Gold Side Gothic

These Okanogan Forest Service roads are punctuated by the weathered husks of farmhouses, their glass and paint long departed, their Norman Rockwell profiles drooping with iron sickness.

But not rot; that wants rain, and the only moisture that ever flowed freely in this country was the blood, sweat, and tears of homesteaders.

When even that ran out, families surrendered.

Standing by those vacant windows, you can feel the handshake, smell the wash, taste the bacon, and in the keening of a wind-blown hinge, touch a sorrow full as deep as it was four generations ago.

(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Around Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. Photo of Douglas County derelict courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

WW: Summer shore

WW: Silver-spotted tiger moth caterpillar

(Lophocampa argentata.)

Founding Theory of Zen

If you chew anything long enough, you can swallow it and poop it back out.

(Photo of Oligocene coprolites courtesy of the Poozeum and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Headbone

(Cow skull found in pasture and hung on barn wall. A visceral human response I've commented on before.)

Self-Knowledge Kyôsaku

"If you want to know what you are, go ask a tree."

Seung Sahn

(Photo courtesy of Mufaddal Abdul Hussain and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: A hundred eclipsed suns

(We experienced a 94% solar eclipse here two days ago. I couldn't look at it because I didn't have any protective glasses, but I needn't have worried; in the event, the light turned the Japanese maple in the dooryard into a mass of pinhole cameras, projecting a hundred eclipsed suns on the entry tiles.)