A good friend recently said something like, “damn we’re lucky to live in a place where we can see this every day,” referring to the enormous range of mountains beyond the Palmer Flats as we drove through. Of course he’s right, but his comment was incomplete. It left out the vision of Cook Inlet on the other side of the road.

It was an important comment because I said the same thing when we first came to Alaska in April 2019 and drove from Anchorage to Palmer, nearly the exact same location. I was an outsider then. Today the coincidence isn’t lost on me, this place is gorgeous.

What about life is not? Whatever negativity we come up with is imaginary, anyway. So is the positive. I say it all the time, our labels are the only definition. Nature, earth, Gaia (whatever), the universe, physics… none of it gives a fuck how we perceive our experience. Yet we look back from the inside and judge, often without the awareness that nothing out there even knows we even exist. That stuff just is; so why can’t we be the same?