Winter played hard to get this year, so I chased it to the horizon and wound up in Idaho.  Lifelong friend Bruce Norvell once again hosted me on his small horse ranch where moose sometimes appear and wolves are never far away.  I could tell you about a prairie fire on the drive out, or skinny skiing Galena’s Rip & Tear loop, or sitting on a geothermal seep in the middle of an icy torrent next to inspirational speaker Tony Robbins’mountain hideaway, or winning a drawing for exquisite dining at a Sun Valley theater production, or hiking up breathtaking views of the Sawtooth Mountains, or soaring the calving crust along a serpentine river for miles and miles on skis, or beauty written in early morning mist, or vaporous nights where you duck reflexively to avoid bumping into stars, or towering pine forests majestic with silence, or following unknown trails alone through the back door of Yellowstone on the way home, but…  Fabled adventures just don't cover it.  Because for me it always comes down to the intangible, the people connections, the sterling conversations, the insights, the inspirations.  Lots of laughter, energy and poignancy.  You had to be there.
 
Wind and water are nature’s Facebook, streaming every nuance of events and itineraries in their eddies and tides, some profound, some simple, but each one meaningful.  And as always, I come home to Minnesota to find the very same miracles in my own backyard.  The magic feels identical whether in the green pools of Yellowstone, the dark settled lakes of Minnesota, or the chill torrents of Idaho.  A playful breeze is pawing the lake behind my house right now but leaving no tracks.  Wind and water have a pact every March and April, it seems, a marriage in which they dance wildly to gusts and currents all day and heal serenely side-by-side at night.

And speaking of marriage, I wish I could address all the feedback that has come in about that last question in my February column [ http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2012/02/15/thomas-sullivan-of-silver-souls-and-carousels/   ], but as usual there is too much to say and not enough room.  So permit me to just give a short generality here that I hope dovetails with some of your responses: What I believe is that true love includes but is boundlessly more than infatuation.  The singing in the blood never goes away. That kind of measured passion is galaxies removed from the mere accommodation into which so many marriages default.  I’ll come back to your questions in another Q&A soon.  

This month’s column over on StorytellersUnplugged also sprang from my Northwest adventures, but it takes place entirely indoors.  I call it, AMERICAN “IDLE” or HOW I MET RANDY, JENNIFER AND STEVEN AT A MOTEL 6 -- Here’s the link:   http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2012/04/15/thomas-sullivan-american-idle-or-how-i-met-randy-jennifer-and-steven-at-a-motel-6/  

The best way to show you the magic of Idaho skiing is to take you along with me in this short video clip.  You might want to see it full-screen to catch the calving ice sheets on the river.  Here’s the link:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=fqUS74C6688    It’s also included in this email’s attachments if you want to download it.  And the first picture below is from a hike, where I'm either dying with an arrow through my side or trying to play air guitar.  The next two shots are from somewhere in Yellowstone – no clue where, as I didn’t get there through the front entrance.  Another hike is next, this time in a soft rain somehow fragrant with mountain lushness, followed by three shots of the hot spring in the icy river I mentioned.  Above me on that silhouetted scarp are elk, and above that two golden eagles are circling (Glenn Frey and Don Henley taking it to the limit?).  The next picture is from just outside Sun Valley.  And Doc Foto (Mark Manrique) was kind this month, giving me a western lid to wear and a cyclone to ride.  Mark, like Bruce, is another swimmer and water polo player and lifelong buddy who has graced (or disgraced) these pages.  I guess collectively we'd be the over-the-hill gang if we could just…get over the hill.

The photos of Idaho will continue to connect the dots of great times with my magnificent friend Bruce across far-flung vistas, and I’ll be taking one trip to Michigan in the next couple of months, but after that I expect to max out the beloved haunts of my Minnesota paradise for awhile.  I've found everything important in life right here.  Wherever you are, I hope you can say the same.  It's mostly about what's inside you, you know.  The problem for a lot of people is that they are living a life dictated from outside themselves, when in fact they should be finding a way to live what is core deep within them.  Life is full of façades that force us to lie to ourselves in order to keep faith with externals.  Fear and guilt are the whips that crack above our heads.  But if you don't find a way to keep faith with your true self, ultimately the joke is on you.  Happiness is getting it right, even if it's only in some honest sanctuary that you can escape to now and then.  The contradictions that life demands in between cannot defeat your dreams, unless you offer them unconditional surrender.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
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