New Frontiers!?

It's been awhile since I last posted but the need to take up the pen (of course that is a euphemism since I am writing this on a computer) is getting strong again. This blog started out to be about adventure and here I am ready to relate to you why I feel like the last few months have been an adventure even though I haven't done anything remarkably 'adventurous'.

This morning I started the day by seeking knowledge - how to remove reeking cat spray from inside the closet of a rental I have. Unfortunately, Ace Hardware isn’t open at 7am as I had hoped and after sitting in my truck YiHa a few minutes, sorting out what I would do with the half hour I had before I had to be somewhere else, I realized I had enough time for an outside meditation.

I like outside meditation.  I try to meditate at least a few minutes on every hike or backpack or schlep out to the wild. But this meditation would be different. The venue would be the labyrinth behind my church.

OK, I’m coming out of the closet. I admit to being an irregular church goer. Sometimes I’m kind of embarrassed to admit I actually attend church but this morning was beautiful and the mountains behind my church are beautiful and my church family is beautiful and they often think beautiful thoughts. So, lucky me, church can be a really good place to be on a Sunday – or any day actually. Sometimes it occurs to me that this Sunday thing is one of the downfalls of organized religion – it doesn’t happen often on other days so it's easy to forget.

My church (St. Francis in the Foothills United Methodist Church if you really want to know) has a labyrinth. I know because I have sometimes helped to keep it tidy. A labyrinth is a special place which can be a focal point or even a playground for your spiritual self. It is a maze, usually built with stones that one proceeds through step by step, moving further into meditation with each step. The maze itself, however, winds further away from the center before heading back into the center – an appropriate allegory for our spiritual lives. One’s slow, repetitive and thoughtful steps through the maze are a metaphor for the journey for your soul. At its best, a labyrinth can be a tool to calm the mind so that Spirit can get through the obstacles our busy thoughts put it through.

But I have this monkey mind you see. I would love to say that I can easily find my ‘meditation seat’ and let my mind wander off to play with Spirit. More often though my mind starts making lists or gets riled up about what some ‘stupid pundit’ said on Fox News or wonders if some animal will think I'm a tasty morsel. To calm my monkey mind, I often use mantras – very short phrases that are used when one breathes in and out. One of my favorite is “I know your greatness (on the in-breath) and I feel your love (on the out-breath)”. I tried it today but my monkey mind wanted to listen to the birds or take a peek at the cute Sheriff who I finally realized stopped by my church’s somewhat secluded Sunday School classroom bathroom to use the always open facilities (my monkey mind was ALL OVER that one).

My monkey mind just wouldn’t come to center like it is supposed to.  That’s the trouble with monkey minds; they don’t – mind that is. My monkey mind was particularly adventurous this morning. Aware that my monkey mind was in complete control, I decided to tire it with what I hoped would be a particularly difficult task. Sometimes this helps; a worn out monkey mind is not as agile.

I find a Yoga breathing technique called ‘alternate nostril breathing’ to be quite useful, especially when I need centering or I’m all stuffed up with allergies. I thought it might be interesting to see how my monkey mind handled my pilgrimage through the labyrinth while employing a form of alternate nostril breathing. Instead of 'breathe in-breathe out', this Yoga technique entails breathing OUT first followed by the breath IN. Try it. It's a head trip to keep it going. Exactly opposite what we have learned since we screamed our first breaths at the mean person in the white coat who forced us to leave that incredibly comfortable womb.

I began by stepping forward on my breath out and then drawing up my left-behind leg square with my leading leg on my breath in. Then, as my body was letting go of its breath, I would lead with this same left-behind leg repeating the process. Monkey minds have to be quite quiet when doing this because otherwise not only will you screw up but there may be risk of serious falls.

The whole point of this exercise was to provide my mind with a completely different experience and see what happened. Would I experience any insights worthy of my time at the labyrinth? The other day I posted on Facebook that I have decided to live my life in a way that makes the phrase “adventure of a lifetime” redundant. I’ve been pondering exactly how to do this lately and it seemed likely my monkey mind might like to think about that during my labyrinth meditation. I was ready for this.

Now, I’ve had a couple very nice adventures since my last writing.  I’ve made a promise to myself to start writing again and I’m sure I’ll write about that wonderful hiking trip Sedona or that terrific weekend of cross-country skiing in Glacier and Whitefish Montana or that incredible New Year’s Eve in tangy Terlingua Texas soon. But I’ve also been working very hard on completely orienting my life in the direction of CHANGE. CHANGE is a big scary word sometimes but I kind of like it and I’m a bit of a planner so I’ve been taking ‘steps’. My monkey mind has found this inner discussion fascinating and wanted to think about change this morning instead of calming down to sit in the dark corners of my mind so Spirit could visit.

My monkey mind sometimes acts as my Greek chorus – laughing at my ‘certainties’ and providing witty and sardonic commentary on my most important questions. My question this morning – what exactly does “New Frontier” mean? You know, the Star Trek thing “where no (wo)man has been before”. Does it have to involve travel or bear spray? If your life takes off in a 90 or 180 degree angle, can you classify that as adventure? I looked up adventure in the dictionary (I still have one of those really old dictionaries one turns pages to find the word they are looking for). “Adventure” according to Webster, is “an exciting or dangerous experience”. I would suggest that this covers a whole LOT of circumstances, including change.

Running away to Yellowstone is undeniably adventurous - much like running away to the circus. I’m pretty sure I could get most of my readers to agree with that.  Spending a year to reorient my finances so in the near future I can work and live in National Parks and still have a very nice townhome in Tucson’s Catalina Foothills to come home to might not be considered very adventurous. But I can attest that changing your life in order to change your life is an adventure. Hence the title of this post “The New Frontier”.

Moving to Yellowstone felt very much like stepping on a cliff and hoping that the winds would provide enough loft to sail.  Changing my life so that I can take the radical step of working seasonally at National Parks seems an adventure of a more tedious nature – more like going back to school than setting off for a distant planet. Yet, it definitely feels like a cliff and I am learning new things every day as I adjust my life and my finances to suit my goal of living off the meager dregs of pay meted out by the concessionaires for the Park Service. Let’s face it – they don’t have to pay a lot because they have the most priceless employee benefit known on the planet – you get to wake up to and live in beauty EVERY DAY.

So I am, as I have explained to my friends, turning every asset I have into a ‘profit center’. I have listed my beloved townhome with VRBO.com (Vacation Rentals by Owner) and have successfully begun to host 'guests'. I have sold stock and acquired and renovated two rental houses to provide additional income. And to help through the transition, I now work as a contract bookkeeper for three non-profits and still act as CFO for our real estate development partnerships. I've been busy.

Honestly, I don’t mind being paid wages that barely provide a sustainable life in order to live in incredibly beautiful places but I don’t really want to LIVE just a sustainable life. I haven’t seen Indonesia or India or the Acropolis yet and I can’t get there by walking. Traveling around the globe takes some money – maybe not much if you travel light but at least some.

So I am learning how to remediate cat spray in a bedroom closet. Or that you can buy replacement hinges for your garage door but they come in a bunch of different designs so guessing from memory may mean a second trip. Or that ants really love dog food the previous tenants left under a refrigerator. Lots of different things. I am also learning that when you really want something, obstacles can be overcome and thinking of them as mini-adventures is the most pleasant way to get through it.

Just in case you think my life is boring, while I am working on freeing my financial life in order to run back into the woods, I also am researching and writing a love story about two neighborhood children who, during and after WWII, wind up courting via the military mail of the Pacific theater and then getting married and raising five wonderful kids (one of whom is me). I am learning to live with the decision of my son to go a direction that frankly left me gobsmacked when he called to tell me about it (definitely I’ll be writing more on that one after he actually takes that giant first step). I am living a somewhat itinerant life, moving from one house to the next as my ‘profit centers’ are rented or remodeled. I have rented and remodeled an office tastefully and beautifully so it is now a real pleasure to work in. I am working on my own website.

Life IS an adventure and as long as I can wake up in the morning with enthusiasm and the knowledge I will go to bed knowing more than I began, I’m satisfied with my ‘adventure’ for now. OK, all those long weekend trips to really cool or wild places help of course. And it helps to know with certainty that I am working on getting back to my wilderness, to those trails I didn’t get to because of Yellowstone’s summer fires and the new ones I’ve never encountered. But for now tramping into totally new life paths and learning lots of new things along the way will have to suffice. I’m convinced it is possible to find adventure every single day if you look for it.

That’s not exactly right. It is possible to find adventure every single day if you are open to the possibilities of it. And maybe it means trying old things in brand new ways. Sometimes it requires one to step away from one's comfortable aerie in the hills. If you think about it, on Star Trek, discovering New Frontiers was always about the journey anyway - rarely about the destination.