Fall in love with being alive
Add it to the list of things I haven’t had time for. But it’s Mother’s day and so after working 5 Saturdays straight it was time to go home. To my parent’s, that is. It was gray and chilly but we ate macaroons and blueberry baked goods and walked the pier and had lunch with […]
I try to think that I am a climbing rope. A climbing rope can take the force of a fall up to 5000 pounds, way more weight than can actually be generated by climbing. I am a climbing rope and I can bear 5000 pounds and that is more weight than can actually be generated […]
I don’t remember when the woods started calling me. Maybe it was my whole life and I wasn’t listening that hard. But I do remember when my insides started screaming and the woods made them quiet. I was working 80 hours a week for a company I hated and people that didn’t care about me. […]
A student asked me how much I made teaching Intro to Outdoor Rock Climbing. I did the math and found out it came out to about $6.20 an hour if I divided my pay by the amount of hours I felt like I was “on the clock”. I jokingly said that the money isn’t much […]
This weekend I went to Pittsburgh to help a friend move. It was sunny and warm and I ate well and lots of ice cream. I came back and it rained violently but I walked the dogs anyway because they don’t care about rain. The next day I helped clean beer cans, wrappers, and red […]
My niece said for her birthday she wanted to spend the day with me IN BINGHAMTON. I thought about this a lot and realized that for her whole life I’d been telling her that I couldn’t stay, I had to go back to Binghamton. I had to make sure she believed that Binghamton was a […]
I got to see the sign for Peter”s Kill Area Climbing Permits UNavailable change to AVAILABLE this weekend. And I think that’s what joy looks like. It looks like opening day at your favorite place. It looks like sunshine in late March. It looks like a cold, hard day that is also beautiful. This time […]
“Look, it’ll be a hard day” is what I say to myself when I know the day (or days) ahead will be long and difficult. It’s a quote from Mad Max Fury Road when Max is suggesting they punch their way through three armies to storm the keep. When he says it, it’s the understatement […]
I find that we all tell ourselves stories about who we are. The reality is that we aren’t actually the person telling the story, we’re the person listening to it. This is important to remember because you have to be careful what stories you tell yourself. Sometimes you tell yourself that you can’t or that […]
I’m still coming to terms with the fact that what I want to be when I grow up has changed. Like, they just don’t tell you that might happen. They ask you what you want to be when you grow up and if you’re one of the lucky ones, maybe you know and you have […]
