Comittment to messier living

I went camping this weekend, only for a day and during a rainstorm no less. The thunder rolled around the tent, as if the world was an egg it was trying to crack open in its entirety. I believe it almost did.

And I do love the smell of fire and dirt on the hand and the sense you get of being *clean* even if you haven't washed in...some time, but I do want to do that further from all of you and away from these plastic things, I must say. No offense, I promise. Well, perhaps to some, a few here and there, but if so it is by accident or by mistake or on purpose and I take it back, it was foolish of me, and I didn't truly want to.

There's just so much of the camping experience now, at least in the ways I've seen it and been close to it, that is about highlighting the *experience* part of it. CLIMB this with these 200 accessories, BIKE this with these 300 bits of clips and batteries and and CANOE but don't go without these fundamentals. Not that I mind that folks are going outside and moving around, I'm doing it with them, but it all seems a bit staged, somehow - we're having a play about camping and these are the funny props we got from here and here and here.

When everything is so sanctioned (down to the exact amount of logs in the bag of firewood you can buy at the hut that also has nanimo bars and cans of bug spray) the communion with things beyond sanction becomes a bit blurrier or the reception, fuzzier.

While I am truly not trying to be ultra-puritanical and perhaps I am simplifying the deeply rooted ways in which the un-sanctioned things rumble their rumbles to us, I do feel that there's something to be said about looking for a way to commune that has a more direct vibrancy at its heart. Toss aside the restrictions, live with a bit more mess, go with a little less.

Not that I am very good at doing that, a stick drops in the woods behind me and I am convinced that a bear that has been stalking me since birth has finally caught up with me and we must fight, immediately, and I must die soon after.

But I feel that lately, since quitting my job outright, I have been pondering about my inherent values again. And I've begun to realize that I want to attempt to love that fucking bear regardless of what it might do to me, and live out my life with a little more mess, and a little less. An artist friend recently gave me a coin she had, well, coined, that is the shape and weight of a quarter. On one side it exclaims, "security" on another, "courage". I feel like the tension in that dichotomy is one I relate to deeply these days.

Sp put your oars down! Kayak with your hands! Wrestle your morning oatmeal out of the hedgehogs of the world! Go off that path and when you get lost, as Mitch Hedberg says, build a house. Seriously improve your predicaments in life and don't be scared to have them in the first place.