The residue of hypocrisy remains at the bottom of the coffee cup that is my life. A skewed circular reflection and scum stare back at me; quietly I take the cup into the kitchen and rinse it out.

I get more fulfillment from my connection with land than my connection with people. I long to see the sunrise in the gap between the Thousand Lake and the Boulder in the same way normal people long to see old friends or family members forgotten.

Ice fishing. It is in opposition with all I believe. In the summer months, on open water, on streams, reservoirs, or lakes, I never use bait. Last summer, I logged more fishing hours with my fly pole than my spinning rod. When I did use the spinning rod it was tipped with a jig or a Kastmaster. I carry no worms, powerbait, cheese, salmon eggs, corn, marshmallows, or rancid meat with me yet, in the winter... Hypocrisy. How can I stay sane with such a gap in belief and action?

I missed an ice fishing trip. For the first time in a long time. I really just want to fish in liquid water...

Tomorrow, I'll go under the knife, yet again, and they better fix my knee this time...I hope to chase the Elk up into the thawing canyons by the spring...

It's been a tough winter.

Craig Childs wrote:

"If you lived through only one of those winters the way the elk has, you could write books about it. You would become a shaman. You would be forever changed."

Me. I'm spending the winter on my couch.

My wife and kids were good enough to join me on a frozen desert exploration, so I could mourn with the sleeping truth that is waiting for winter's end...

James Cameron says "Avatar" is a metaphor for the way humankind treats the Earth.

"I see it as a broader metaphor, not so intensely politicised as some would make it, but rather that's how we treat the natural world as well," the Canadian-born filmmaker said.

"There's a sense of entitlement -- 'We're here, we're big, we've got the guns, we've got the technology, we've got the brains, we therefore are entitled to every damn thing on this planet'," he said.

"That's not how it works and we're going to find out the hard way if we don't wise up and start seeking a life that's in balance with the natural cycles of life on earth."

Why is THAT message lost in millions of dollars of production costs and THE only question that I keep hearing about the film, "will it make enough money to pay for its self?"

I hate that every thing is about money.

Ed Abbey said: A journey into the wilderness is the freest, cheapest, most nonprivileged of pleasures. Anyone with two legs and the price of a pair of army surplus combat boots may enter.

HOT CHOCOLATE
By Amy Parsons Syme
Almost every body knew my grandpa and when he died the whole town came out to the funeral. He was a man that demanded respect but some believed him to be domineering, one in control of every one around him. Some people may have seen him as mean, uncaring, selfish and egotistical, even chauvinistic, but my brothers and I were able to see the light he had in his heart.

We moved from Salt Lake to Richfield when I was 7. My older brother was 9 and my younger brother was 4. While my mom and dad moved the boxes and beds and furniture and stuff, we stayed with our grandparents. They both worked at the bakery down the road which bore our last name, but our family did not own it. My grandpa was a baker and started work early in the morning before the sun came up. He baked the famous 'Parson Bakery' spud nuts. He work hard for his brother that owned the place but was payed very little. As he came home my grandma would leave to do her share of the work at the bakery. She made sandwiches and prepped the store for opening. She work very hard was payed even less.

When grandma would leave, grandpa took care of us. He would sing songs about a Little Eskimo and Adam and Eve and Pinch Me Quick. He would take us hiking in the Red Hills and tell us how he would play with the little 'Ingen' kids in Koosheram where grow up. They told him how to find water in the rocks and food in the hills. He would help us pack a lunch of sandwiches and crackers with cookies for desert. I think we had a lot of fun.

One such morning grandpa was left to the task of fixing breakfast. I remember we had bacon and fried eggs with buttered toast. But the thing that stood out the most about that breakfast was the hot chocolate. Grandpa could not find the hot chocolate mix which I am sure was just behind the peanut butter. So he did something that most people that knew him would not believe. He made it from scratch. He got out the milk and got out the coco and sugar and made hot chocolate. I still remember the taste of the warm milk and the dark flavor of the coco.

Many people believed him to be selfish and uncaring but he made us hot chocolate from scratch. So, to all those nay sayers, take that!!

Now, some times, I will make hot chocolate from scratch for my kids. They ask for it, now and then. The say “momma, will you make grandpa Parson's hot chocolate?”. Every time it takes me back to that kitchen that I became so familiar with, and the wood stove that would warm us to the bone, and my big, smiling, happy grandpa.

The weekend was spent rubbing up next to sadness.

It's a long story.

I found myself back in Black Canyon, the last place of interest I visited before going under the knife for my triple hernia surgery...

Not a red rock splendor, not a national park or monument, not on any major road or near any population centers, Black Canyon is the perfect coyote habitat...

I found selfish comfort in the empty, forgotten wild, while one's I love mourned the loss of the life they had become accustom to...I found peace in the canyon, next to the running water...while they struggled with the world's craziness and pain...

There was a Mormon Church, post office and two whore houses in the town of Widstoe, at the end of Black Canyon.

There is a family torn apart in Richfield Utah...

No whores in the canyon...none that I could find...no formal church service there either...just wind and rock and water and ice and a deep feeling of spirit and light at winter slants...

Very Good Quote...

From: Conserving Solitude: Reflections on Sacred Landscapes
By Scott Thompson

The land is who we are. Comprehending this while out in a vast landscape is an ineffable experience; as such it eludes description. Yet the experience is as real as sagebrush and Cliff rose, and it is vital to know that such an immense human encounter awaits each of us if we protect the solitude inherent in the wildness of the land. It is in this sense that the land protects us from harm, as dutiful elders and ancestral traditions always have; at least they did in indigenous cultures. The wildness of the land protects us from the anomie and nihilism that hang like dark spider webs all over large, amorphous societies. And from the cynicism, resentment, passivity, and fundamentalist religious species that crop up as bleak compensations.

It's cold in my classroom. That's really the way I like it. Cold. There's this girl who can't sit in her seat, a 6th grade girl who is worried if this one boy in the other 6th grade class likes her or not. She is always over to the heating unit in the room turning it on. The boys who play football at recess, they don't like the heater running after they come in...so at writing time, after recess, she got up and turned the heat on.

"If she doesn't turn that off, I'm leaving," one of the boys said to me, but to her, too...

She just laughed.

"What do you want me to do man?" I said.

"I'm leaving."

She just laughed and left the heater on. He sat down and started writing but he wasn't happy about it.

Me, I lost a little more of the control that I really never intended to have, or to take from the students that I conceder to be people, not all that different from the adult people who can vote and drive...

After about five minutes, she got up and turned the heater off, and he said, "I guess I'll stay then."

Which is good because he really didn't have anyplace else to go...

She didn't pause, didn't even look up from the love story she was now writing.

An emersion baptism of snow has fallen upon Canal Canyon. (Some of us around here believe in re-birth, we feel that the old can be made new. This is true of canyons and mountains and maybe even people.)

So, I was the first into the re-new-ed canyon, the first to see the brand new place. There weren't any human tracks ahead of me on Friday night.

I'm bragging. I have so little to brag about. I've been in a few places, I've seen a few things, and I was the only person alive in Canal last night.

Sage. As the sun set across the valley my mind returned to the subject of death, it's still hard on us mortals.

The smell of sage in snow is bitter-strong and resplendent. “If I die tonight,” I thought, “this would be the last best whiff of sage I'll ever have.” Is there sage and snow in heaven? I lingered and smoked it in as if I was addicted, I inhaled until tears formed in my closed eyes.

I had waited all day, watching the snowfall through the window in my classroom, waiting to go into the canyon and see if I was still a human man.