Field Notes
Field Notes is a space for reflection. A venue for sharing the observations, sensations, emotions, and insights experienced through the simple act of moving through nature.
A Vast and Intricate Tapestry
It’s a misty afternoon but the warm glow of the sun is trying to burn through the cloud cover. The tension between the cool rain and the gauzy solar radiation conspire to create the perfect conditions for light and color to dance together. And the rain has worked its gentle power on more than the visual experience. It has seeped deep into the fabric of the land and its inhabitants, enriching the olfactory experience as well. California sage brush, spicy and pungent. Deer, nowhere to be seen, but their lingering scent hanging in the air. Mosses, like the musk of an old library, familiar and nostalgic. And between these moments, the pure joy and power of movement, light and quick on my feet, tracing along a narrow thread of trail woven through a vast and intricate tapestry. What patterns. What details. What stories that tapestry tells. And the emotions it evokes.
April 1, 2026
Mount Tamalpais Watershed, Marin County, CA
It Is One Thing
It’s early spring here and that means there’s usually a first-of-the-season observation I can’t resist stopping for. Today they were pacific peas and blue dicks. Western fence lizards have become more active in the past couple of weeks as well. As I was staring into the eye of one such lizard, I reminded myself to see it both for all its constituent parts and for its collective whole. And then, quite unexpectedly, my mind did a thing it sometimes does—a rapid series of associative thinking—and it jumped from lizard to lichen to my running practice. Few phenomena in nature bring into question the true meaning of an organism like lichen. It is both an alga and a fungus, and yet it is one thing. A split second later, my mind said involuntarily, “and so is my running practice.” It is running, and it is mindfulness, and it is naturalism, and yet it is one thing. I cannot remove one of the parts with out destroying the practice. They are inextricable.
February 26, 2025
Mount Tamalpais Watershed, Marin County, CA
During the Darkest Hours
Waking up early to start a run in the dark and cold can be emotionally challenging. But in addition to the sense of rejuvenation I get from moving through beautiful landscapes, which I could get even if I started my runs later in the morning, the one thing I couldn’t get is the ability to see the intensely detailed world through the focused lens only offered by limited light. Seeing and taking pictures during the darkest hours blocks out surrounding distraction and narrows one’s attention on an object such that you see it more vividly and in greater detail than you would otherwise. Winter months are great for this and provide that additional motivation for putting feet in shoes, arms in sleeves, and heading out the door.
December 18, 2023
Mount Tamalpais Watershed, Marin County, CA
Distracted
I used to feel a twinge of guilt when I would stop during a run to notice something that caught my eye. Like I was too easily distracted. But over time I started realizing that to be distracted is to have your attention pulled away from the thing that is important and toward something that is not. When I came to appreciate that stopping to enjoy a beautiful view, or the pattern of lichen against the bark of a tree, or drops of dew suspended on a spiderweb were just as important to me as running was, I was able to set that twinge of guilt down and never look back at it. When I stop to take in my surroundings, whether in the minutiae or across a sweeping vista, I feel as engaged and present in that moment as when I am feeling the burn in my legs, the rugged ground under my feet, and the rhythm of my breath as I focus in on a stretch of continuous running.
November 20, 2023
Mount Tamalpais Watershed, Marin County, CA
Notice Differently
Yesterday was not a day for sweeping vistas. But it was a day to feel the power of the elements. To feel the wind rush up the mountainside carrying the clouds and mist and debris with it. To feel the moisture in the air gather on your face and then drip downward. To feel your body become soaked to the core over and over with every passing of coyote brush, manzanita or golden chinquapin. To seek out rather than avoid each puddle on the trail. To feel the soft saturated ground under the duff of fallen redwood needles and the crunch of gravel and crumbling rock on the exposed fire roads. The thick fog narrows and deepens your focus on days like these to what is right in front of you and begs you to notice differently.
October 23, 2023
Mount Tamalpais Watershed, Marin County, CA
Euphoria
I woke up early to thick fog and was certain I’d be socked in again at the top of Mt Tamalpais on my third attempt to catch a summit sunrise. But I decided to go for it anyway and after just a few hundred feet of elevation gain, the stars started twinkling through. Before I knew it, I had cleared the low hanging fog and was under the clearest, most vivid night sky I can remember seeing in a very long time. The fog that blocked the cosmos from down below also seemed to be blocking all the light pollution from the surrounding towns and San Francisco leaving a vast inky backdrop pierced by the light of thousands of stars. Once the warm glow of the sun crested over the horizon it revealed the details of an endless cottony ocean rolling over onto itself and tracing the invisible topography beneath. The mountainside vivid and alive now. As I descended the steep East Peak ridge line my legs started to feel worn from absorbing the jackhammering strides on the downhill and my head swirled with the euphoria of a perfect morning spent moving through a perfect landscape.
October 16, 2023
Mount Tamalpais Watershed, Marin County, CA
The Passing of Sensory Input
Yesterday, I ran through such a dizzying array of landscapes that as I slowly climbed the small hill back home, I could hardly believe that only a brief early morning had passed. My mind seems attuned just as much to the passage of sensory input and experience as to the passage of time, if not more so. It shapes and distorts my perception so profoundly that a transition in my attention from a distant glowing peak to a woolly green leaf on the side of the trail to the mesmerizing dance of water evaporating from the glimmering lake into the morning summer air might only be a few moments. But they feel like events separated by so much more; an expansive temporal space lives between them and etches itself in my memory. And when I’ve traversed through a sunrise slicing through a hillside, waded through chest-high drooping brome, climbed the gnarled mess of a rocky weathered forest ridge line, and descended a tangled chaparral patchwork of browning chemise and vibrant green manzanita, so much more than a brief early morning has passed.
August 27, 2023
Mount Tamalpais Watershed, Marin County, CA
Inward Rather Than Outward
As I approach a long run I’ve been training for, I’m focused on putting in the work to be as prepared as I can be. That has meant focusing on running and less on my surroundings. In that process, I’m increasingly inward rather than outward - exploring the crevasses of my mind rather than the crevasses of a rock, the unfurling of an idea rather than the unfurling of a frond, the meandering of a stream of consciousness rather than the meandering of a creek. But I still take a few pictures along the way.
March 11, 2023
Windy Hill Open Space Preserve, Portolla Valley, CA
Cohabitating With the Dead
In a forest, the living cohabitate with the dead. The dead are not systematically reduced to ash or buried in endless rows of boxes. The dead do not become toxic vessels for disease and stench. The dead remain. Their slow decay feeds the forest. Their death enriches the ecosystem. To be a dead tree, to the extent it is anything, seems a far greater thing than to be anything else that is dead.
December 15, 2020
Camano Ridge Forest Forest Preserve, Camano Island, WA
The Tree Stands All the Taller
The deeper I run into the forest, the higher I climb up the hills, the more I feel completely myself. All the things we say and do because we feel we should, because they are expected of us, they creep into the most private corners of our minds and inhabit even that most sacred space. In a forest, they shed like heavy snow off a branch and the tree stands all the taller.
November 11, 2020
Mount Hood National Forest, OR