The addiction of adventure.

My friend is 82. She’s travelled the world already. For her, a rich internal life characterized

by a deep curiosity is adventure enough. It made me wonder when she started

to recognize her own contentment with smaller things. Nadia Boltz Weber

Adventuring has been an avoidance strategy I have used my whole life. Perhaps it was born with me in my life as a military brat…the moves, the having to get comfortable with being unsettled, the never knowing when the school would change or new friends would have to be made.

Friends I made along the way shared rich memories of mom at home, pre-school, church… all American things. In my youngest memories swirled the smell of tatami mats and sliding rice paper walls, art deco fish flags and dancing dragons whose movements were punctuated by Taiko drums. My friends had memories of trikes and car rides. My three year old brain stored memories of the U.S.S. Gaffey and the deck chairs as we crossed the Pacific from Japan to San Francisco, in calm and in storm.

Other kids’ moms cooked and cleaned and welcomed them home from school. Mine started her own business and set us out into the world unsupervised. Other families had friends for dinner, or for cards or for barbecues in the backyard. In eighteen years in our family home, we never had a visitor, except for the day my dad was killed by a drunk driver and the lady next door brought over a foul smelling casserole to comfort us in our grief. It was literally the first time we had exchanged words.

That is not to say mom was not social. While my dad did his soldier thing and then went off to run a theatre at night, she reveled in collecting characters at work, eventually making them part of “our work life”. I say our, because she made child labor a major part of her children’s existence when we were old enough to help.

While our friends played games with neighborhood kids, my younger brother and I would be collating some mimeograph job having contests to see who could do it faster. And there were stuffing envelopes contests and licking envelopes contests, being careful to not have the sharp thin edge cut into our tongues.

The adults in our lives were introduced to us at her place of work and most had recently stepped off the greyhound bus from a station across the street, a street once walked by John Steinbeck in our shared home town.

There was the older man named John, who was a Watcher from Mars, here only to observe those of us on Planet Earth. His stories about outer space were shared as I stood carefully watching the mimeograph barrel circle rhythmically, hoping for no jams.

And there was Erickson, the escapee from a mental institution who lived with Lilly the bird lady in a Miss Haversham style home. The curtains were always drawn against the light and her parakeets fluttered in the dusty light from curtain rod to curtain rod. In a short amount of exposure, I came to learn he saw dead people and had conversations with spirits no one could see. He haunts me still.

It seemed for most of my life I was trapped in situations that wrapped me in a state of dis-ease and from which I could not escape, only disappear. Except for family adventures in nature. On those occasions, I could escape because the first thing my parents would do once we arrived was disappear, leaving four children to be free of any expectations. Only then did my life seem safe.

I couldn’t run from my life then. But set free as an adult I could, and I did. Whenever some growth opportunity reared its painful head. Whenever I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Whenever I felt my life on the edge of conflict, I moved. I called it adventure.

And thus, adventure became a distraction. From the reality of my circumstance.

But these days, the siren’s call lands on ears damaged by time. The lure of dotted white lines has disappeared in the rear view mirror. Everything I ever have wanted to see, I think I have seen. Everything I wanted to do, I have done. And as the landscape of my heart has undergone exploration and renovation, I have grown weary of my addiction.

And so, I begin a new journey…to stay rooted in one place…

to find contentment in the small things

Because it is in the small things that hope lives... the sun in the morning appearing with its Ta Dah rays over the Santa Rita mountains….a drop of dew clinging delicately on a tiny flower in a jungle of cactus…a sunflower with its face turned towards the morning reflected in a small lake.

Here, in this desert place, I find adventure in turning over stones as prehistoric creatures with frantic legs flee from the light. I move agave plants from one location to another one I have deemed more suitable. But I take great care to keep the siblings together, as I feel they have become accustomed to one another’s sharp embrace, and I cannot bear to separate them. I move gravel from one place to another and back again reveling in the sound of its sharp stone edges hitting the the metal blade of the shovel.

So, like Nadia’s 82 year old friend, I am making friends with small moments.

Around me, war swirls across the globe, and here, in our own borderlands, the dance of hope and the finality of death weave in and out of the dry, sharp landscape of the desert. Sirens scream in the night, and though I hunger for a sense of peace, it eludes me in the onslaught of cruelty that pervades our human landscape.

I feel helpless. I have no where to turn.

And so, in my inadequacy and the paralysis of my heart, I turn to these stones, these pebbles, these plants. I dig in the dirt in the morning heat, and I stand under the night sky and soak in the stars. I cry out to God in the darkness and beg for release of the suffering of this world. For healing. For peace.

And then in the morning light, like Sisyphus of ancient lore, I begin again, finding small things to love and to move again, from one place to another.

In the face of such tragedy bombarding our hearts in the world today, one might find this work of little value or consolation.

But like Camus, I believe that in this never ending task I am learning that “the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart…and… imagine Sisyphus happy…”

And in these small moments, so it is with me.

Not my story to tell

When a car runs a red light or a stop sign and crashes into the side of an unsuspecting driver, the term often used to describe the event is “t-boned”. After such an event, the victim is often left not just with physical trauma, but mental and emotional as well. The world becomes an unsafe place and danger can seem to be lurking in every shadow.

In our family, we used the term universally, especially when it came to relational and emotional areas. When a distant family member’s response to another’s vulnerability and honesty was unexpected and cruel, we would say, “That was a t-bone.” When a social issue came up where we assumed everyone was on the same page and something cruel and expected came out of somebody’s mouth instead, that was a “t-bone”. If instead of expected love, we received intentional harm, it was a t-bone.

And lately, I feel like a walking car crash.

It is not because people are cruel, though they can be. It is not because anything is going on in my social relationships, though sometimes there can be. No, it is because, though I should expect no different, our culture has been crashing into my recent new vehicle, and I am always unprepared.

This new car is different from my old one. My old car was safe and unnoticeable. I drove around in it and had conversations with myself about the state of the world, and then I drove to the mountains or to the vast sea and walked and talked with God and everything was good,because my world revolved around the thoughts in my head and my perceived notions about the world and its occupants.

But this new vehicle was built on confronting reality and not safety and escape. This new vehicle has four wheel drive, with the top down in the heat and the wind and the dust. Its views of the desert are not of sunrises and sunsets over a manicured path, but of rocky ravines and desiccated river beds.

This new vehicle does not just read headlines and plaster bandaids and frolick off into an interior life of peace and security in solitude on well marked roads.

My old car touted the value of social justice. But it only received dings in the parking lot. Here, every time I get into the new vehicle, the side of it gets destroyed.

I cannot drive down a road without encountering a cross where hope died crossing the desert, often steps away from civilization…more often in remote places, unforgiving places…inhumane places to die. I cannot unsee the images that surround us here in the borderlands. Nor can I unhear the despicable responses to the sufferings of others.

T-boned. Every day.

As hard as this is, I have lived here less than two years. Others have been driving their battered vehicles through these deserts for decades, tending to the lost, the thirsty, and the bruised and never giving up hope for a more just world until it becomes one.

I had breakfast with a road warrior like that. Decades of driving through these desert roads, tending to the broken hearted, building bridges where others build walls. I felt the warmth of her spirit and sang baby shark to her granddaughter. She shared her vision for the work she does for a more just world. She promised to send a public documentary video of her life story.

I would never want anyone to be experience being t-boned in reality, but today, I am inviting you to be t-boned in your spirit and watch the short documentary at the end of this post. Hear the story, her story, and let it wash over you into any dry places you might have when it comes to issues around the border and immigrants.

Hear the story of someone who lived the headlines, and now, even knowing the dangers, has been cruising through the intersections anyway, because being on the road matters. No matter the cost.

It is her story to tell. I could never do it justice.

The man who said yes.

My husband Tim described his dad as a “no” machine. Only one opinion in the family mattered: His. Anything he didn’t like himself was branded unworthy of exploration. So deeply ingrained were his parameters for life that to go against his way of thinking was, well, unthinkable.

But I loved his dad. He was all gracious Texan charm to me and to his acquired grandchildren. Even after the unimaginable happened. One day at a family gathering, he expressed a less than favorable opinion of teachers. Since I was one, I felt the need to challenge him on the subject.

I literally remember a collective gasp from the rest of the family, who awaited the punishment for my crime of having an opinion, but, as I recall, he merely smiled his gracious smile, a twinkle in his eye, and moved on. Apparently, I may have been the only one who did not fear the paper tiger that had ruled this family.

But Tim had ingested a wealth of “must held”opinions, one of which was that outdoor adventures, especially camping, were stupid. Our family, on the other hand, only went on camping adventures, being too poor to do anything else. And every weekend we seemed to be doing something in the outdoors. As someone who only found peace from conflict on family camping trips, his anti-camping stance presented a conundrum for me.

It took years before I began to devise a plan and then to feel safe suggesting it. Knowing that his version of camping was a motel, I first broached the subject of a “cushy” camping week, all meals provided, tents set up and a week to kayak with the orcas off the northern end of Vancouver Island. And the “hook” was this:

We would stay at a hotel on each end of the trip.

He agreed, to my surprise. When we arrived at the dock with our gear bags, a small cruiser awaited to boat us to a remote location with eight other participants all, we learned quickly, from foreign countries. After about 45 minutes, we turned the corner into a small cove, and the engines were shut off as we coasted to about ten or so yards off shore.

One of the crew member threw a park bench over the side as our “step ladder” and reminded us to carry our gear over our heads to keep it dry, sending us one by one into the icy water.

And, yes, it was a portent of things to come.

Once on shore, we were assigned to one of the permanent tents scattered around the hillsides. We were directed up a root tangled trail into an overgrown, rank forest. In the afternoon air, a rotting smell filled the air, which I chalked up to the hot midday sun. Throwing our gear inside, we hurried back to the main camp for dinner.

As the light faded, we clambered back to our awaiting tent after dinner with our insufficient flashlight, noting the smell had intensified. But sleep eluded us both. With the odor and the sound of a small stream nearby, the only antidote to the effects of intense nausea we were feeling was to drag our sleeping bags down to the beach in the dark to spend the night.

Stretching our bags on to the rocky sand, we lay there under the stars fighting the downhill tilt of the beach. In the distance, we spotted a cruise ship lit up like a Christmas tree and fantasized about swimming out to sea and pretending we had fallen overboard.

But finally sleep overtook us both. At least until I was awoken by the beautiful sound of waves crashing on shore. Getting nearer. And nearer. I wrenched my eyes open to note flashes of white near my feet.

The tide was coming in and we were below the tide line.

That was the beginning of the worst “cushy” camping trip in the history of mankind. Within two days, we had also discovered that Tim’s legs were too long to fit in a kayak without pain, and I had panic attacks when they tried to button down the skirt on my kayak to be in open ocean. We were land bound for the remainder of the trip.

Without kayaking as an activity, we became the guardians of someone else who found kayaking not to be to his liking: one of the twin teenage boys from Germany whose only English was the F word. At least that’s what he and his brother had convinced the group to believe, but I saw the twinkle in their eyes, and decided my contribution to their language study would be to add the sign language for “loser” to their vocabulary. Not our finest moment, but we somehow bonded with him over this sign language, and the three of us applied it far more than was appropriate.

Being the adventurer I was, I begged Tim to bail and go home early. We were covered in bites from an active sand flea invasion every night.. Sleep eluded us, and we woke up every morning to soaked sleeping bags. And our leaders expressed incredulity that anyone would book a kayak trip who did not, in fact, kayak. But we did kayak. Once. In an ocean kayak on Maui. True, we flipped it the moment we put our paddles in, but I was so sure this would be different.

Tim held the line. It was only a week.

Yes, a week. The longest weeks of our lives. Finally set back down on the dock, we limped to our car and drove to our hotel room. Once inside, we both literally looked at each other and started to weep. Uncontrollably. I looked at his slightly swollen, bug bite covered face and caught a glimpse of my own in the mirror. We had never looked so beaten up.

You would think that would have ended Tim’s adventures in the wilderness, but I continued to come up with wild ideas for “cushy” wilderness experiences, and, unlike his father, he continued to say yes. Yes to car camping, yes to tent camping, yes to camping on a river trip. Yes. Yes. Yes. In none of these trips did he ever have what I would call a positive experience. But he has hung in there.

When I read him my take on this adventure and asked him if it was accurate, he replied that it was all totally true. As we processed our less than stellar record with outdoor adventure, I shared that I marveled at his unfailing good humor when presented with yet another crazy idea, given his family DNA. . He looked me in the eye.

You know why I would do that?

Because I love you.

And so friends, we are headed on an another adventure this week to New Mexico to run in the White Sands and whatever else comes our way. Just another crazy idea. But because love is reciprocal, I booked a casita for us. Someplace with hot running water and fresh baked bread for incoming guests and a pool and a hot tub. Someplace where toilets flush and the yard is fenced.

Somewhere fit for a man who turned his back on “no” and, because of love, embraced the adventure of a spontaneous, sometimes uncomfortable life.