december in the specific northwest

December 26, 2009 by me | 1 comment

tree woods sound

making a sound, sequim, wa, december, 2009.

been busy with some recent weekend trips to vancouver island and washington state’s olympic peninsula. the pacific northwest is remarkable.

alice on the ferry to victoria. we stayed with kyle hobbs, a sailor in the canadian navy, a 25 year old veteran of duty in both afghanistan and the persian gulf, and the victoria ambassador for couchsurfing.com. he’s a wonderful host: more than 215 couch surfers have stayed with him on their way through victoria. we can’t wait to stay with him again.

lovers parking at clover point, victoria, bc

portrait of greg joly, a piano-tuner and wind harp artisan since 1980, victoria, bc.

self-portrait in the window of the harmonic sanctuary, victoria, bc.

victoria, bc.

kyle lived in sooke, a suburb of victoria. on the bus ride in to town, we spent a really great hour chatting music and life with james, aka dj still broke.

sunset view from our 6 bedroom shared house on east 12th street, vancouver, bc.

last week we spent three inspiring days with ankur shah, an author, musician, modern-day sadhu, organic farmer, chef extraordinare, pilgrim and fellow lovewallah, at his mother’s home in sequim, washington. together, we explored the wild old growth forests around the olympic peninsula. ‘old growth’ is one of those orwellian terms like ‘organic’ that have only come into being in the most recent 70 or 80 years of the modern experiment and that only make sense in comparison to un-natural alternatives. why do we accept the tyranny of these marketing words? in the hoh rain forest – from this point forward, i won’t use the redundant ‘old growth’ – we were overwhelmed: soaring, hundreds of years old trees; dozens of varieties of lichens and moss; giant mushrooms sprouting from decaying wood; enormous salmon spawning in the snow-melt rivers; deer grazing in the forest; the hoh river rushing down from the high peaks; our toes frozen by the cold temperatures and the pouring rain. it’s impossible not to feel overwhelmed by life itself in these forests like secular cathedrals. in ankur’s words: monoculture? seriously?