Adventure Awaits
Welcome to our 2022 year in the rearview. We put 10K miles on the Sprinter this year, which means we generated tons of memories. We got back from Baja in May after four months of wonderful time with friends and family.
Our trip home included getting the van stuck on a Baja beach, and a birthday ride on the eBikes into the park at Joshua Tree with Kate.
We weren’t in Portland long before we packed up the van to attend a wedding in Durango, CO. Our dear friends from Baja got married in the mountains and I played a little wedding song during the festivities. What a trip. We had two days of driving through a Mormon Cricket infestation that turned the roads brown with their crushes bodies. Very surreal. But great weather and we met up with Portland friends for the drive home, which was a blast.
Upon return, we began planning for the trip north to Calgary to see Lord Huron in concert. There was also a Decemberist concert in Missoula on the way. It would become nearly three weeks of wandering, which included a flight from Spokane to San Diego for another wedding the end of the sojourn.
September brought us back to the Four Corners area for Elliot's memorial at the Zuni Sanctuary near Farmington, NM. We flew this time and met Brother Mike & Judy for the trip north from Albuquerque. It was another moment of closure on a charmed and sometime conflicted life. We were able to get out on some desert hikes and it gave me a truer sense about what was pulling Elliot to this part of the planet, over and over. We planted a memorial at the sanctuary and spread some ashes. Met some of the people he loved, played with the dogs, and walked the land to which he was spiritually connected.
We've been doing smaller trips over to the coast or out to the other side of the Cascades since our return. The crabbing was excellent on Netarts Bay this Fall.
Mitchell and Danielle are an inspiration in our lives. We get them and their dogs for entertainment every now and then. Their lives are busy and full with work, school and travel.
Kate had me doing yoga on the beach in Baja and now we are doing yoga together three days a week. I've been at it seven months and it is a staple in our exercise routine along with walking/running trails in the Arboretum.
I started writing the following bit of introspection while wandering the Bisti Badlands. The desert’s stark beauty gave me some time to go a little deeper into my understanding of grief...
Grief is a love letter stamped return to sender. Yet, a life without grief is no life at all. But grief’s sometime partner, regret, is a prison. Regret chains some part of you which you deeply value, struggling; forever cemented at the center of a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget. It breeds guilt, which is a story unto itself. The key to escaping regret’s incarceration, and accepting absolution of guilt, is the admission of the past as past. Leaving, not forgetting, the past makes room for the present and a path forward to whatever the future holds.
Grief is a love letter stamped return to sender. Yet, a life without grief is no life at all. But grief’s sometime partner, regret, is a prison. Regret chains some part of you which you deeply value, struggling; forever cemented at the center of a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget. It breeds guilt, which is a story unto itself. The key to escaping regret’s incarceration, and accepting absolution of guilt, is the admission of the past as past. Leaving, not forgetting, the past makes room for the present and a path forward to whatever the future holds.
Kate and I are settled in for the holidays and slowly organizing to leave for Baja on Jan 5. We are traveling with Canadians we met down in Playa Escondido last winter, and that will make the trip more of a party.
Have a wonderful holiday season and an adventurous new year. We’ll see you down the road…
Jbird & Kate 2022
Have a wonderful holiday season and an adventurous new year. We’ll see you down the road…
Jbird & Kate 2022
