The Narrative Image

  Photo Credit: Kip The light from another morning begins gently assaulting my eyelids, so my comatose body instinctively begins to burrow like a worm, forcing my face into a loose amalgam of swaddled-up fleeces and t-shirts - the makeshift pillow I build every night (because I forgot my pillow). My liver has never really had to metabolize alcohol on a regular basis, so feeling ambushed, it grudgingly does its work to restore what passes as my typical chemical balance, asking only that I be still and unconscious. A sort of peripheral consciousness jury-rigged by my ears informs me that Kip and Rico are rooting around in their vehicles for implements of destruction, lug nut wrenches, jack handles, hammers, and pry bars, anything that might steal a geode from the grasp of its mother. My liver is not the only organ of mine that is being taxed. Evidently, a significant portion of my neurons were slaughtered near the end of yesterday and synaptic first responders are desperately trying ...

Our eight-wheeled convoy skitters from the gulch and confidently negotiates a gossamer web of roads that evolved over time - shaped by topography, territory, and tepid human encroachment.   This instant in time - this fragile iteration of topsoil and flora tied to the sky and the distant oceans is even now responding to disparate fingers -   Water vapor flows - an atmospheric river streams in the sky   This image was chosen for its analogous visual relationship to the next picture. Ramona Falls (pictured) is not actually in the Owyhee Canyonlands. Water falls - water flows - gravity is   Earth is a fitful sleeper. She tosses and turns. Her skin cracks and buckles. She bleeds magma and farts ashes that settle in layers through the epochs.   Rain turns the pages - shows us chapters of the past - reveals secrets of creation - and nightmares of extinction.     The earth murders whole worlds, and tries to bury the evidence. And we stumble onto fresh stages ...