"Rocky" is irony out here.

Yesterday I was speaking to one of my new managers and friend and she mentioned how every now and then she looks to the horizon and sees the mountain line and stops to think, “Wow. How am I so lucky?” She was raised here, went to school in California, and returned to her beloved Rockies. When she told me this, I couldn’t help but fill with warmth. As I write this, I’m looking out my back window at a perfect complimentary color schemed sky and my very own mountainscape.

I still don’t know what called me here. All I know is when I look at that horizon, right now is all I need. This is what yoga is teaching me and this is what I will strive for the remainder of my time here. Life isn’t perfect, and it may never be. But the beauty certainly outweighs the tortures. How can we find our mountainscapes everywhere, everyday? Some of my friends wake up to someone they love and find it. Some see downtown St. Paul lit up and romantic in winter and find it. Some let the tide hit their toes and find it. I don’t need these mountains to answer my questions. I need them to let the questions go.

 

Thanks for the inspiration Brooke and Matt.

Should we retort our grand design?

Four years ago as the wheels rolled beneath me on my move to Miami, I felt a growing cloud of anxiety and grief as if I knew that we were driving head first into a hurricane…and quite literally we were. Thus far in my life, any decision I have made with too much weight for another person has ended in destruction. That doesn’t mean I’ve chosen to be selfish or celibate, but that I have reached a point that I question the blueprint of this life and encourage you to question as well.

This move out west feels organic and full of purpose. As the recreational director of my youth, I am now placed in a life that promises only the basics to survival; shelter, income and friendship. Although I’m leaving a piece of my trust and smile with a select few in Minnesota, I’m walking into the light and designing every day in the manner that I see fit. We can make this choice.

So, what is our grand design and how much can we control? In only 25 years of experience, I’ve most commonly realized (or concocted) a reason for the way things turned out. I suppose my suggestion then is…if we are going to concoct a reason for the way things turned out anyways, why not take full advantage of the situation you’re in today? I don’t know why we meet intriguing people two days before we leave the state. I don’t know why we lose loved ones or why some people choose to leave. I don’t know why society tells us to stay in a miserable job to support a lifestyle that the individual has not defined themselves. What I do know, is that we have a life to live today anyways. Despite your foundation, your grand design or even your desires for the way you want your life to be—try just living it today. It just might turn out exactly the way it’s supposed to.
 

I met this happy bartender in Puerto Vallerta, Mexico back when my dreams were to live barefoot in the sand. After his divorce, he took off and opened this tiny bar just inches from the beach. I thought him terrific.

Confessions from the Walk-in Closet

I suppose there is some Freudian reason as to why I have put off cleaning out the basement closet so long. I imagined the daunting task of transporting the hundreds of Vogue magazines I had kept would be painful, but I didn’t realize that all of my secrets from ages 12-18 were sitting here under a pile of fabric and notebooks. As I sift through my adolescence in the form of misspelled notes and frayed photos I can’t help but ask myself (excuse my Bradshaw plagiarism)…what do I do with this massive pile of compact discs? How do I relieve myself of this post traumatic episode that these ghosts of ex-boyfriends past is causing? And…why did I have an open relationship in Junior High? So, you’re saying the commitment phobia has been around for a while?

 

This must be the reason females have “boyfriend box” flame parties. Can someone please escort me to the nearest bonfire before something really goes wrong? I have just spent hours rehashing the fact that my first “real” boyfriend in Junior High was madly in love with my charismatic personality while the other 7^th grade felines (including my best friend) chased after him like all the other lions had gone off to war. I think I won out in the end and at least managed to not play the body surrender game that damaged the souls of my peers. He’s married now and she’s pretty wonderful so he must have overcame my “dangling the mouse in front of the hungry cat” open relationship philosophy.

High school came next and this phase stings like my heart turned into an iron clad transformer that threatens to morph back to a junk yard at the appropriate phrase. Journals. Receipts for guitars. Dirty, long haired pictures.  Real love. Real love almost lost. More Journals. Cards from friends and family. Notes telling me I’m beyond my years and I deserve so much. Journals confessing I want only one thing. I remember sitting in my car in the high school parking lot senior year on a Friday once class got out. I was heading to the hospital to spend the night. There is no such thing as a curfew when your boyfriend is in the intensive care unit. I watched everyone jumping into their vehicles, off to parties and laughing. I couldn’t remember laughing. My life changed that day. I vowed to survive until he could have a real Friday night. I’ve been surviving ever since.

Freshman year of college soon followed. I found someone that was fascinated with me again. Once he told me he wanted to marry me. I told him to stop the car and I got out. His notes are the sweetest, most confidence boosting words I have ever received. I trampled him because I didn’t think it was possible to love once you had been hollowed out. I hope his cut wasn’t as deep.

That’s when the notes end because I learned to speak aloud and I learned to let things go. I met someone that lived in the moment and he was the Fluoxetine to my day. Today the answers are still unclear and they are not found on tiny folded sections of college ruled paper. Today the best you can do is open up some space in your transforming heart to see what comes next. Do not seek what comes next, but be the most courageous and honorable version of all the lessons of those that came before today. Let the rest flutter away like Vogues in the wind…that you can find piled at the end of my driveway.