For thirty years, when I packed up my backpack for a walk in the woods or a trek up a canyon in Utah, I always found room for a notebook and a couple of favorite pens. If I saw something beautiful, or a thought suddenly emerged that was mine but somehow more than just “me,” I could jot down a few sentences so I wouldn’t forget. This journal was partly a record of daily events, but always in the context of some larger search for —something—for an experience that was beyond the ability of words to describe, like trying to divert a river into a garden hose.

The blog distills these journals down to what I believe is their essence, and comes from a need to learn what my younger self has to teach. There are so many ways that the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” can lead one astray! The words in those notebooks are filled with the innocence and hunger that kept my feet on the creative path: the daily discoveries of a gardener who turns over the soil in the spring, to see if anything’s growing. —BHP