Author: <span>Patrick Cumby</span>
Patrick Cumby is a science fiction writer who also blogs about exploring the real world. He's sharing his thoughts at PatrickCumby.com.
A 90-minute drive south from Portland brings you to one of the most unique hiking trails in America. The Trail of Ten Falls is an easy, 8.7-mile loop hike in the Silver Falls State Park. The name of the trail doesn’t do it justice. Yes, there are ten waterfalls along the trail. The thing is, though, several of them are terrifically magnificent, dropping vertically 200 feet or more. The trail even passes behind a few of the largest falls, giving you the unique perspective of standing inside one of nature’s most awe-inspiring engines.
My wife and I hiked the trail and captured our experience on a short video. Check it out for the highlights of the trail, and if you are ever in Oregon, make the time to visit this state park. You won’t be disappointed.
I hear the same mantras over and over from my most successful and happy friends, as well as the famous artists and business people I admire most: Live in the moment. Be mindful. Live like there’s no tomorrow. It leaves me wondering… do they know something I don’t? What the heck do those words even mean, really?
So, as a project for the new year, I’m going to do a little philosophical experiment. And because I’m a writer, I’m going to write about it. If you don’t like philosophy, or you don’t care for experiments, stop reading now and go check out the latest cool article over at wired.com.
Okay, you’re still reading so let’s just dive in. I’m neither a philosopher nor a scientist, but in an effort to make my philosophical experiment be all scientific-like, I’ve developed a hypothesis. Here it is:
Screw the future. It’s irrelevant to happiness and it hinders success.
Designers say the eye is guided by the simplest elements of an image. Maybe that’s why we humans find whitespace so compelling; it provides context for the pattern-recognition tendencies of our brains. But truly, it is the unexpected disruption of simplicity that elevates a beautiful scene into one that is sublime.
Writing is influenced by so many things, from your mood to the meal you just ate to the temperature of the room and the comfort of your chair. Writers all dream of finding the perfect spot to do our work, quiet and undisturbed but surrounded by beauty and inspiration. We all have to settle for what we have, an old armchair in the bedroom or the kitchen table or the hotel bed at a Hampton Inn.
Some writing spots, however, are better than others, and some, occasionally, are spot-on perfect. Once I found a place so perfect, so sublime, that I had to bottle it up and save it for a rainy day. Even now I regularly retrieve the bottle and pour it out whenever, like today, my chair is uncomfortable and the room is cold and the sky outside is grim. Today’s bottle contains a stone patio on the city walls of Montepulciano, Italy, high on a hill in Tuscany.
Images and impressions on a Moroccan train from Casablanca to Rabat teach me not to point out the mote in another’s eye while ignoring the log in my own.
In the Casablanca Train Station
There’s something about the collision of old and new, of tradition and progress, that makes the bizarre wreckage of Casablanca utterly irresistible. A gleaming new train station with flat-screen monitors, none of which work because nobody knows how to operate them. Luxurious first-class coaches where the air conditioner has probably never been switched on. State-of-the-art train platforms covered with blowing trash, apparently because nobody thinks it’s a problem. Internet-connected ticket machines that will instantly debit my bank in America, next to a bathroom with a filthy squat toilet attended by a smiling old lady in a burka.
Here’s one for my friends in Edenton, North Carolina, the “South’s Prettiest Small Town.” Situated on the peaceful shores of the Albemarle Sound, Edenton is just a few miles from one of the greatest natural disasters in the history of the planet. It made me wonder: What would happen to the town if the disaster occurred today?
