About Cairns
Cairns is a collection of stories, reflections, and questions drawn from a life of work, travel, love, loss, teaching, reinvention, and ordinary moments that turned out to matter.
A cairn is a marker left along the way. It doesn’t tell another traveler where they must go; it simply offers a bit of orientation and says, in effect, someone has been here before.
The story is the stone. What I recognized in it becomes the cairn. Whether it offers anything useful to another traveler is theirs to decide.
After more than thirty years of working, teaching, traveling, beginning again, loving, losing, and changing my mind about more than a few things, I’ve started to notice that some of the most useful lessons in my life didn’t arrive looking like lessons at all.
I’m writing Cairns because I want to pay closer attention—to the experiences, conversations, mistakes, surprises, and ordinary moments that are easy to move past before we understand what they might contain.
Some Cairns will begin in boardrooms or classrooms. Others may begin on a dive boat, a mountain trail, around a dinner table, or in a memory I didn’t expect to revisit.
The subjects will vary, but the question underneath them is usually the same:
Is there something here another traveler might recognize in their own life?
I’m not writing from the end of the trail. I’m still walking it. If something I’ve noticed along the way helps you see something in your own life a little more clearly, I hope you’ll walk with me for a while.
And if a story helps you pause, notice something differently, or ask a better question of your own life, then the Cairn has done its work.
What to expect
I’ll publish two substantial Cairns each month, with shorter Trail Notes in between—observations, questions, photographs, bits of language, and moments that seem worth noticing before they disappear.
Free subscribers will receive the main Cairns and Trail Notes. Paid members will also receive occasional companion reflections, audio notes, behind-the-story pieces, conversations, and other ways to go a little deeper when a particular Cairn invites it.
Subscribe if you’d like to walk along.
