“It’s not easy being green,” but don’t tell that to Mother Nature. Every blade, bud and tendril is decked out like it’s St. Patrick’s Day. Standing on their roots, bursting in the breeze, climbing out on a limb – all things that want to thrive are reaching for the azure sky. The wind is combing out the tangles in the golden field and last year’s extensions on the willows reach out like telomere caps on chromosomes. Color is pulsing in the wings, building to a climax that will spew rainbows when the critical temperature is reached. Already lilacs bob naked in the sunshine, greedily gulping down each other’s perfume.

I like to call the frog bogs porn ponds because they are shamelessly indiscriminate just now. Nature is promiscuous by…um, nature, and if you dare breathe in the heady swirl of pollen, you are a participant like it or not. But you will like it, because nature’s imperative is in your blood and the contagion of warm life flows through your veins. Keep your clothes on, but do not lock out the urgency that calls your name.

What, what…you think you’re too busy living your REAL life to take time for an “outing”? Lemme tell ya, trapped behind glass or surrounded by noise and neon isn’t what a couple million years of basic training in evolution prepped you for. The REAL you is alone in a crowd. If your life is a bitterly contested game of solitaire, you’re not getting it. Hie thee to your local empty lot or vacant field and examine the magic!

And you don’t have to do it alone. Life presents its rare people…if you can recognize them. Much as I like solitude, I’ve been lucky enough to meet a companion or two. Some of you have asked about one of mine from recent photos in Sullygrams, so here’s a sketch:

Mickey is someone I share many adventures with along with incredible conversations. Because she is such a committed rescue person for animals, we often get into the ethics of life, and there we juxtapose reason against emotion – call it rational vs. compassional, if I may coin a term. Without dwelling on technical examples of the conservation of life, ranging from mitochondria to white Siberian tigers, invariably I express the sentiment to her that at some point in caring for all things I won’t be paralyzed by inadvertent collateral damage. If you’ve ever spend a nickel on yourself that could’ve gone to the poor or driven a car that inevitably hit an insect, you’ve done no less, I say. Life is too short to be a no-show for your own path or destiny. I think that holds true for any person seeking a meaningful life in line with everything inside them. To do less than that is simply to exist less. There is risk in living to one’s capacity – risk to oneself, risk to the world around us. But to not accept that risk is a betrayal of the gifts you were given, an affront to whatever created you, and a lack of worthiness of your own freedom to live. I say these things, but I admire Mickey’s common-sense compassion and the very unique and fascinating history that brought her to where she is.

Risks in general are nicely balanced between Mickey and moi. I don’t scare at the stare of a bear just out of its lair but am terrified by creatures that Mickey is unfazed by – my dreaded nemesis, the blood-lust relentless predators of the forest prime evil, aka deer ticks. Deer ticks carry Lyme disease and the ghastly powassan virus. Mickey, on the other hand, would never throw a surprise party for a bear. In theory, I protect her from bears (though God help her if we ever stir up Smoky and she can’t outrun me). And Mickey allows me to flick deer ticks off my clothes as long as I don’t give them concussions.

This is how it works: …we cross a stream into the Porn Pond (frog orgy locale) and beaver foresting area, pushing our way through tearing briars and up-hill woods thicker than mist in search of a place I once found while scouting for  sanctuaries. It is a magical place – a picturesque hill with a stand of oaks and a trap door in the ground – one of many that I had wanted to share in 2007 with the love of my life. But like memory itself, the journey back through time turns into a maze. And when Mickey and I stumble into a reedy clearing that contains bones, including a large skull with the snout bitten off and a couple of thigh bones (clearly the loser to a larger predator) she begins to get antsy.

I’m all for going on (it’s too cold for deer ticks), but a few yards further into the dense underbrush we see some bear scat. It is March, the time when alarm clocks go off for hungry hibernating bruins. Mickey’s alarms of a different sort are already going off. Her intuition is keen, but I ignore her protests until the thickets effectively block my progress anyway. I pretend it’s because of the bears (we are sort of like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer that way). We work our way back to a creek and, for all I know, she has saved my life.

But now comes the true menace as I spot a LIVING, MOVING TICK who doesn’t know it’s too cold to go out for a 6-pack of blood. Sayonara, Sully. Time for me to head out of the reeds and onto the bare naked trail where ticks tread not. Mickey says goodbye to the tick...

My latest archived column over on SU is Q&A, but with a decided departure. Which is to say, I’m breaking my rule to never answer about politics or religion. Here’s how I put it in the column: “…a long late-night discussion while in Idaho recently has inclined me to take on one of those topics. A question I receive regularly asks in so many words if I believe in God. I don’t pitch my beliefs, but clearly some people want to know what they are in a genuinely curious way rather than out of religious zeal, so maybe I should have answered this before. Let me generalize a little – LOL, well, as superficial as my answer is, it ain’t all that short, so I’ll generalize a lot. But please…no predicant replies or evangelizing email. Not challenging anyone else’s faith, just trying to explain generally how I came to terms with existence and purpose.” The column link to Stubbing my TOE: http://www.storytellersunplugged.com/2015/04/15/thomas-sullivan-stubbing-my-toe/#respond

This month’s photos below: #1 kayak channel by my house; #2-4 Idaho sanctuaries where I ski near my life-long friend Bruce’s ranch. #5-8 OK, as promised in one of my columns, here are photos of two trailmates that readers tend to mix up and with whom I share adventures – #5-6 Mickey the dog whisperer and #7-8 Lisa the horse whisperer. #9-12 more exquisite settings in Idaho’s ski haunts. And here’s a video of gorgeous Galena on an icy day in the mountains. Turn the sound up and you can hear heartbeats. Big screen will let you share the nuanced sky… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SSfdIlTQrY

Thanks for the couple dozen email replies and comments to my “Poetry of Shaving Cream” column. You added some new rhythms to my thinking. May your life be a poem sung by your heart…

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Thomas "Sully" Sullivan

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