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When I was learning Spanish in elementary school, my teacher had us sing songs and memorize poems. I still remember some of them more than 50 years later. I recall them when I encounter reminders of their carefully chosen words or wider references. I had not thought of Federico Garcia Lorca’s poem “Córdoba,” one of the poems she had us memorize, until I see the place name on the map as I am flying to a conference in Madrid in 2026, the 63rd year of my life. I had always fou

For my first 25 years, I was fortunate to live on or near the coast of northern California—childhood in San Francisco, four years of college in Santa Cruz, one year of graduate school in Palo Alto, several years in secondary school teaching jobs in Portola Valley and Menlo Park. For that quarter of a century, I was never far from the Pacific Ocean. When I moved to the East Coast for doctoral study, I rarely returned to the West’s waters, and Eastern mountain creeks replaced t

Source: https://quirkytravelguy.com/seattle-portland-drive-road-trip-stops/ The listening begins on a long drive in November of 2020. Halfway through her final year of high school, my daughter, Morgan, and I travel to the west coast of the United States to visit colleges we won’t have time to travel to in spring. Because it’s during the COVID-19 lockdown, colleges are not officially open for tours, so we explore empty campuses, trying to imagine what they would feel like full

“The culture that refuses honour to stones refuses honour also to the great earth forces that have shaped and placed them.” – Val Plumwood, “Journey to the Heart of Stone,” 2007, p. 21 I had never visited the western coast of Ireland. Trips to Dublin for work with the Higher Education Authority had kept me on the eastern shore, and the wildest place I had visited was Howth to walk above the cliffs that slope into the Irish Sea. But in May 2025, I arrive several days before I

At the invitation of a colleague at New Mexico State University, I travel to Las Cruces—via El Paso, where the closest airport is located—to give a talk and a workshop on co-creating courses with students. It is my Fall Break, and since this is a part of the United States in which I have never spent any time, I have planned to spend a few extra days visiting White Sands National Park, hiking trails in the Lincoln National Forest, and exploring the Organ Mountains and other na

I had not planned to travel to Scotland. I followed lines from a book as they led me there, like the stairs on the near slope in the photo above and the dirt path further in—two of many passages I would find through the early spring trees of Highland Perthshire. The passage that compelled me was a clear invitation to move from one place to another: “Now and then comes an hour when silence is all but absolute, and listening to it one slips out of time. Such a silence is not a