While traveling—in unfamiliar surroundings, assistance less readily available—attentiveness climbs the scale. So much to note! A cactus flower fades, a canyon wren trills, a keynote speaker pinch-hits for a fellow panelist whose airplane connection failed. Overwhelmed by the impossibility of a 3-paragraph post, I returned home from a promised week off to the rapid slide of a second week not reconnecting with my “regulars”, Acoustic Burro readers and subscribers. In all the rock-strewn low rivers and heavy hail storms skidding me through high mountain passes, what even has a chance to eddy out, to slow and spin and allow reflection, to invite (as Parker Palmer might say) ongoing bafflement?

In a backlog of unread email, I clicked open a conversation in Orion between Terry Tempest Williams and Robert MacFarlane about his recently released book, Is A River Alive?. With my dedicated intention of sharing positive news for people and planet, I happily hyperlink all of these names, and encourage readers to allow this eddy to provide a fruitfully reflective pause in the low-water currents threatening boulders at every breath. As I floated into their exploratory curiosities and experiences, TTW posed a question that snagged my attention. “What did these rivers…say to you?” RM directed us to the final 20 pages of the book as his “best fit rendering” and yet he also tried translating into a “more recognizable vernacular.” This experience of hearing or understanding something beyond human remains awkward for those of us embedded in the mechanistic worldview of industrial societies.

Awkward for me, too, is relating this experience—one the trained skeptic in me claims as strictly coincidental. In a shop in Durango, while my glamping partner perused gifts to bring back to those supporting her trip to the Mesa Verde Writers Conference and Literary Festival, I knelt by a bin of small stickers. Without intention, I found myself picking up bear after bear. We returned to our wall tent late, and I never checked my travel route for the drive home, thereby missing a fire closure along a scenic byway that also was not signed anywhere. Hours into the canyon, a road construction guy flagged me down and told me the news. I drove a bit further, then pulled off by the river for a snack and a heavy sigh, hours and a lot more traffic now added to my trip. But the willows shifted, and bent, and a brown blur pushed through narrow green leaves. A bear met my eyes. A witchy perspective (fantasy is all the rage at book festivals and writing contests this summer) might say that I conjured this apparition. But that’s not at all how it felt. My gut tells me not to discount the feeling. The bear planned this encounter. The bear beckoned. The bear, despite the noteworthiness of so many less-awkward experiences that could be shared after traveling, stands tall in my mind. In my…heart. The bear wants me to share my discomfort with you, or so something leads me to believe. As many friends have told me, travel is about pushing ourselves outside our comfort zones. Writing can be about that, as well.