Amen.

Gotta Get Home This Year

I was trying to remember how I've rung in the last decade of New Years. MOST years have been pretty straight forward since joining the Outdoor Trails family; meet up with Scott and camp out in Arcadia with the Odyssey Adventure Racing / OT crew, but there have been a few exceptions. The year Cindy and I danced around while Stewart was at work, the year I spent my first night in Allendale, the year I brought a brief beau to North Creek, the year I depressingly just went to bed around 9pm, and one of my favorites; cross country skiing in Glacier National Park.
After some mental sifting I realized none of those New Years Eve activities necessarily dictated what the rest of that year would bring. Which helped me overcome the disappointment of a canceled New England adventure, and the search for *the epic awesome* experience that would perfectly culminate 2010 and ring in 2011.
Holidays.
Not to be a grinch - I mean, I've been having a wonderful Christmas - New Years week. But isn't it funny? the emphasis and stress we put on having perfect holiDAYs? Isn't any day just as likely to be epic and amazing as the rest? And isn't it most likely that the memories we'll cherish most are moments of surprise? Honestly most planning just stresses me out and predisposes me to have expectations. What a slippery slope - expectations.
So I relaxed, threw on a black dress, cowboy boots and some mascara and spent the evening with laid back buddies at an over crowded bar downtown enjoying live music. This morning I spent hours cultivating creative endeavors and found myself wandering the streets of Fincastle on a rainy afternoon with Carrie.
After days of shifting plans and surprises our conversation revealed all the beauty of letting go, living from faith, joy in surprises, and the timelessness of friendship.
On my chilly rainy drive to meet Carrie, Virginia Coalition's "Gotta Get Home This Year" pumped from my stereo speakers. A song I became smitten with about this time last year.
"Something I can't live without. Something like a perfect destination. If I get there, I swear I'm never leaving. Oh it's there I know I can believe it. Gotta get home this year...."
And that elusive lesson which so frequently slips out of my wisdom resurfaced. That home is fluid. And life is more about where you're at internally than externally.
So I suppose if I were to have a new years resolution it would be about that. To live from an internal place of "home". And to balance my life in a way which encourages me to do this.
What are the hopes and fears of your year?

Silent Nights

We used to put these amazing lights on my family christmas tree. They were multi colored, the small bulbs, and had about 7 different settings. We needed two strands to surround the whole tree. We put our tree in this fancy room that I can never remember what to call it; family room? living room? After 20 years in that house I still refer to either as "tv room" or "piano room". Anyway - we put our tree in the piano room, with wooden floors, dark green walls, and fancy paint / plaster designs on the white ceiling.
My family of five plus an entourage of pets has always been busy. Baking, shopping, jobs, school, everyone would whirl around; in and out of the house, around the house. It was never too hard to slip away from all of it unnoticed.
I like to slip away.
All the years we used those lights my favorite part of Christmas was the way they reflected on the ceiling. With life swirling around me, the cold settled into the hills and valleys of Botetourt County, I would tweak those lights to my liking and settle into the best spot in the house. Quiet and still on the rug I would lie on my back watching rhythms and colors flash around shadowed fir, pine or spruce.
My own version of a Virginia Aurora Borealis.

Last Christmas was my first Christmas away from Botetourt. Geronimo and I bought a wreath of western pine and red cedar and snuggled up quietly in Missoula, Montana. Sad as it was to not be amongst family - there was a special magic to the eve and day, a quiet slipped away feeling.

This year is my sister's first Christmas away from Botetourt. She has no snow, no hurried holiday shopping - just young Tanzanian orphans celebrating the coming of summer and reciting bible verses of the Christmas story. She skypes us a lot.

We have a really lovely douglas fir in the piano room right now. While our parents were at work my brother and I strung some lights in the boughs. We had bags to choose from - blue icicle, huge colorful bulbs similar to downtown Fincastle, a white light coil, and singing bells. Deciding to keep things in the white light category we opted for the coil and bells. You have to press Santa's eyebrows a few times on that bell controller to stop those things from singing - they're so obnoxious when they sing. So there's this filtered glow, and a bit of blinking from the bells. Mom put all the ornaments on herself after work yesterday.

Years of rug laying and light watching pulled me to the room after everyone else was in bed. I stood at the doorway and took in the scene. But it wasn't there. That hushed mystic escape. The tranquil meditation of a girl lost in dim light, rhythm, and the smell of pine.

And the funny thing about magic- you can't really get IT back. It just sort of - is. And I wonder what's changed so much in my life. If I'm capable of that wonder and quietness again.

Maybe I drink too much coffee for that stillness.

Maybe I don't breathe deep enough.

But sometime this winter, I hope I will, and whatever form that mystic escape takes, I hope the magic finds me again.

With the days living faster now We cast our make pretends Extra heat demands A rising constant power Darkness taking days...

Cold November rain veils pine boughs and boney decidious limbs. The white of low clouds brings soft filtered light, steady drizzle sparkles the foreground.
Life is a balance of holding on and letting go.
Those who want to keep their life will surely lose it, and those willing to give it up will find life to the fullest.
Haunting.
Things we know and may not recognize as the hypothetical having become real - personal.
Are these morals actually something we WILL live by?
I curl up on my Grandmother's couch. Forever a rebel rouser - I let Geronimo join me; because it's my couch now- covered in my comforter AND with cold feet buried under his warm fur I'm quite cozy.
Life.
This year I spent the second Thanksgiving that I can remember at my parents house instead of with our extended family in Keyser, WV. My grandmothers are gone, the older cousins balance holidays between our family and their spouse's family - and so another generation begins their own traditions.
No one talks about that part much. But I notice it. Montana snuck into my traditions and I find myself missing Dacia and the other Native Americans who welcomed me into their home and family during so many holidays. And the quietness. I miss the quiet space of Montana.
But I try to season the egg noodles and be supportive about pie from a box. You got what you got after all.
The first second cousin on my mothers side was born, on my birthday. And my mother left this note "Happy Birthday to YOU!! 26 years ago today you can rushing in to our lives 3 weeks early and haven't slowed down yet. You took a peek at the world with your big brown eyes and were ready to spread your love and joy!!"
Sounds like Seth Grayson may be a handful if birthdays and stars have anything to do with who a person becomes.
I will be a bridesmaid for the first time next fall. I get to put my two cents on wedding photographers and eagerly volunteered to help taste cakes. So the running buddies grow up.
In a few days I'll wake up in another running buddies home. I hope the first thing I see is her two year son grinning in my face. We're going to craft Christmas cards.
I have really amazing friends - for which I'm speachlessly thankful.
After three shots of espresso and hours of photo editing one sat in front of me, divulging the details of a recent break up. As we parted the only hope I could give is that - I understand - because romance frustrates me too- but our friends - how blessed we are for that love.
Before sleep that night Low tells me, "All this motion you know? The pushing and prying forward?
It's all just a life-long walk to the exact same spot."

He's one of the best food for thought chefs I know.
So it all marinates.

Journey. Destination. Somethings Old. Somethings New. Many things borrowed. Too much hope and motion to be blue.

Nights Filled With Longer Hours

Ode to 11

I don't get out much. Which is ironic I suppose.... considering I live "out" of what most folks consider mainstream. But here I sit in my "town" clothes listening to jazz and buzzing off espresso as people flit in and out of these doors like the syncopated trumpeted backdrop.
My 40 minute drive through Shenandoah Valley farmland, the Shenandoah River jumbled into the town of Front Royal. Which is really a story in and of itself - I have never understood this town.
Driving out of the woods, watching territory move outside my windows has me thinking about November. Beautiful November. With it's deep angled sunlight. White puffy clouds are shadowed in deep blue/ grey/ purple undertones. Few golden leaves quake in a chilly breeze. Mountain ridges and hollers are showcased one last time before Appalachia relaxes to boney silhouettes.
Silos and rippling rivers reflect golden glares from this vibrant scene.
Stakes are higher as ripe fruits are harvested, wood is chopped and we begin to hunker down for holidays, friends, family and the simple pleasures of cleansing cold.... creeping closer... with every sunset.
Chilly shivers warmed with golden filters of all that was, is, and is bound to come.

Show Me

It has come to my recent attention that I use the words beautiful and brilliant a lot.
This, along with my recent considerations of the prevalence of "love" in my dialect leads me to a personal challenge... omitting them.
The theory of love languages proposes multiple ways of communicating affection ; quality time, service, verbal, physical and gifts.
In short - if love is an emotion - how is it expressed?How much there must be beyond three spoken words.
So it is my current challenge to use other languages to express emotions. Beauty, brilliance, and love.
Perhaps I could tell you about golden sunlight, wind whipping 4th graders' hair and journal papers, warm stoney cliffs with rippling rain water pools. Perhaps I could tell you of cruising across crisp leaves peppering the Appalachian Trail, the turbulence of waves across a man-made lake as 10 year olds in blaze orange PFDs soaked in this ever present autumn light canoe through what could be the next cover of LLBean's fall catalog.
After spaghetti and garlic bread Sophia and I giggled until we cried over birthday cake and nothing at all.
Two years ago I was on top of Springer Mountain in Georgia October 7. Today is a good day for mountain tops.
It dawned on me today this life at Mountain Campus, through full of unique challenges is the most personally serene fall I've had in years. No homeless sleeping in cars or finding mattresses in alleys, no rainy north Georgia days to walk through giardia, no commutes after choffee dates and before scrounging for dinner.
Nope. Things are pretty simple around here. Wake up, eat, keep to the day's schedule while serving / protecting/ teaching students and other instructors, sleep, repeat.
At morning meeting today Izzie gave her class a quote "Life is a grand adventure, or not at all". Students interpreted this as unless you're on a grand adventure you're not really living.
But I've been wondering.... whether it feels like it or not.... we're always living. So maybe the true point is to LIVE a grand adventure; in southern terminuses, homelessness, unemployment, homecomings, restlessness, quiet breathing, pumpkin parties and pumpkin ales. All of it jumbled into the epic pages of simply complex adventures.
Maybe the "not at all" part isn't possible.
Yeah. I'm calling that bluff.
How could life not be a grand adventure?