“Every person needs to take one day away. A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future. Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence. Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for. Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.” – Maya Angelou
I’m typing this post on a Sunday morning while sitting on the floor of a hotel room as my kids sleep. This weekend, we didn’t have any events scheduled, the weather was unpredictable, and March doesn’t have any holidays so we made up a get away of our own. On Saturday afternoon we checked into a hotel for one night. It has a pool and is less than 1 mile from our house.
It sounds silly as I type this but I swear the psychological benefits are real. We walked away from all the regular stuff – homework, practice, pet care, cooking, and cleaning – to change it up for 21 hours. This small shift has reminded me that all that we carry isn’t as immoveable as it sometimes seems.
The kids have explored every feature of our 300 sq feet hotel room and spent quality time watching the freeway because the room is fun but not all that scenic. We’ve splashed and swam in the pool, and are about to head down to a FREE all-we-can-eat breakfast buffet.
I know it’s not really free but it still feels freeing. I wonder how many restorative breaks are waiting for us on the other side of silly?
“Passion is what makes life interesting, what ignites our soul, drives our curiosity, fuels our love and carries our friendship, stimulates our intellect, and pushes our limit…A passion for life is contagious and uplifting.” – Jon Krakauer
I have a handful of close friends that prove that distance doesn’t matter. Whether we’ve been separated by space or time, whenever we get together it feels like only a moment has passed.
Distance also doesn’t matter when talking with the delightful author and blogger Darlene Foster. In the latest episode of the HoTM podcast, Episode 107: Travel and Adventure Vicki Atkinson and I were able to connect with Darlene from her home in Spain. Her warmth, energy and delight were just as palpable as if she was next door.
Darlene shares how she started writing her young adult series featuring Amanda Ross. It’s such a great story that captures so well the struggle for tone and perspective. And how once that key is unlocked we can keep on building!
She brings us the magic, the mystery, and discovery that come with travel and tweens. The delight of being unencumbered enough to not be afraid to see where things lead.
Darlene does such a beautiful job of writing about travel and adventure because she lives a life of travel and adventure. She tells us what it’s like to be bi-continental and why money should not be the limiting factor.
She is so inspirational. I know you’ll agree as you listen to how she reminds us to make our dreams come true. Darlene’s story is so compelling. She beautifully shows us how to attach to goals and just keep moving.
We’re confident you’ll love the scenic and beautiful places we explore as we talk about dreams, travel and adventure!
“Jobs fill your pocket, adventures fill your soul.” – Jaime Lyn Beatty
This past weekend I went on a bike ride with my kids. I think the below is a fairly accurate graph of the big emotions during the adventure. I didn’t chart the minor tremors as it’d look like we had been in an earthquake.
And this is how we remember it looking back four days later:
Now I’m just grateful that my kids keep my expedition muscles working. Because in the end, I think these adventures, big and small, teach us about life. We learn we can do it, survive the ups and downs, and in the process, do something worth remembering.
“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I ended up where I needed to be.” – Douglas Adams
My nine-year-old daughter, Miss O has started walking by herself to the neighborhood grocery store. She comes back with the most fabulous things. Not only the lemon I asked for but great stories about what she saw and experienced out in the world. The crow tapping on a wire and the longest dog howl ever, for example.
Also, the lessons learned. The first time it was that the automatic door sensor doesn’t work for her so she had to tailgate behind a taller person. The second time it was that she didn’t know that the checker was trying to hand back her change so she gave him a fist bump. The third time it was that she needed to wait for her change.
There are so many things to learn when we try new things. And in that spirit, Vicki Atkinson and I went scriptless for the latest podcast with author and blogger Mark Petruska in Episode 101: Out of Our Comfort Zone.
This format was Mark’s idea – to do a podcast without any prompts. To be fair, it’s not that different than our standard format. Usually we go into an episode with three or so prompts of things to talk about. But as all you listeners know, we clearly go down any side roads and questions that occur as we talk.
But in this episode, we each came up with a question for the others to answer. No predetermined topics or heads up.
And you know what? It was fun. Kinda like a great dinner party conversation. It opened the forum up for off-the-cuff storytelling.
I’m confident you’ll love the scenic and beautiful places we explore as we share the power of going out of our comfort zones to do unscripted storytelling!
“Sometimes you have to let go of the picture of what you thought it would be like and learn to find joy in the story you are actually living.” – Rachel Marie Marten
This past weekend my kids and I went to the Reptile Expo. I know that might be the least appealing hook for a Monday but stick with me.
It was an experience gift that my niece gave us for Christmas. The same delightful niece from whom we got the crested gecko. And guess what? My kids loved the idea. She and her husband made this great bingo card for the cards to help guide the experience.
My niece had given us an extra ticket so I extended the invitation to my friend, Eric. He asked if my niece was mad at me and then humorously declined. But he came over for dinner after we got back and had lots of questions.
And that’s where this got interesting to me. My kids loved the expo and so my off-the-cuff response was that we had a good time. But Eric is a great storyteller and pressed for the details. When he asked all about the show, it elicited stories and information I hadn’t really thought to mine.
Like he asked who went to reptile expos and it made me think of our reaction when we arrived. The show was about an hour south of Seattle and when we neared the fairgrounds, there was a huge line of people at the gate. We thought there must have been something else going on. Turns out the lines were for the reptile expo.” Two hundred people?” Eric prompted. More like two thousand.
And the type of people that attended were mostly families. In the bathroom, we saw a woman helping her grandsons wash their hands. And then she said, “Cmon, let’s go find grandpa and great-grandma.”
The first exhibit near the doors was snakes and the kids wanted to hold one. I stood back to watch until the gentleman that got one out for us explained that the protocol with kids is that he hands the snake to the adult and they supervise the kids holding them. Ugh.
Eric wanted to know whether the exhibitors were just people showing off their pets or if it was a money making opportunity. Most of the animals there were for sale. In one display, there was snake after snake after snake in what looked like cake displays. You know the topper you put on a cake plate? Let’s hope that these had latches to secure them. I didn’t get close enough to check.
There was also a guy who was charging $5 for anyone who wanted to take a picture with his snake around their neck. We passed but I got a picture of him with the snake around his neck. Eric took a lot at that and laughed, “Not surprisingly, he’s got snake tattoos.”
And there were also a couple of rescue organizations that had snakes, turtles, and geckos to adopt. I asked how most of their animals come to be in their care. It’s mostly when animal control calls them in. They even have a fostering system just like with dogs and cats.
One of these booths is where my kids got to pet a tortoise named Tate and hold a bearded dragon named Quibble. The volunteer that was helping us said she didn’t really enjoy geckos so I asked if it was bearded dragons she liked. “No,” she replied, “I like snakes.” When I asked, she listed the kind of snakes she had. I confess that I stopped actively listening after the fifth. Yikes.
People also sell the bugs that reptiles like to eat. Five-year-old Mr. D and I were looking into a container that had several geckos and Mr. D said, “Look, there’s a beetle.” And then a gecko noticed. It’s tongue was so fast that it was barely perceptible. It clearly enjoyed a crunchy snack.
Which led me to the story about seeing a display with 10 gerbils for sale. There was only one left and I was unclear about whether people were buying them to be pets or…? Eric’s response, “Can you imagine the level of stress for a gerbil at a snake show?”
On the way out, my kids nearly fell over when we came across some axolotls (see featured photo). These are the Mexican salamanders that are like the pickleball of elementary school kids. In the last few years, it seems like the increase in axolotl merch has been meteoric – stuffies, backpacks, keychains, and more. Eric confessed that until he saw our picture, he wasn’t sure that axolotls were real.
I’ll spare you the stories of the snake throwing up and the snake pooping. Suffice it to say, my kids had a great time at the reptile show. And I got some pretty good stories out of it – because Eric asked for the details.
It makes me wonder if an element of creativity…and life… is having people around us interested in asking. Last question from Eric was, “Did you check your car for snakes when you got home? No? That’s okay – you can just sell it.”
“We have more possibilities available in each moment than we realize.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
After almost two years of working for the company that I sold my company to, I’m back in the business of working for myself. I’ve spent two-thirds of my career as a self-employed computer consultant. The inclination to build my business exactly as I did before is so strong – kinda like muscle memory. But that doesn’t honor that all the ways I’ve learned and changed since I did this previously.
So I love the inspiration I find to build outside of the box. Here’s one from Mark Nepo:
“It was a curious thing. Robert had filled the bathtub and put the fish in the tub, so he could clean their tank. After he’d scrubbed the film from the small walls of their make-believe deep, he went to retrieve them.
He was astonished to find that, though they had the entire tub to swim in, they were huddled in a small area the size of their tank. There was nothing containing them, nothing holding them back. Why wouldn’t they dart about freely? What had life in the tank done to their natural ability to swim?”
–The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo
In addition, my meditation teacher, Deirdre recently gave me some powerful imagery. She said we need to envision the future without the filter of our past.
I’ve spent enough years hiking and climbing to know the wisdom of why we continue on the same path we’ve always used. It helps keep us from getting lost and if we have to backtrack, we know the way.
But for almost every trail system I’ve been on, there are certain intersections where you can easily traverse to another path. Because some paths don’t go to the place we are trying to reach.
I’m trying to keep that in mind as I navigate my next steps. I feel so lucky that I am at an intersection point that has made doing something different not only possible but also preferable. It’s like the Universe has left some bread crumbs to a different route. I just need to follow them. It’s easier to type than it is to do.
“If you believe it will work out, you’ll see opportunities. If you believe it won’t, you will see obstacles.” – Wayne Dwyer
When my friend, Eric, was over for dinner last week, I asked him if he had room in his car to take his chairs home. In the pause as he considered it, Miss O jumped in and said, “Yeah, they were just dumped here.”
Eric surprisingly showed up with chairs unbidden on the morning of Thanksgiving of 2023. And while we used them around the table for that Thanksgiving and this past one, they haven’t been used otherwise.
I think Miss O was doing the thing we often do – saying one sentence too much when there’s a pause because we’re afraid the answer will be “no.” Call it pressing the point or making the case, often it’s trying to shift the answer in our favor. Sometimes it comes with an unnecessary punch.
Because “no” isn’t the worse thing we can hear. Sure, it means we aren’t getting our way for the moment. But consider all the missed opportunities if we didn’t ask at all. Things like dates you didn’t go on, the path you didn’t take, and the pitches you didn’t make.
And the chairs we stored for 420 days because I hadn’t asked my friend to take them. Fortunately, Eric did have room for chairs in his car that night. As we carried them to his car, he and I had a good laugh about the chairs that were “dumped.” Not the word I’d use because they came with good intent and thankfully left in the same spirit.
“No two readers can or will ever read the same book, because the reader builds the book in collaboration with the author.” – Neil Gaiman
This was originally published on 10/11/2023. Heads up – you may have already read this!
I’ve been speed reading blogs lately. My apologies to anyone with whom I haven’t done a good job of keeping in touch. Somehow, I got behind (I say it somehow like I don’t know how, but we all know how life piles up sometimes). Then with notifications that I had 200+ blogs to read, just from the blogs that I follow, I endeavored to speed read my way through.
Interesting thing though. When I did that, I got a glimpse of the bigger picture of our collective writing. Something like flipping through a book with a drawing in the corner to get the feel of animation. I picked up Word Press like a magazine to thumb through and get a sense of what kind of publication it was.
We all have a story to tell
It’s magical when we are treated to another person’s story. We get a little moment of being able to inhabit someone else’s shoes. In the posts I sped through, I found so much vitality created by writers opening up a vein, to steal from Ernest Hemingway, and leaving a bit of themselves on the page.
The narratives range from trauma to kindness, optimistic to pessimistic, factual to fiction which makes it hard to figure out what this collection has in common. But my speed read led to an a-ha. What binds it together is a rich tradition of story-telling.
We are trying mightily to understand what it all means
To borrow another writing quote, Anne Lamott said “Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.” There is something in the practice of putting words on a page that defines the outline of what we are trying to live. And as we draft new versions, we keep reshaping what that looks like. We are writing things into life.
It seems this was even more palpable during the beginning of the Covid pandemic when we were faced with something most of us had never seen in our lifetimes. Collectively we were trying to understand the landscape of socialization and security as conditions changed. We faced fear and grief by writing about it.
Now that those concerns have receded, or at least become a familiar backdrop, I see us wrestling with love, parenting, the state of our planet, success, family, aging. Sometimes with humor, and other times with tears, but we show up on the page as real people writing it out.
There is a beautiful persistent vibe of trying to get better
That leads to the final gem that I gleaned from the pile of posts I sped through. There was a consistent spirit of trying to share knowledge. The collective is telling their stories, processing life through writing, and when we learn a lesson, we memorialize it in words.
This might be the highest hurdles of our collective writing. How to offer up the individual lessons so that others can heal and learn. What I noticed is that we are learning through teaching. Often humbly, and with a dose of personal perspective, but as Yale sociologist Nicholas Christoff says, one of the incredible things we do as humans is cooperate with genetically unrelated individuals, “We teach each other things. People take this for granted, but it’s actually unbelievable.”
iWe are publishing a magazine every day. A lifestyle magazine. An inspirational writing journal. A guide to healing. I’m sorry I’ve missed your individual posts but I’m glad for the opportunity to thumb through this magazine. Well done!
Mr. D replied, “I’m learning about recess, the lunchroom, art, and music.”
I know you are laughing alongside me as you read this.
Learning his way around the school, including the specialist classes (art and music), has been a huge part of the first three weeks. I can’t imagine how many neurons are firing just to create a mind map of this new experience.
But as you’re smiling, consider this. Aren’t recess, the lunchroom, art and music still a big part of your days today?
(featured photo is Mr. D’s line heading in to class on the first day of school)
“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day, saying, “I will try again tomorrow.” – Mary Anne Radmacher
I was listening to my neighbor talk about the anxiety she felt this past weekend when her husband took their oldest, a 12-year-old boy, up to Camp Muir on Mt. Rainier.
In her delightful British accent, she said, “It’s not that I don’t trust my husband’s skills, it’s just that if you take the three tallest peaks in the UK, Ben Nevis (Scotland), Scafell Peak (England), and Snowdon (Wales) on top of each other, then you have Mt. Rainier. It’s an American, super-sized mountain.”
Fortunately, the weather held and they had a great time hiking up to and camping at base camp on our super-sized mountain.
It struck me as I listened, that there are many different types of courage in these adventures. To lead an expedition, to join as a team member, and also to stand on the sidelines and cheer for an adventure. All take a unique kind of fortitude.
Cheryl recounted her experience on the Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa which is familiarly known as RAGBRAI. Seven hot days of riding, camping, and communing with 20,000 other riders.
Sounds fun, right? But what Cheryl does so consistently is bring the magic. She rides in tandem – both on the bike with her husband, Larry, and also in her writing. She is so good at synchronizing her inner landscape with all that she sees around.
She takes us on this journey from the Missouri River to the Mississippi River. And she leaves Vicki and me in tears about what it all means.
Cheryl is a beautiful writer and inspirational story-teller. She reminds us all what is out there when we face our fears and try hard things.
Pork chops, sunrise, kindness, and courage to name just a few.
I’m confident you’ll love the scenic and beautiful places we explore as we share the power of storytelling.
We know you’ll love it!
Search (and subscribe!) for Sharing the Heart of the Matter on Apple, Amazon, Spotify or Pocket Casts OR Listen to it from your computer on Anchor: Episode 86: Tandem Riding with Cheryl Oreglia
Surprised By Joy 