Glacier Bay-WWJM(John Muir) Do?
Alaska Field Notes · The Elixir
Have a nICE Day
Alaska, Norway, and the recurring realization that Mother Nature and Father Time are far stranger than the maps suggest.
Same Ship, Different Day
Alaska Meets Norway
The geography changes. The epiphany keeps returning.
I had a similar epiphany in the Norwegian Geirangerfjord: Mother Nature and Father Time Are Effing Special.
Before Norway, Earth Goddess was just a yuppie salad dressing you could buy at Whole Foods. I never thought people died. They just went to organic health food stores... and that Japanese guy who always wins the hot dog eating contest is the anti-Christ.
Signal 01
Past the Point of No Return
“I’m past the point of no return.”
Today, as I kayak in the fjords and observe the sun, the water, the green and everything in flow, I say to myself, “Yes indeed, all this belongs to me.” And more than that, I play a role in its appearance.
As I get a glimpse of the deeper, random, chance encounters of my three-pound universe — brain — with Mother Nature and Father Time being demoted from actual reality to my mere subjective experience of consciousness, I feel immortal.
Signal 02
Father Time Simply Reboots
The epiphany being: old-school selfishness says, I am the center of the world. New World Order says, I create the world. Space and time are not objects — they are my brain’s tools for putting everything together. Without me, they do not exist.
Reminds me of the joke: if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
We carry space and time around with us like turtles with shells. Without mind, matter does not matter. It hovers in waves of probability. Thus, there is no absolute grid we live in where things occur independent of our own thinking about it.
Although our body may self-destruct, the twenty-watt fountain of energy operating in the brain does not go away at death. Father Time simply reboots. The universe is in our head, and not out there separate from us. What the bleep?
Companion Stories
Continue Through Alaska
Alaska Summer
A season of ice, ships, wilderness, and northern light.
Read Alaska SummerWings Over Misty Fjords
Alaska from above, where water, mountains, and weather become one moving map.
Read Misty FjordsPath of Moist Resistance
Ketchikan rain, persistence, and the wet route through Southeast Alaska.
Read KetchikanThe Elixir
Alaska and Norway keep returning the same message: the world is outside the window, but the meaning is assembled inside the mind.Same ship. Different day. Different coast. The same widening sense that geography changes consciousness long before it changes the itinerary.