just watching the wheel go round

I just returned from a long walk up to the credit union. On the way back I got to thinking back about opinions – Opinions – and that you rarely see any of those here at Couch Surfing. There’s two reasons: One, I like writing posts and pieces here that lean into storytelling. Like a reporter, wildly freelance, reporting to no one other than you, the reader. There’s something about stories without opinions that feels, oh, I don’t know – charming. Engaging and worthy of your time, if I’ve done good work with the reporting. With the language.

The second reason is that for the last couple of years I have tried to live each day I’ve been gifted on this rock twirling through space without opinions – at least not strong opinions I feel some need to share. It isn’t that I don’t have opinions, or don’t notice opinions showing up unbidden in my head. See, here’s one – the whole planet is on fire, and it’s my take that’s a climate change thing.

But, I’m not feeling a need to say that lately, now a couple of years worth of lately. I’d rather tell you a story about a midnight power wheelchair flying down the middle of Durant Ave in Berkeley. Or what it felt like to go to a beach in my hometown when I was just a kid, getting to play with horseshoe crabs and minnows. Or sitting mesmerized trance-like on a bench in the Rhododendron Garden in Portland. Or communicating with a kingfisher high on a pole by the Deschutes River.

If you follow my writing back 10, even seven years, you find lots of opinions there. I still believe pretty mcuh everything I wrote then. It’s just that this is the me of me today, and I’d rather write about a surf instructor and her do-it-yourself save the North Shore magazine in Hawaii. And a cashier at the People’s Co-op in Ocean Beach who was delivered a lost dog via the deep kindness of neighbors far away. Wicked cool stuff.

I don’t know if the photo here constitutes an opinion. It said hi to me on my warm walk home. And I dig the colors.