The temperature of birth has been reached here in the northern hemisphere! Nature’s water broke through the last carapace of ice and the Earth is pushing life from its body to the huffing and puffing of spring winds. No C-sections, no induced labor. This is the irrepressible bloom of a nine-month gestation. From the dew-kissed emerald dawn to the vibrant viridescent twilight, green is conjugating itself in all its tints and hues.

But complete rainbows have awakened as well. Let your heart be a chameleon discovering the full flush of Spring. Listen up, left ventricle – no more drab! And you – aorta – get rid of that mauve. Time to pump rich, red blood like you mean it!

Don’t your senses sharpen when a new season arrives? Makes you realize you’ve been letting life become dull and abstract. How easy it is to slip into sensory deprivation when you hunker down all wrapped in routine and apathy. But you know, there’s another way to stimulate the receptors in your mind and soul. It’s called adventure.

Actually, it has lots of names – discovery, imagination, creativity, communication with all your brain lit up! Communication is the unifying thread of all of it. No texting with caveman grammar. You have to look someone in the eye and reach into both your souls for all the Technicolor you can find of wit, style and insight. Otherwise you are scribbling grunts, the babble of a baby’s needs. 

Wish I could take you with me through the microcosms and macrocosms of a day here in Mini-snowda where everything throbs with magic! Colors are more vivid, sounds are more sonorous, water is wetter, tangs tastier, and fragrances more redolent – everything seems invested with that bigger-than-life quality of a dream. You think maybe it is a dream? Nah…only reality could span the miles of green glory and liquid laughter I’ve shared this last month. Pick your medium. Earth, Air, Water, Wind or Fire – I’ve felt them all in the settings and the souls of what and who I’ve touched this month! 

Easy to revisit in my memories. But not just b/w memories like old dead photographs. My memories are full senses five! That’s because I keep the most transcendent ones separate. Of course, you have to have those transcendent experiences first. They are unlikely to come to you if you are living under a rock or in a rut. If you know who you are, what you want, and what you need, you stand a better chance. May take some searching, a little courage, a lot of passion, and some providential synchronicity – but, hey, dreams don’t bother waking up for the dull and mundane. Mediocrity need not apply for the highlights of your life. 

As usual, the pace of living precludes catching it in photos/vids. But here are a few – mostly people – that allowed for savoring: #1-2 Elm Creek’s sanctuaries never fail to stun me their flow of light and nature; #3-6 that’s Mickey Magic on one of our recent voyages by my house; #7-8 if you haven’t sat down in the dust and let life happen to you at a microcosmic level since you were a kid, you really need to do that (…so easy to exaggerate your own proportions and lose track of your place in nature when you smother yourself with urban culture and social context); #9-11 yours truly at a conference of ants, snakes, bees, dragonflies et al; #12 some new friends at Crow Hassan; #13 and can’t forget the swans – if you’re looking at this on a big screen, you may be able to count 6 new cygnets between the white-feathered mates!

And here’s another video clip for those who like skinny skiing vicariously. This is crust skiing in Stanley Basin, Heido-ho (Idaho). My friend Bruce said I wouldn't be able to resist skiing crust, though I was supposed to be rehabbing my arm from a pretty serious injury. The morning was gentle, as it turned out, with no sudden break-throughs of the crust except near the road. The bigger the screen, the better for really seeing this fabulous mountain plateau where wolves, elk and eagles play (don’t know what happened to the deer and the antelope): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv4A_0VORT8

Two Facebook friends of mine, Karen Waeschle and Yvonne Austin, have requested that I revisit columns I wrote a decade ago that were lost when StorytellersUnplugged made format changes. So my column this month is one of those with the original reader comments included. "Agent Bingo & the Cannibal Snowman" captures some of the adventures I wrote of above. Here's the link: http://www.storytellersunplugged.com/2016/06/01/thomas-sullivan-agent-bingo-the-cannibal-snowman/#respond

Those necessary elements for experiencing adventure that I wrote about above – discovery, imagination, creativity, communication with all your brain lit up – are not the least bit rare. But with all our technology and increasing reliance on being entertained, it’s a sedentary spectator’s world, is it not? Still, the fundamental resources that brought us through evolution to this point haven’t guttered out yet. The dystopian vision of humans losing control to robots and AI is still at bay. So I’m betting on you…us. We don’t have to resign ourselves to what stress and social pressure dictate. If you’ve ever come close to blossoming into a different person, or at least one living an entirely different life, you were on the threshold of adventure and transformation and fulfillment. Somewhere inside you, maybe lying fallow, the fuses of inner resources are waiting to be lit. Got a match?