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.

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Sitting on Dark Mountains


Grief is the coming of darkness. In the beginning it’s a void of everything we’ve known and loved.

When my beloved died, I went to Yosemite and sat by myself in the darkness on Glacier Point and watched the constellations of the night sky above and the campfires of people a mile below, trying not to think about the bears and mountain lions that lived in the wilderness behind me. The world I had known had abruptly ended, and I was thrown deep into the cosmos where there were no sounds and every constellation was unfamiliar.

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