Northern Arizona
Marc
It’s this outlook, it appears, that places at the top of Marc’s list of values the virtue of tolerance, a virtue that, would his principles permit it, he would wish to profess as a universal moral obligation; it is society’s failure to exercise such tolerance that gets him the most worked up. It is also this outlook that seems most responsible for his antipathy to Christianity. “I can’t endure a religion, he says, “that would condemn me to hell for merely pursuing desires with which I was born.”
Jerome
The whole idea of a mining town is inherently impermanent. Such a settlement usually survives only until the natural resources of the site are exhausted and then it fades into a ghost town. In this sense, then, any mine is a gradually disappearing foundation for the attendant settlement. But some of the Jerome mining operations seemed especially bent on destroying the town’s structural foundation even before the copper ran out.
Winter Colors of Beaverhead Flats
This was going to be a post about lichen. Really, it was. And why shouldn’t it have been? This colonial organization of algae, fungus, and cyanobacteria living in mutually beneficial symbiosis, the first form of life to move into an environment denuded of vegetation and soil by natural disasters, and the initial agent of renewal in a devastated ecosystem: why shouldn’t we celebrate it as one of the more glorious inventions of our Creator?