I come down off the mountain and into the city. Ever since moving to Arizona, I’ve been searching for an authentic Dia De Los Muertos festival. It’s the weekend before Halloween and a few festivals are going on in the Valley of the Sun, but I choose one close to home, in downtown Mesa. This…
Tag: life
All Hail! The Arizona Renaissance Festival
For the past twelve years (give or take a year or two), I’ve been driving past the “Renaissance Festival” sign at the base of the Superstition mountains in the east end of the valley. I would look out into the vast desert and wonder what truly happens here for six weeks. This past weekend,…
Cenote Ik Kil
The Cenote Ik Kil was as different from the Cenote Maya as New York is from Los Angeles. You can’t even compare the two, and I recommend going to both places if you can. Ik Kil is much larger and more designed for tourists due to being so close Chichen Ixta. Since I was going…
The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center
“A white man opened fire in a historic black church, in Charleston, South Carolina the night of June 17, 2015, killing nine people, including a pastor, during a prayer meeting. “ As I heard this news, I stopped what I was doing and bowed my head in a moment of silence. It’s hard to love a country that is so…
final thoughts on BCK’s last day in Kenya on the project….
When I think back to our final day on the St. Winner’s 2013 school project in the slums of Nairobi, it’s the faces of the little ones I see. Faces that haven’t seen a group of white people in such close proximity to themselves. As the days pass by though, we become closer as we…
the murders of Holcomb
“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas. A lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there”…Until one morning in mid-November, 1959, few Americans, in fact few Kansans, had ever heard of Holcomb. Exceptional happenings never stopped there….” -Truman Capote. In Cold Blood. I awake early, hours before the sun…
CO Poisoning
Out beyond the reach of email and text messages, the flood of incoming penetrates my phone once I have reception…. “He has carbon monoxide poisoning…in the hospital….being rushed to a hyperbaric chamber…don’t know what happened….” Messages such as this hurtle me back to when we lost another sibling a few years before. My knees buckle…
the grounds of Prazsky hrad
It was the morning of my first full day in the city of Prague. As I open my window and look out, I see the spire tips of Prague castle. I use internal GPS to make a map in my mind, and set out on foot to find the entrance. The morning air is…
Lord Calvert Springs
Lord Calvert Springs will forever be synonymous with the man I only knew as Grandpa Leo. A man who wasn’t my Grandpa at all. A man who tells it like it is with a scotch and water, little ice if you would please. Back in the sage brush and pine mountains that he called home…
beyond the slums
We pulled the van off the street and into the trash filled embankment on the side of the road. The putrid smell filled my senses and I gagged. “The school is just down here a little bit, not far…” The dirt path was littered with garbage, a surreal scene as new homes were being…
The Aqua
“Let him think that I am more man than I am and I will be so.”― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea I look for something unique whenever possible for my travels, as the mundane is a poisonous pill to this already short life. So, when I heard about…
In Good Company
As the pictures capture moments in time the clock ticks toward the future, never stopping never waiting for the perfect moment which rarely comes to those who sit idly by. The lens shows the real truth, one can not hide. Struggling to keep your head, your spirits, your essence above the proverbial waters of doubt,…