Sweet Miracles

 "Oh, sweet miracle, love's sweet miracle of life..."

—Rush, Sweet Miracle

One of my dear friends usually teases me when I post them. My regular posts about my beach workout on Natural Bridges State Beach I do throughout the year (sometimes my wife Amy joins me now). One that I've been doing for many years now. He teases me because it's seemingly the same picture of the remaining Natural Bridge. 

But it's really not the same picture each time. The geological changes may be imperceptible to us humans in the near team, but in the long term, these rock formations have been changing for decades. Hundreds of years. Thousands of years. Hundreds of thousands of years. Millions of years. Mercy me. 

Back in 2015, it didn't look much different than today.

But take a look at it in 1970. The bridge extended from what's left now to the main rock cliff. 

And now there's a new bridge forming to the left of the current one. 

These incremental changes can be nearly unnoticeable, until they're seen. When I'm on the Natural Bridges beach, I'm very mindful one moment, then daydreaming the next, working through things in my head as I listen to my music and do my workout. Not running anymore, just hiking across the sand and up and down the small hill to the upper parking lot and back down again. I'm very aware of how I'm feeling, physically and emotionally, and very aware of my surroundings. I may not see the continuous Natural Bridge erosion from sea and weather, and from humans too, except for the new bridge that's now forming, but I do see the sea and weather changes that impact the beach itself.

We usually don't put value judgements on geological erosion over time; it is what it is, and was. But for our own human erosion, we do. The life weathering we experience can be good, bad, or indifferent. It can beat us down or lift us up, constantly changing us physically and psychologically and spiritually. From our own childhood, to adolescence, to young adulthood, Amy and I survived and were transformed, and then we met one day at the beach. We were so much younger when we met, and now we're not. Our own kids were kids for years, and now they're not. Every day they inspire us to be better; we inspire each other to be better. 

And it's these little bits of breakthrough better that are the best, our BhivePower. These are the sweet miracles that transform us into what we become next, and there's nowhere on earth I'd rather be right now than right here. When you embrace what you live, it really can be as easy as 123123.

Blessings and Happy New Year. 

The Act of Simply Doing

Oh, how I dreaded it. The long walk up a driveway or a walkway to the front door. I'd park my bike on the sidewalk and approach a porch imagining so much ridicule and shame coming my way once they'd open the door. I felt that way going to every home on my paper route to collect their monthly newspaper fees. 

Most of the time was without negative incident. They'd either be home and respond pleasantly getting me cash or writing a check, or they wouldn't be home. Sometimes I'd get a scolding about throwing their newspaper into the bushes or the front yard and not right on their front porch in front of their door. Sometimes I had to go back multiple times to collect when they weren't home (or they saw me coming and didn't want to pay). 

It was my first job at 12 years old. I enjoyed the newspaper delivery part most of the time, but not the collection part. Also, the early Saturday mornings folding, banding, and delivering the papers weren't all that fun either, but the reward was worth it. A little money and after Saturday delivery, fresh donuts and a Coke as a treat. 

The collecting of payments was an anxiety-filled drag. I didn't have the job for very long, but I'll never forget it either. Through all that stress, there were some important communication and persistence skills I learned at a young age. Asking people for money isn't easy, even when they owe it to you, especially for a 12-year-old.

Decades later, it's hard to watch your own kids stress about new life experiences, and the fear of putting themselves out there and then failing and being ridiculed and shamed is a difficult rite of passage for many kids and teens (and adults). For our youngest Bryce who's now 12, the angst was over trying out for a youth theater production of Beauty and the Beast. She had never done anything like this before where there were auditions being held and she actually had to try out for a role. Her anxiety was palatable, but after she got through the initial auditions, she really started to enjoy it. In fact, now she's loving all the rehearsals, the learning, the singing, and the dancing with a new found confidence. We can't wait to see the production!

More recently for Beatrice, who's now 14, the angst was over marketing herself to babysit. She took an online course, passed, and I then helped her put her first resume together for her. After getting the word out that she's ready to babysit, a friend gave her a paid practice run, but afterwards she got no other bites, which was another stressor. The hurry-up-and-wait time added up -- until finally she got the call for a babysitting gig (a text to her and her mom actually). She wanted to do it, but was apprehensive, and went back and forth about it. She also worried about making mistakes and her mom and I told her the only way to learn is to do it. And she did do it and did just fine. 

The stress-relieving catch phrase for both girls has been, "But they're going to throw rotten tomatoes at me," whether that's about trying out for theater, babysitting, presenting in class, etc. How they heard that expression, we have no idea. It's an old expression that refers to the practice of throwing tomatoes at bad performers going back to the early 1900s. Nobody throws rotten tomatoes anymore, at least, not literally.

Put yourselves out there, kids. Take risks, face your fears, stretch, learn, fail, and try again. Do it all. Sometimes the greatest success is in the act of simply doing. And that cumulative success of doing can empower self-confidence for a lifetime.

Live the Effectual Stretch

Experience the great outdoors! Be one with nature! Revitalize your spirit! Live the effectual stretch!

"I want to go camping," said Bryce.

"Yes!" echoed Beatrice.

"Mama doesn't go camping, girls," said Daddy.

"Nope, no camping," said the Mama. "But we can go to Paris."

"That's not camping."

"To some people it is."

"I don't want any parrots," said Beatrice.

"Not parrots -- Paris. Like Paris, France. Ooo, la, la," said Daddy.

"That's where I want to go," said the Mama.

And so it goes. One African safari nearly 20 years ago with one of her best friends and the Mama just can't do the tent camping thing. This was a year after we'd met and I was green-eyed with envy for sure. Of course I wasn't too disappointed when I learned that diarrhea had swept through their camp for a few days challenging the notion of "resetting the mind and spirit." Nothing like a good colonic in the presence of Mount Kilimanjaro to then be confined to your sweltering tent for a few days.

I shouldn't complain, though. Around the same time I had gone on a business trip to Barcelona and Paris (ooo, la, la) and did not get sick. However, I did go out of my way to during a dinner event in Barcelona to run down to the beach, take off my shoes, hike up my pant legs and put my feet in the Mediterranean Sea. 

For years as a child, our family went tent camping every summer at Huntington Lake in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, south of Yosemite. Real tent camping. Dirty, cold at night, cooking meals over a fire (and a Coleman stove), fishing and hiking and exploring glorious tent camping. One year I had what my Mom called sand crabs on my head. To this day I'm not sure if that's what they were -- or if they were sand fleas, or sand lice -- but whatever they were, I got 'em good. All over my head. Buried deep in my scalp under a blanket of sandy blonde hair. 

There were no medicinal shampoos at the lake store, only turpentine. For those who have never had this very special liquid poured over open wounds on their head, you have no idea how "alive" it makes you feel. To this day I remember how much is stung and throbbed. And how much I cried. But no matter what, it never wiped away the happiness I felt fishing for rainbow trout or exploring a mountainside of granite rocks and all the various Sierra Nevada pines filling me with the amazing scent of adventure. 

Decades later and we're off to another annual trek to Lake Tahoe, the Big Lake as the girls first called it. We're not literally camping per se, but we are hiking and swimming and visiting with family and experiencing the great outdoors in a mountain range over 100 million years old. We did take the girls on a beautiful mountain hike to Eagle Lake, just above Emerald Bay. It's only about 2.5 miles round trip, but that's the most the girls have ever done in any one stretch. And thanks to perennial hiking family members Uncle Brian and Aunt Julie, and the Mama and the Daddy, the experience motivation moved them along.

Research shows that "experiences" are critical to happiness, healthy connections and relationships. In fact, "one study...even showed that if people have an experience they say negatively impacted their happiness, once they have the chance to talk about it, their assessment of that experience goes up."

This is why invest in experience for ourselves and for our girls. It's the effectual stretch as I call it -- to push ourselves to learn new ways to see and understand our individual and collective worlds, and to expand beyond what’s known and comfortable in ways that produce desired yet diverse, highly personalized and usually effective results. This could mean the literal extremes of big success or failure, or those incremental leaps and lapses in between that give our daily journeys sustenance for mind, body and spirit. 

Happiness and healthy connections, kids. That's what I'm talking about. And we impress the same approach and attitude on our daughters, teaching them to embrace experience -- to be bold yet aware, to protect themselves but not live in fear, to keep getting back on the bull like they own the beast, horns held tightly in hands. This includes exposing them to travel, new locales and people, experiences that we hope will shape their adult lives and those they interact with for the better.

We may never literally all go camping together, but we're certainly going to treat each new experience like a camp out -- to embrace the wilderness around us and the sky above -- and live the effectual stretch.

Happy 50th Birthday to Me

“I’ve gone through life white-knuckled
In the moments that left me behind
Refusing to heed the yield
I penetrate the force fields in the blind
They say I'll adjust
God knows I must
But I'm not sure how
This natural selection picked me out to be
A dark horse running in a fantasy…”

—The Killers, Flesh and Bone

Like a ship on fire in the vacuum of space, I burned helplessly mute. In space, fire is unpredictable and tenacious, burning for longer periods of time, even when it seems to be out. In space, there is literally no sound, at least none heard like we can on planet earth.

So there I was, spiraling out of control and burning blue, when finally earth's gravity wound me back in and down to crash landing after crash landing. I escaped the fiery wreckage each and every time, but not before sustaining a recurring emotional concussion, one that made me feel insignificant and unworthy. One that left me wanting to run sobbing into the unknown horizon, to the point of know return.

I was 17 years old when my anxiety and crippling panic attacks started. Mostly from the inordinate pressure I put on myself to be liked, to succeed, to not be the skinny and shy asthmatic kid I used to be. Yes, I'd survived growing up in domestic violence and sexual abuse, but I never wore those chains like radioactive bling for all to see. In fact, I didn't really connect the past to the present anxiety until therapy in my 20's.

My memories weren't repressed, just more like emotional missives written but never sent to the ones who cared for me the most, the ones who misunderstood me. My interstellar trauma trips continued throughout my life, but thankfully decreased dramatically over the past two decades.

When I was in college I used to imagine what my world would be like in the year 2000, the year I'd turn 35. Envisioning that future-scape included visions of grandeur and popularity, of complete self-awareness and impulse control, of being anxiety free, of being smoke-free and healthy, of saving children from violence and abuse, of being loved by the love of my life, of being a good husband and father, of having the peaceful popularity of being the next Lee and Kerouac and Faulkner and Hemingway and writing my own great American neo-hipster novel. All before running out of time.

Back then I would've said you were as crazy as a loon if you thought I'd someday be comfortable in my own skin, mostly impenetrable from the extreme temperatures of the ever-expanding universe and the very fabric of relative time.

Now, in 2015, you weren't so crazy after all. Although I'm nobody's hero, I am a survivor who finally learned how to cope and manage the rhythm of my own overreactions and who's navigated life's booms and busts fairly well with a sometimes witty, self-deprecating grace. Sometimes...

And although I didn't write that novel yet, I have found a modicum of success and I did find the love of my life -- and two little lovely girls later, the fatherhood I never had as a child. I've learned that you don't ever run out of time, you just learn how to run alongside it and make it a partner for life for whatever duration that ends up being.

In space, no one can hear you burn. Welcome to planet earth, Kevin. And welcome home.

Happy 50th birthday to me.

Where The Real Magic Happens

“Magic happens—but it often requires some planning.” —Neil Peart

I sat less than two feet from the TV. Fixated. My butt glued to the floor. Nothing else mattered except for the singing and dancing monsters, children and adults on the screen. The chill of foggy frosted winter mornings or the scorching summer Central Valley heat made no difference. My mom would vacuum all around me and I still wouldn’t budge. I didn’t hear or see anything else except for my special show brought to me by the letters A-Z.

“…can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street…”

That blessed little Children’s Television Workshop creation (now Sesame Workshop) that launched learning and imaginations not only for the Mama’s and my generation, but also for the subsequent generations since – including our girls. Over 45 years of Jim Henson furry Muppet fun on an imaginary inner-city street in New York City.

The Big Apple idea that shared big yet safe, sometimes socially and culturally sensitive, accessible information for toddlers and children (and their parents) about learning and life. So it was only appropriate that when we planned our big family vacation adventure to New York City and beyond, that we’d end where it all began for us as children – Sesame Place – the amusement park that celebrates all that’s huggable Muppet and more. To sit on that beloved corner of 123 Sesame Street with my girls

We’re West Coast folk for sure, but we decided that for this adventure we wanted to go east, to do something different and give the girls some travel sea "land" legs for a future of continuous discovery. We’ve traveled many different places with them prior to this, but this was the longest duration we’ve done “on the road again” since before they were born. The Mama architected the journey and I helped with a few finishing touches and then we were off…no step-by-step planning, just enough of an outline to guide us on our journey and make some magic.

Because that’s what travel is for us, experiencing new locales and their locals who light up synapses we never knew we had like exotic fireflies on a sweet summer night. That includes those across town or across the state or across the country or around the globe. As much as our budget bandwidth allows, and even then the Mama is quite creative with a dollar.

It’s important to us that our girls eventually find it important to them that there’s a whole world of adventure and experience out there, easy and hard lessons alike, spacious views and painful realities, that will give them a rich tapestry of perspectives and worldviews. We can only hope that these experiences, along with the mindful presence we try to impart on them over the years and the spirituality they may find, will help them hewn the strongest of life staffs for their journeys far and wide.

Oh, and there’s the fun. Tons and tons of fun.

So now after over 6,300 miles of planes, trains and automobile through three states, five cities, a cave and visits with family and friends in less than two weeks, we’re home.

And that’s where the real magic happens anyway, when the blur of what we've experienced pools in our busy heads and hopeful hearts like summer rain in Central Park.

Why the Wheels on the Bus Are Empathic

Let's take the city bus!

Granted, it's not glamorous global travel, to see the world through the eyes of locals from other cultures, but then again...

The Mama and Beatrice have already taken the Santa Cruz city bus around town, but have not as a family. I know, I know -- we drive all over town and don't usually use alternate forms of transportation, including walking, all of which are better for the environment (and the pocketbook, even with gas prices dipping like they've done).

We actually do walk a lot in and around our neighborhoods, especially back and forth to Natural Bridges State Park, and even sometimes to the girls' school. We're not a bicycling family, but we are a walking and hiking family, and we proudly push the girls to partake wherever and whenever we go.

The caveat to the "push" is that we literally have to push them in the sit-and-stand stroller still once in a while, Bryce especially, and the second year at Disney was no exception. But hey, we're still getting out and going, going, going!

We've been doing that with the girls since a very early age -- planes, trains and automobiles -- to various locales near and far in the states. No where international yet, but definitely on our travel radar.

The Mama shared a great Atlantic article titled Traveling Teaches Students in a Way Schools Can't and this quote really sticks with me:

It’s a very powerful Eureka! moment when you’re traveling: to realize that people don’t have the American dream. They’ve got their own dream. And that’s not a bad thing. That’s a good thing.

Indeed it is. The Mama introduced this good thing to me when we met and we've never looked back. But this quote's just as applicable inside America than out, which is why we want the girls to be comfortable and confident going anywhere, meeting new people, embracing new experiences across the spectrum of life (good and bad, but preferably not life-threatening), and learning a humane cultural awareness, empathy and perseverance to carry them through the good times and the bad (thank you, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.).

So we took the city bus downtown to eat breakfast, riding along with locals, hipsters and UCSC students, and then we walked (and pushed) back home nearly three miles. A bit much, but worth the extra "umph" for me and the Mama. Plus, we stopped at parks along the way home for the girls to play, play, play.

Right on. The wheels on the bus go round and round, all through the town!