Love Plan B

Nature weaves an intricate web of life into all things. Here, the spirit of the mountains prevails, and the higher in the mountains you travel, the closer to the heavens you reach. The backcountry surrounds me: untraveled and inviting.

Rocky Mountain National Park is:

416 square miles

350 miles of trails

473 miles of streams

147 lakes

267 backcountry campsites

75 miles of paved roads

110 peaks over 10,000 feet

72 peaks over 12,000 feet

25% Alpine tundra

95% designated Wilderness

And the best part? This is my entire back and front yard. This wilderness is where humans are visitors and don’t remain. While there are 3 million annual visitors, the only year-round residents of the park are the natural inhabitants. Here, nature gets to be nature—it’s free to do it’s own thing.

Today was the first day of work, starting with backcountry training in the auditorium with our staff and a bunch of LE (Law Enforcement) rangers. As we sat and listened to the uniform and backcountry spiels for this year, I began to think about and write down all my hopes and goals for this summer. As Barry pointed out last summer, a hope is something you have no control over, while a goal is the opposite. As my list grew, the last thing we talked about it training before playing Jeopardy (who says Rangers can’t have fun in training!?) was about “Situational Awareness”—a word that came up all the time in training last summer too and that is so important in the field.

“Situational Awareness” is knowing what is happening all around you, along with your ability to process it. It’s the difference between perception and reality, and is ESSENTIAL to managing risk.

After the group backcountry training, our staff left and loaded into our government vehicles to head off to an unknown destination. Barry led the way, and we ended up at a huge mansion that once belonged to Mr. K. Kingston who I guess began and owned some huge banking firms in Denver. The place is used now for non-profit organization meetings and functions, and Barry had arranged for our staff meeting to be there. For the beginning, he encouraged us to explore around the house as we ate our lunches, until we finally settled into the giant living room. The seventeen of us sat in a circle and our personal training began.

The neat thing about Barry is that the training today was personal. Rather than going over rules and regs from the very beginning, he wanted us to all get to know one another. He said he wanted us to hear each other’s voices and see the sparkle in each other’s eyes as we talked so that we could see what excitement we were in for this summer. What other bosses do people have that strive for a healthy work culture made of two kinds of people, “comedians and philosophers?” His biggest goal is to make our government office the exact opposite of the DMV. (Oh, how I can relate to that right now!)

He asked us two questions that we were supposed to answer, popcorn style instead of around the circle so no one was pressured to talk at any point. The first questions: “What did you learn?”

All of my coworkers went around the room, sharing their bits of wisdom they’ve learned from over the years as I sat and planned out what I was going to say. The first was taken directly from Timon in The Lion King, “Home is where my rump rests.” I could directly relate to that, along with many of the following ideas: “Some relationships are for a reason, some relationships are for a season, and some relationships are for a lifetime.” (I might have to come back to this quote at some point this summer.) “Leave your egos at the door,” combined with “Arrogance kills.”

Finally, as I sat there thinking about my life and writing down ideas and notes on my yellow legal pad, I realized exactly what it is that I’ve been learning lately: I CAN’T plan out and control everything in my life. I spoke up and began telling about my very first Halloweens, when I would come home after going around the neighborhood, dump my candy on the floor, and then rather than eat it all before getting into trouble like a normal three-year-old, I’d begin to organize it by color or brand. I asked for a “little kitchen” for Christmas one year when I was younger and began to organize all the shelves and put the food away in its appropriate spots as soon as I saw Santa brought it for me. My main use for Barbies was to set up their houses and organize all their accessories, rather than actually play with the dolls (I was more into legos than dolls all along anyway!).

At the end of high school, my best friend Erin and I sat down and decided to plan our lives out. I wanted kids by a certain age, which meant I had to be married so many years before that, which meant I had to be dating the guy by so many years before that, and had to actually know the guy so many years before that…Throw in the job timeline, combined with school, and my life was set. When I was back home at my mom’s house recently, I found that timeline we had made and realized just how many of those dates I had missed. That’s when I realized what I was learning.

Andree pointed out to me, “you can set your goals, but you have to be willing to change your plans.”

How true is that in my life right now?! I am officially done with school and have nothing holding me back. I don’t owe any debts to anyone for my college expenses. I don’t have a relationship I’m involved in right now to tie me down somewhere. I am completely free to go wherever I want, so why not take a job in Anchorage, AK if that comes my way?

Thinking back even on my lesson plans during student teaching, I immediately thought back to the second grade incident. While I had everything planned out for my class, there was no way I could have accounted for the little boy to lunge at his classmate and tackle him, while choking him, to the floor. As John Lennon said, “Life is what happens when you’re making other plans.”

More importantly, as Barry pointed out today, “LOVE PLAN B.”

If you love “Plan B” and “Plan A” doesn’t work out, you’re still set either way. I am learning to roll with what life gives me, and see where I end up. Even after three days in Colorado and only one day at work, I can tell this is going to be yet again a summer of a lifetime.

Dreams and Reality

The past week truly has been a blur of emotions. I woke up yesterday morning after a restless sleep with tears still unwillingly streaming down my face. I tried to make them stop but I had no control over what they were doing.

Strangely, as I lay there in the bed, I stared at the wall on my side and remembered back to the exact feeling at the end of last summer when I woke up and stared at my blank wall, back in my room, thinking it was all a dream. That's what prompted me to cover it with pictures from the summer so I would know it all really happened. Looking at that blank wall yesterday though, I realized that waking up back in Estes, I was going to realize I was back home again but was that going to make me feel like the last five years (especially the most recent!) in Flagstaff were going to seem just as surreal? As all these thoughts of walls and deeper meanings were going through my head and I was chewing on my lip to think about something other than crying, Drew pulled up a C.S. Lewis quote,

"And just as there are moments when simply to lie in bed and see the daylight pouring through your window and to hear the cheerful voice of an early postman or milkman down below and to realise that it was only a dream: it wasn't real, is so heavenly that it was very nearly worth having the nightmare in order to have the joy of waking, so they all felt when they came out of the dark."
-The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

The irony of how well that lined up with what I had been thinking about set me off again, and as I willed the tears to stop, I couldn't even say anything at all. Reading another passage--this one from the Bible--kept the tears coming as I thought about how I was leaving the town where I lived the past five years.

"We don't see things clearly. We're squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won't be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright!"

After saying the final tearful goodbyes to D, D, and L, I got in the car, made a quick stop at the MVD, and headed on my way. On the drive, I started with Mahler 1, using it as a memory of one of the highlights of my playing career in Flag. After that, I went through some of the fifths, with Shostakovich 5, Beethoven 5, and Mahler 5. The first two brought back memories of playing with the Flagstaff Symphony, and while I never performed the full Mahler 5, the horn excerpts were used on my last horn audition at NAU. After those four symphonies, I tried listening to the mix Kelly made me for my birthday last summer. With that music though, I found myself zoning out and not listening as intently as I had been with the symphonies.

I found it strange that I was more unfocused listening to the music that actually had words to sing along with. At my first gas stop in Kayenta, AZ, I was on the phone with Aaron Walker. He said he couldn't listen to classical music when driving because he has to sing along to stay awake. When I got back in the car, I realized I had been singing along to all the different instrumental parts of the piece. I was immersing myself in the music and able to listen so intently for the first time in a while because there was nothing else to distract me.

Utah found me listening to Pictures at an Exhibition and Night on Bald Mountain, both an FSO and high school memory, respectively. Tchaikovsky 4 took me to Moab (the halfway point) while Sheherazade took me away. I70 gave me a chance to listen to all four Brahms symphonies, with the final, triumphant chord of the first symphony lining up directly with my cross over the Colorado border. I70 went on forever, so I was able to get Dvorak 8, Schubert 8, and Dvorak 9, totaling at twelve complete symphonies and a few other works combined with Denver radio for the 836 mile drive.

Waking up this morning in my bed in Estes, I opened the window and let the daylight pour in. Long's Peak was outside, covered in snow, and there were so many shades of green I didn't know what to do with myself. Kristin was sleeping on the mattress on the floor and my suitcases were shoved in the corner from unloading half my car after stopping at The Rock last night before heading home. The cheerful voices I heard were of the wind sweeping through the grasses and trees, combined with the chirping of the birds and rustling of the small rodents running around outside. The best part--it wasn't a dream. Even though I'm here now in the mountains where I belong, Flagstaff is still just as real to me and I am not losing touch with that feeling yet.

Skillet on the Stove

It's time. In just a few hours I'm getting into the already loaded car and heading 750 miles away, not knowing if I will ever really be back. It's so strange and it just hit me as I was laying in bed and tears started coming unexpectedly from my eyes.

I'm done in Flagstaff though: All of my NAU bills are paid. I finished the last minute errands like getting a haircut, oil change, gas, tire rotation, stopping at Cedar Music and the bank on last time. I am an official member of the National Association for Music Education (MENC) and the Sigma Alpha Iota Alumni Association.

Then today, I had to do some of the hardest parts of leaving. I loaded the car and official moved out of 206. Sure, I had to move out last summer too, but this time I'm not coming back. Throughout the past week and a half, things were slowly disappearing. The pictures on the walls were some of the first things to go, and it immediately made the apartment seem like some foreign place. Today, we turned in the keys and parking permits, and looking around the empty, echoing rooms left a giant pit in my stomach, especially thinking about all the fantastic memories that were made within those walls.

Tonight at dinner, a bunch of my close friends met up at Beaver Street Brewery for a final dinner/goodbye. After dinner, most of us headed to Liza's place where we sang Disney tunes at the top of our lungs, and it made me realize how much I really am going to miss Flagstaff and all my friends here. I realized that life is going to go on for all of them, and maybe I will stick around in their minds for a little bit, but chances are they will move on and not really give it a second thought. Those 750 miles make quite a difference and if I end up teaching in Alaska, it will be an even further thought tucked back into any of their minds.

So here I am, sitting in a friend's bed while they snore away and I have just a couple silent tears trickling down my face. This time of reflection is making me think of my last big event in Flag: the tattoo I got yesterday. It's a simple drawing that I made in high school--an intermingled treble and bass clef, tucked behind my left ear. To me, it means more than just that though. The connected shape doesn't have a start or end point, and the fact that it's on the left side of my body makes it closer to my heart. Behind my ear reminds me to listen deeper for more meaning in what goes on around me, and the combination of bass and treble clefs indicate a harmony of sorts that cannot be surpassed.

As I go on into this next stage of my life, I need to keep these Flagstaff memories with me as a happy period of time, but I also need to be ready to embrace what lies before me.

Why should I be tearing up thinking about what I will be missing when I have so many opportunities lying ahead of me, starting tomorrow?