Magic has an address, and it's yours.  I firmly believe that.  If you can't find it in your own rooms, you're living with the lights out.  Go ahead, throw the switch and be dazzled.  That's what I've been doing as a guest in so many places these past two months.  From exquisite Norway to Aussie friends to beautiful Crosslake-Brainerd to wide-open Montana to the Sawtooth Mtns of Idaho to Oregon's Mt. Hood and all points in between, it's been an illuminating ride.  And through all that grandeur and exhilaration, I'm left sorting out the people moments.

Like the Delta flight where I sat between a shrieking baby and a 300-pound Muslim woman from Sudan.  Before takeoff, the intercom kept asking for a "Hussein," who hadn't shown up for the empty seat next to the woman from Sudan.  Ashamed to say, anxiety-driven biases had me figuring it was her husband, and his bomb was un-safely aboard in his luggage, and this was his no-wait divorce as well as his jihad.  The Muslim woman was swathed in religious garments and kept whipping my face with the ends as she tossed them, but by halfway to Amsterdam we were friends and the baby alternately cooed and slept.  I'm thinking Hussein is one of the good guys and just overslept.  And then there was the female physics student with whom I discussed the Higgs-Bosun God particle as we sped toward Oslo on a nearly empty express train very much like a particle accelerator itself.  Add to that the memories of brilliant and far-ranging conversations halfway to dawn with Grant & Fiona.  I first met Grant when he interviewed me for hours in an international call from Australia, and here we were a couple of years later, sharing adventures in Minnesota.  We took it on the road and were rewarded in a place called Grizzly’s in Brainerd where charming Melissa – who has emerged intact from six years of rehab following a motorcycle accident – inspired us.  And then there was the haunting echo of lifelong friend Bruce Norvell's voice across a misty stream as we skied high in the snow-blessed sanctuaries of Altura Lake's mountain in Idaho.  Bruce and I tend to ski off alone even when skiing together, chasing one miracle or another and meeting at different points on the trail.  Check out this video where Bruce caught me coming up on a bridge over open water [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itSpP3y430g   ].  And again my memory pulses with the Avatar-like rapture of hiking 8 miles (round-trip) up 2500 feet in elevation to the top of Oregon's Mt. hood trail.  What made it special was that it was shared with my daughter Colleen, who hiked carrying her 9-month-old infant Seamus strapped to her chest, and with her husband Dave.  To see my daughter's family enveloped in the magic of a velveteen forest, dancing from boulder to boulder across frequent torrents cascading down the mountain, was bittersweet and fulfilling to me.  This was the kind of day I had once yearned for while she and her brother Sean were growing up.  And I swear, Colleen was faintly smiling the entire way, as if the genes for energy and optimism were lit up in her soul (which is how I feel every day).  Seamus never cried the whole four hours, except for about 100 yards at the very top.  But that was where the narrow trail skirted treacherous heights with unforgiving drops a couple thousand feet into the gorge below.  My daughter tells me that people die every year falling from that precipice, but I figure Seamus just wanted to linger longer because we broke out some food up there. 

The whole two months seems like a compressed lifetime, but then I sometimes get that feeling after a single outing or intense experience right here in Minnesota.  I sincerely hope that your life is as rich and textured.  If you are trapped in suspended animation, merely existing in one narrow dimension, consider adding more lives to unleash who you are.  They won't conflict, if you're just filling emptiness anyway.  It sort of like enriching oxygen by adding more atoms into the same space.  Like I said, magic has an address, and it's yours.

In addition to the video link above, I've attached some photos below: seven of them are on the trail up Mt. Hood (the picture with the figure standing above a river is the START of a trail that goes up to 2500 feet from there).  There is also a shot of my daughter, Seamus and myself, and another photo of the narrow trail edge at the top (the trees you see below are actually high up on the slopes).  And that gorgeous snowscape in another picture is the Prairie Creek Trail in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mtns. 

There will be many more photos to come of adventures past, present and future.  I love my own backyard, but already plans are under way to fly to China, take a train to Mongolia, and follow the Genghis Khan route by yak with my Aussie friends.  Here are links to two of the videos Grant made after he and Fiona took me to the Brainerd-Crosslake area:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyujha4me9Y  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwpUzCgLr0M   

And my column on StorytellersUnplugged this month catches up with the Norway trip.  Follow this link for the skinny:   http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2011/04/15/thomas-sullivan-channeling-jack-kerouac-or-why-writers-need-to-get-out-more/#respond

Thanks for being you!