Cook Inlet, Alaska Incoming Tide Ice Flows

The first Alaska Nomad videos were never meant to be polished. This one proves it.

I forgot to upload a soundtrack.

What remains is a silent winter sunset over Cook Inlet, ice drifting with the incoming tide, stacking along the shoreline, moving freely one moment and catching the next. Slow, then fast. Flow, then resistance. The water keeps moving, but the ice doesn’t always know how.

In the silence, the scene says more than music could. I realize how often I miss the music of life, not because it isn’t there, but because I’m too distracted to hear it. Tasks pile up. Stress hums constantly. Hurry becomes the default tempo. My soul gets overwhelmed.

Watching the tide push ice toward shore became an unintended metaphor. When I ignore the tempo of my inner life, everything starts to jam up. Even good things, work, responsibility, and creativity, collide and catch along the edges instead of flowing. But standing there, watching light fade across frozen water, something loosens. A simple act of attention becomes an act of rest and rejuvenation.

Even in the deep winter darkness of Alaska, life still fills to the edges with very little mental or emotional margin.

These early videos were my first real attempts to create space again. To reorient my life toward noticing and not just producing. I would soon learn how difficult that would be. It is a perpetual tension that continues to this day, January 17, 2026.

The goal is to always go slow... I'm not wired that way. So, I appreicate what Carl Honoré teaches me about music in his book In Praise of Slowless.

Be fast when it makes sense to be fast, and be slow when slowness is called for. Seek the tempo giusto, the right speed.

Two years later, ten years later, twenty-five years later, forty-seven years later, I'm still trying to find the right speed at the right times.