you found me by the fields of wild gold / my hands still filled with ashes from fires long cooled

there's something about mary - for laurie. maybe i can enter this into the 700 club or something as a "mary-sighting"

sometimes i drive on dirt roads and listen to country music with the windows down.

note the moon in the bottom right corner. it's what makes the picture worth it.

more than i love the grand canyon - i love what surrounds the grand canyon. to the north - well, you have more canyon. to the east, there is the painted desert, to the south there is the san francisco peaks, oak creek canyon and sedona, and to the west... you have las vegas, but that's besides the point. i had today off and took a hike in the coconino national forest to the top of slate "mountain" - it's not a mountain, by my standards, or most standards, it only took 3 miles to get to the top. it was easy. but no less beautiful because of its ease. it was a good way to spend my labor day.

i went to a barbeque at the house of two friends from church. they're married with a cute little girl named sophia. there were a few of us there - ate some hot dogs and then watched a bad robert dinero movie on their new 50 inch screen tv. i left early to get home so that i could waste my evening alone, doing the same activity - only better: watching the entire series of six feet under, again, for the second time.

during dinner, i realized that i was happy there. although these friendships aren't the most intimate relationships in my life - or anywhere near it, they're what i've got here - and they're enough. i've said this a few times before, and i probably won't stop saying it - but one of the greatest lessons of the desert is that sometimes enough is . . . enough. with less options, you find that you need less, you desire less, you want less. or maybe what you need, desire and want changes. either way - the idea that you are entitled to more seems to be understood as what it is: an idea, and a faulty, deceptive idea at that. and what makes it so false is that it simply doesn't work. or - at least, it hasn't worked for me.

i thought i was smart enough to know that the right job, right friends, right things wouldn't make me happy. i don't think it was until i got out here and had to actually settle for less that i realized it hasn't felt like settling at all - in fact, i don't think i've felt this satisfied in a long time. maybe it's something of a mystery, and maybe it's impossible to explain, but i've traded the things that have mattered the most to me in for an average job, average friends, an average church - and not only am i okay with it, but somehow it's better.