Who I am.

I write about the landscape of grief, nature, and the wisdom of fools. The author of four books, my essays, poems, and reviews have been published in over 50 journals, including in the Huffington Post and Colorado Review. I’ve won the River Teeth Nonfiction Book Award, the Chautauqua and Literal Latte’s essay prizes, and my work has been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes and named a notable by Best American Essays. My account of hiking in Yosemite to deal with my wife’s death, Mountains of Light, was published by the University of Nebraska Press. http://www.markliebenow.com.

Thursday, September 18, 2014

Life is a River: Sitting on the Shore or Riding the Waves


I do not like dying. None of us do, I suppose. Every time someone or something we love dies, part of us dies, too.
Whenever I return to Yosemite, I want to see the places that I’ve come to love, but invariably they have changed in some way, and I can’t stop them from doing this. Happy Isles used to be a beautiful, wooded glen with cascading rivers running through, until the blast of air and tumbling boulders from a massive rockslide knocked most of the trees down and opened the glen up to sunlight.

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