WORRYING

Mt. Teneriffe Again

Today we tried Mt. Teneriffe with a fresh head of steam, in search of empty minds. No luck. A snow bank at about 3000 feet. J. “pulled a muscle.” We stopped and looked at Mt. Rainier instead.

Right now life is not about hiking or that someone broke into our car last night and stole mostly nothing. It’s about a year in a back water town called Silver River just south of Inner Mongolia, about reading suitcases of books, writing on a schedule as though for only the best of publications, and playing cards in noisy tea houses.

We love Seattle, but right now my mind is set on leaving this studio apartment life and endless planning so that we can sleep. Incredibly, J. says her latest research shows that worrying does the brain good: “it keeps it active … and makes baby brain cells.” Today we stopped and looked at Snoqualmie Falls and I said, “Man, I want to go down that in a barrel.”