What do you need to feel holy and right? Some people need words from others. The reassurance of habits and familiar things. Rites and ceremonies. Institutions and constructs as old as their generation – or aged 100 years, or a couple thousand. I need something as old as time itself. Something that has always been, even if it’s constantly evolving. I need stars churning in the firmament. Whispers of a beginning. A local planet in my neighborhood galaxy. Snow in a forest, the wind at night, sunshine on a summer lane, moonlight tracking silver off a lake to my window. I need nature.
Nature is my authority, my absolution. In the main it contains all the human wisdom I’ve found to be true, but none of the façades, transitional mores, ulterior motives and deceits. It is always simple, always profound.
Mountains of
that inspiration filled me this month when I drove across the Northwest,
particularly during a visit to lifelong pal Bruce Norvell’s small ranch in the
state of Hie-diho (my name for Idaho). I’m blessed with adventures that make my life a yellow
brick road and every stop an Oz. Hiking,
skiing, dining, exploring, philosophizing, interacting with people so glorious
you wish they would breed more – we did it all in pristine beauty and adrenaline-fueled
adventures that left nothing on the table.
Can’t possibly sum it up (you had to be there), but I’ll feed what I can
to you in small doses over the next couple of months whilst I continue to savor
it.
These photos below will give you a 2-dimensional peek with just one of your senses (imagine it in 3-D experienced full senses five): #1-6 pics are from a solo ski from Galena to Prairie Creek through the Sawtooth Mountains. Undulating over the Disneyesque dunes was pure fantasy. Hated to stop for photos; hated to not stop and snap a memory. Skipped too many as it is. The crust was incredible, a glaze of iced lightning where my passing barely left a trace for about 18K. #7 An Easter vista of crust skiing. #8 That’s Bruce his own rugged self on a mountain meadow. #9-10 Crust skiing the Salmon River. I like to think that’s a meteor you see in the sky in #10, and if you look close, it’s racing moi on the crust. Bruce’s dog Ziggy Lee started out after a couple of wolves in this spot before thinking better of it. Skiing on solo from this area, I came upon a track that was either a cougar or a bobcat. #11-21 Bruce set his camera so that it took about 150 shots at one-second intervals, resulting in a jerky video where I’m dancing around in this icy river swim. Hilarious (he thought). I tried to figure a way to get enough of the photo sequence inserted here for the video effect that would absolutely replace dancing gangnam style, but it’s too big. So here’s a sketchy substitute. There are scalding vents in the river bottom, which is in sight of motivational speaker Tony Robbins’ mountain hideaway. Between the ice and the boil I didn’t last long. #22-27 Yellowstone on the way home. #28 The tres cool pastor of Covenant Church with two of his four children at my house apres skiing. Chad’s ministry has taken him all over the world from Africa to Russia, and he’s the one I went with to help build a girl’s school in the Dominican Republic a couple of years back. #29 Me with Millie (or maybe it’s Shawnee)…the only female on the planet who lets me put my arm around her!
For whatever reason, Q&A is my most popular format. The bulk of in-email contains comments/questions on answers I’ve written about relationships, marriage, or my inamorata (which really lit up the inbox). Many of you have asked me to expand those topics, and several have now suggested creating another blog exclusively for personal stuff – mine and readers. While the subject of a writer’s blog can be anything – because writing and a writer’s life deal with everything – I don’t want to lose sight of the connection to creativity. Also, I just don’t have time to manage that much writing (too busy doing this thing called living, you know). So, for now at least, I’ll try to keep the balance, but whatever you send in will be reflected in the Q&A. Your questions/comments are so meaningful and heartfelt that I’m touched and appreciative no end. Never doubt that I cherish the candor and confidences. Here is April’s column on StorytellersUnplugged with Q&A ranging from escaping lions to a White Feather update: http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2013/04/15/thomas-sullivan-the-exiled-prince-a-brass-lamp-on-rollerblade-wheels-how-to-run-away-from-a-lion/
I hear from
so many people who are just hanging on, semi-defeated, taking a step backward
when all they need do is take a step forward.
I hate to see people shrink.
That’s not what should happen as life culminates. Spring
is calling you…again. Open your blood
and listen to the music! Whatever
you’re searching for, bring it with you.
Energy, inspiration, happiness.
Be it! You are the conversation,
the wit, the intelligence. It’s in
you. You just need something/someone on
your wave length at the other end to make it happen.
If we let ourselves be paralyzed by fear, we miss it all. All fears poison us whether they prove warranted or not. They numb us to possibilities, induce comas of inaction, and create a slippery slope into inertia whose only footholds are rationalizations. We postpone courage until it is too late to move off the dime and risk anything, then we bemoan that we would have acted if only this hadn’t happened or that. We let fate decide for us so that it’s not our fault, but rather a default. For some, of course, that kind of ironclad security IS living. They simply would rather protect safe illusions than dare dreams. Nothing wrong with that really…unless it’s followed by wallowing in regret. And in that case I recommend believing in a multiverse – the theory that we live in but one of an infinite number of universes playing out all possible realities. Which means that whatever we wish had happened in our career, quests or relationships did happen, somewhere, sometime. Wrong choices were made right. Another exact version of you on an exact clone world did just what you wish you had done at that critical point in your life. That should be some kind of consolation. But on a more realistic level, even here and now there are always alternatives, work-arounds, sanctuaries or options within us that can maximum whatever we have left ourselves. The question we should always ask is whether the rest of our life is going to be a wake or awake.
Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
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