Fog Chaser
Volume III
Stone & Light
0:00
Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -2:45
-2:45

Stone & Light

Exploration 011 | Badlands National Park, South Dakota | Vol. III, Issue 11

Welcome to the latest installment of the Fog Chaser newsletter.

🎵 This month’s piece is in G minor.1

Traveling through the Badlands National Park in South Dakota — “the land of stone and light” — I am softened by its desolation. Its isolation. This landscape is otherworldly. Peaceful. Silent.

The sky stretches uninterrupted, sweeping above hills and canyons etched by eons of erosion. We wind through this ancient and haunted landscape, crossing a threshold — between seasons, between chapters, between places. Between one life and another.

📷 This month’s photos were taken with a DSLR in Badlands National Park.2

I invite you to sit with this month’s song, photos, and poem and make them a small part of your day, whether that’s your morning ritual, afternoon break, or your evening wind-down.

As always, if you feel like it, let me know what you think in the comments. I’d love to hear from you.

Thank you for being here.

Leave a comment

Listen to more Fog Chaser

Explore past issues


Keeping quiet

by Pablo Neruda (translation by Alastair Reid)3

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.

Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.


Listening to

  • A Trick of the Light by Villagers (Listen)

Reading

Sharing

  • The song I wrote for

    ’s new book, Chasing Fog:

Small Stories with Laura Pashby
a walk in the woods with fog chaser
Chasing Fog is here! Not just in my hands but in your hands too—it’s out in the world at last! Later this morning I’ll be visiting the dear indie bookshop where I work, to see this book of mine on bookshop shelves for the first time…
Listen now
1

Stone & Light in G minor / Written, performed, and produced by Fog Chaser

2

All photos shot on DSLR (ISO: 400)

4

The Fog Chaser Bookshop is hosted on Bookshop.org, where 80% of profits go to independent bookstores. I earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

Discussion about this podcast

Fog Chaser
Volume III
EXPLORATIONS /
Volume III of the original music shared in the Fog Chaser newsletter (November 2023 - October 2024)
Listen on
Substack App
RSS Feed
Appears in episode
FogChaser
Recent Episodes