About thirty years ago in Lassen Volcanic National Park, I discovered a cross-country link between the park road and a trail that would make possible a four to five-day winter snowshoe hike around Mt. Lassen itself. Achieving that circumnavigation became a goal for me that I finally achieved on my fourth attempt. My first attempt was twenty-five years ago. By the second night I had made it as far as King’s Creek Meadow but the next morning, while trying to get water from an opening in the twenty feet of snow above the creek, I lost my canteen and had to turn back. My return was mostly a gentle downhill route along the snow-buried park road. As I strode along, the idea of writing a quarterly newsletter surfaced in my mind. I had finished my book, Shifting, and I wasn’t doing any writing. I realized that this lack of writing had led to not keeping track of and developing new ideas. A quarterly newsletter to people who had responded to my book would help keep me attuned. And if I kept doing it, in twenty-five years, when I was seventy, I would have written one hundred issues. Those numbers felt like a neat combination of events so I set that as a goal.
Twenty-five years later, I am indeed now seventy years old and here is Cairns #100. My goal has been achieved so I’m going to step back from Cairns. I will no longer be doing a quarterly newsletter. I assume that I will keep writing about thoughts and experiences I will want to share but I don’t want the pressure of a quarterly newsletter.
The last couple of weeks, for example, I’ve been trying to write something worthy about how my life energy can best respond to the pandemic and climate change. But the pressure of a deadline tends to push me towards repeating what others have said. Then while walking, I thought “you can’t explore the area beyond the trail until you’ve first reached the end of the trail.” Completing Cairns #100 is part of the trail. Complete it first. Part of that completion is thanking all of you who helped me along the way in reaching this goal. Thank you.
During the following three months, I decided to winnow my accumulation of Cairns down to these and put them on-line. Working on that is suggesting a next step of expanding this website with a blog page.
And continuing to love my family, teach part time at Chrysalis, steward our homestead, and go on rain walks.
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