Float back now to the surface and follow the hull of this primordial ocean, in all its vastness to a clear, warm continental shelf, where the ecotone of empty rock and empty sea meet. This gently sloping mantle of tepid sea water, filled with piercing sun is where it all begins. It starts where everything starts, on the bottom of the ocean.

Your job might be boring, but you aren’t, babe!

Our careers are the least interesting things about us

Easing in is not for me

It's certainty

And also mourning. And also being really frustrated.

It is fully, truly, wonderfully summer on the Western Slope

What I learned last year

How to develop resiliency

Why you should do a lot of things

Because life doesn’t come with guarantees

Fulfilling deferred dreams

The most impactful action you can take right now

Big themes for next year

And miles to go before I sleep…

Let’s not talk about the elections just yet.

I am still trying to process what exactly happened last Thursday. I am still trying to get my nervous system to come down from the chaos and the feeling that I was almost certainly going to see someone drown. I am emotionally preparing for this week’s class in which we have a full two hours to learn how to clear water out of our masks while underwater. What horrors will these children drum up?

Even though it’s still in the 90s in Grand Junction and only halfway through August, I already feel like I can smell autumn in the breeze. Please enjoy this snapshot of my summer.

We paddled on, got further out from the homes, and found a somewhat quieter stretch of river. We set up camp in the near dark and took a dozen or more attempts to throw a rope up over a high branch to hang our food. The fireworks dragged out long into the evening as did a particularly loud playlist of the same nine patriotic songs that played on repeat for several hours. By the time the rain began to fall around 11pm, my head was jammed full of Neil Diamond’s Proud To Be An American that not even the steady patter of rain on my tent could drown out. But the weather did shut down the fireworks. All that lingered was the thick scent of gunpowder, clinging to the saturated air.

I watched my grandpa grow bitter and mean at the end of his life, consuming Fox News in great heaving gulps the same way the cancer on his pancreas was consuming him from the inside out. I don’t remember many pleasant exchanges with him in those final years. Even when he knew he was staring down the last months of his earthly existence, most conversations (which my family worked INCREDIBLY HARD to make about ANYTHING other than politics) were inevitably tainted with some moment of red faced rage of his own creation at the “damn liberals.”