This is my LIFE ! ! !

I can't believe that this is my life.

Last weekend, we got an extra day off because the snow forecast caused the schools that were here to pick up their kids early and head out on Thursday instead of Friday.  So, on Friday morning (after an incredible Thursday evening dance party and Rock Band sesh at Cook's cabin where Johnny, Eben, Clint and BC live) Nick and I set off in the Expedition through a full-blown snowstorm toward Canon City to spend another weekend at Mom & Dad's retirement log cabin.  The snow was incredible!

After Canon city, we headed up through perhaps the most beautiful drive of my life toward Vail, CO, where Johnny, Pat, Sam, Nick, Eben, Beck, Beth and I split a super sweet condo in East Vail for an evening of drinking, debauchery, and singing Country Road John Denver style on the bus ride into Vail Village (thank you Johnny!). Here's the crew on Sunday morning with the remainder of our supplies after morning Mimosas ... "Yummy ... uh-oh!"

Hanging out at Cooks:

A lovely sunrise:

Who knew that the Sanborn crew were such booger lovers?  Sam, Pat, me and Nick:

Nick is my absolute favorite fire-fighting, ski patrolling super-studly mountain man.  Miss you babe!

On the Cowboys allday: Teller County Sheriff Johnny, Sam and Clint ... yee-haw!

Johnny loves him some beans!

BC and crew dancing the night away!

BC taking a break from his super-mad guitar skills to harmonica.

Ashley and Clint with some soulful tunes.

The Cowboys (and girls), Erin, Johnny, Nick, me and Clint.

I still can't believe this is my life!

Happier than I have ever been.

Living my dreams!

Trailer Trash party in Colorado Springs!

Baby pool filled with ice, beer, and lawn chairs.  Here is Beth with her sharpied-out tooth and Sam in her hott duds.

Tattoos

Jessie and Nick being trashy.

Beth and Pat (the party host with the most)

Oh, so that's what a prego belly is useful for.

Nick and Beth hanging with the broke-down car in the front lawn.

Sam's black eye from a run-in with the po-lice.

Interacting with Nature

I went on a short hike this morning and considered: How do I interact with nature?

I used to just sit in it--perched, really.  I'd tiptoe through and weave around nature, afraid of touching it that I might ruin it.

I feared engagement with nature because I feared wronging it.  I'd forgotten how to interact, so I disengaged, thinking that was safe.

But how does on learn without wronging; how can one learned disengaged?  One cannot.  If one tries, which I have in the past, to live without wronging, one gets ... an anxiety disorder.  Because humans wrong things and one another in order to learn and grow, and a repression of that wrongdoing is a repression of the spirit.

Now I set my spirit free--inviting mistakes, allowing free, unsuppressed learning.  I am set free, chipping off bark from a tree and smelling.  Free to climb over rocks, eroding them with my boot-steps.  Free to sneeze loudly among the birdsongs and to pluck off pine needles for a taste.

Through engagement with nature--physical, hands-on engagement, I invite it into my life, my soul.  In the place where that fear rested just above my solar plexus, an expansive emptiness emerges--ready now, filling up with bird songs and the sound of the wind through the trees and the citrus-bitter-delicious taste of a blue spruce needle.  

The clean mountain air is seeping into my cells, purifying the blackened buildup of fear and uncertainty, transforming my molecules into quartz crystals or something clearer.

I'm watching trees grow, rooting deeply into the earth to allow for expansive ascent--it is my wish to become a tree, bearing fruit with which I might nourish others.  

A grand transformation is occurring here between snow and sun, a pure white light envelops my body. 

I emerge, truer than before.