaotic, greedy, destructive, vindictive, et cetera. The thing is that my earliest encounters with dragons did not feature the paragons of destructive beings. The first dragons I can remember encountering…