Category: Uncategorized

adventure, Camping, canoeing, Faithful Living, God, Lessons from the Wilderness, Outdoor Adventures, Uncategorized, wilderness, Wilderness Paddling, wisdom

I Wish I May, I Wish I Might…

This Side of the River

At the canoe shows, I like to watch people who stop to admire my husband’s and his brother Hugh’s Sea Wind canoes. These hardy vessels were both built by the famous Michigan paddling pioneer Verlen Kruger. The boats have handsome lines and a certain robust utility about them, and have rightly earned their reputation as having “cavernous storage and bombproof construction.”[1] They can even be joined with a cross arm for catamaran sailing on windy days. Some of the folks-usually men- are seasoned and avid paddlers, and the conversation wags excitedly back and forth around paddle characteristics, dry bags, portage-ability, steering, and stowage. But, by far, most of the people who stop by simply stare at the canoes with their bright yellow sail with what always transmits as a deep longing.

I resonate with that feeling of “I wish I may, I wish I might…” For one, the Sea Wind is a one-man canoe, so I cannot trip along with the men unless I get my own boat. For another, the boats weight 70 pounds, and the gear upwards of 200-300 pounds. I cannot physically carry that much on portage, and the first rule of wilderness adventure is that the group is as weak as its weakest member. More importantly though, the brothers’ yearly adventure trips are wilderness getaways that they’ve shared for 30 years or more, a time so sacred to their deep relationship that I really have no right to intrude. It’s okay, though. We all still paddle together plenty of other times each year.

No, the longing I observe is of the person who wants to be more than a casual weekend paddler who haunts the canoe shows. Who yearns to seek out true wilderness and pit him/herself against the fickle elements of nature, to share the nighttime stars with the moose and the bear. This person wants to do exactly what the brothers do, but can never get past the dreaming.

In all my years as a college professor and academic advisor, I had certain students with the same problem-they thought they wanted something quite badly, but simply could not summon the wherewithal to do what it took to make it happen. The biggest impediment was almost always their lack of confidence that they could, in fact, do this thing. As a result, they took few risks, settled too early, failed to do the hard work required, and missed out on a lot of life’s adventures. Of course, this same lack of confidence holds any of us back in myriad situations. We won’t risk the adventure of a job change, a move out of state, or going back to school to finally study the one thing we always loved. We long for a change we haven’t the grit to embrace and see through to its rewarding end.

I have to say that I think God himself is a risk taker.

He risked becoming a man in order to put the world back to rights. He certainly takes risks on us every day. The Bible is FULL of fragile people God bet on when they thought they couldn’t; just take a look at the weak-kneed lives of Moses, Jonah, and Peter. But, God equips us in every endeavor to which he calls us. And this is the secret: the strength is never our own, but God’s! What have you always wanted to do, felt called to do, but were afraid to try? Maybe it’s time to get in the boat, stop wishing and start paddling!

I wish I may, I wish I might, have the strength to start tonight.

~J.A.P. Walton

Join 485 other weekly readers by adding your email . You will be sent each new post directly!

Verlen Kruger

Quiet Water Symposium

[1] Phil Peterson. All Things are Possible: the Verlin Kruger Story: 100,000 miles by Paddle. Adventure Pulbications. Cambridge, MN. 2006. p.257.

Costa Rica, Creation, death, Dying to Self, Faithful Living, God, Lessons from the Wilderness, Prayer, Sacrifice, Serving Others, Uncategorized, wilderness, wisdom

Snatched

This Side of the River

Do you have questions that can’t be answered?…

Does it bother you that mercy is so difficult to understand?” *

I sat staring at the creek through the snowflakes yesterday, thinking about the nearness of Easter. Just then, Trout Creek’s resident red tail hawk dove to the wooded floor, wings awkwardly fanning the brown leaves, hopping and clawing, before launching to a sturdy branch for a fresh snack of field mouse. It only took a minute to rip and tear and gulp that mouse down. It reminded me of a day several years back when I was admiring a male cardinal at the feeder. Without a sound, a sharp shinned hawk dropped out of the Norway spruce, snatching that cardinal with swift surprise. The only evidence was a tiny cloud of red and pink wing fluff floating down onto the deck.

On our Costa Rica Outward Bound adventure, we were required to catch a chicken, kill it, and eat it. The catching was comical, but using a machete to behead it was gruesome, blood spurting in all directions while firmly holding the still nerve-wracked body in its violent and nauseating death shake. All so we could have some protein.  

Our sanitized grocery store wrappings of chicken and ground beef have made us naïve. Time out in the wilderness quickly teaches not of the gentleness of nature, but of its brutishness. Is life so cruel? Out in the wilds, we can’t whitewash the truth that all this teeming life around us will, and must be stilled. The heron will gulp the minnow. The salmon feeds the bear. The vole grows the fledging owlet. The cougar will bring down the freckled fawn, and the speckled trout will become our dinner. For one to live, another must die. That’s the immutable law of nature and nourishment, that one’s weakness becomes another’s lifeblood. And, that is the sum of it; life depends on death by design.

The same can be said for Good Friday and the Easter resurrection and what the mercy of God in Jesus did for each of us. Jesus died our own death and bore the just punishment we deserve, his flesh torn, his blood spilled out. If you think about it, it isn’t really about cruelty, but the mercy of sacrifice. For our own life to go on, we must kill and eat. (before you vegetarians get too high-minded, even the plants must die to feed us).

So I think it is good to ponder, “what or who would I die for?” at this time of year. Perhaps we’d die for our loved ones, or a brother or sister in the faith. Some might answer country, or liberty. I know people who give up things for Lent, like chocolate or screen time.  But that misses the entire point. Christ calls us to die to self first, to willingly give up our rights and our comforts by gladly and sacrificially taking up the hard work of our faith.

It is so clearly laid out for us in the Beatitudes. You are blessed when you recognize and mourn your selfishness and sin. And on up the ladder it climbs: life-giving blessing flows out of a meekness that denies self, hungers after God and a rightly pure heart, and shows mercy to others. Friends, isn’t it time to let Christ snatch you out of this world?

~J.A.P. Walton

Please share with your friends!

* Mary Oliver. Devotions. Penguin Press, NY. 2017. p. 239.

 

 

Accomodation, Affirmation, Camping, Close Quarters, Uncategorized

The Buck Snorts of Life

This Side of the River

One intent of this blog is to challenge us to live life fully… grace-fully, wonder-fully, hope-fully.  Because being around the Walton brothers is such a hoot, I hope to experiment with using humor to face our challenges with this grace, wonder, and hope.  Here’s to first attempts!

My husband Mark and his younger brother Hugh have been paddling their sea canoes in the wilds of the north for over 25 years. For most of those years the brothers always shared a small tent. Mark will readily tell you that his brother snores. Not the little snips and snorts of a sleepy tongue relaxing at the back of the mouth, but the giant, gaping, mawing croaks that sound like an angry and randy buck. If you have spent much time around deer, you know about the buck snort. It’s a cross between a loud grunt, a sneeze, and a bawl.  Earplugs don’t begin to help Mark with Hugh’s buck-snorting antics. The noise keeps him awake through the watches of the night, as he lies there rigidly, imagining the tent looking like a flimsy lung inhaling through his brother’s open mouth, followed by a cracking and whiffling forced expulsion of air out his face. Snuffle in. Snort out. All the blessed night long.

Mark has tried pushing Hugh over. Turns out a true buck-snorter can snort as well on his stomach as his back. Each morning he awakes refreshed and looking forward to his coffee, while Mark groggily assess how much sleep he did, or did not actually get. Why it took over twenty years for Mark to start bringing his own tent-pitched as far from his brother’s as the campsite will allow-is something for the psychologists to study. In the end, Hugh’s snoring is likely why they’ve had so little trouble in camp with bears.

We who live intimately with other people know firsthand the little, but many annoyances that intrude on day-to-day life. The power of love in such relationships is to learn to accommodate with grace.

It is the most basic premise of hospitality to accommodate. And it is always your choice: you can either affirm or infirm those you love with your gestures and words (and the tone you use). You can be grandly grace-filled, or you can belittle. One builds, the other tears down.

Take a look at your closest relationships. Can you accommodate the little annoyances without taking offense? Without self-importance? It means to make room for somebody, to be obliging, to tolerate with sacrificial humility. I am not saying you must become a doormat- sometimes the solution is to get another tent! But for most of us, it is just like being in your sleeping bag; it may be time to roll over and cherish the one you’re with, no matter how loud the snorting.

~J.A.P. Walton

If you like what you read please click the LIKE button so I will know.

adventure, Life's Storms, Orienteering, Outdoor Adventures, Saint David, Serving Others, Technical Climbing, Uncategorized, Wales, White Water Paddling, wisdom

Saint David, the Wilds of Wales, & Doing the Little Things

This Side of the River

March 1st is Saint David’s Day. My family has always celebrated it with pride, and not a little relief that the winter months are behind us. My great-grandmother was an immigrant from Wales in the 1880’s. Her father left the poverty-stricken slate mines of north Wales to settle in eastern Iowa as a farmer. Nearly one hundred years later, I found myself a student at Trinity College in south Wales where I could study Welsh (a difficult, guttural language to be sure). My other classes were Russian History, Outdoor Pursuits, and Chorale, because when you are in Wales, you must sing!

It was the OP class that captured my heart. Over 12 weeks, we learned technical climbing on the steep western cliffs facing the Irish Sea, whitewater kayaking in the wild, foaming rivers of Wales, hiking up the brooding mountains of the north, and the sport of orienteering. It challenged me physically, and I learned quickly to trust ~ my peers, the ropes, the kayak, and the compass. When we live with our petty suspicions about the motives and nature of others, it is wonderfully freeing to learn, experientially, that trust is a virtue to be cultivated.

My brother is named after Saint David, who was a teacher and a monk in the 6th century. Native Welsh, Saint David established Christian enclaves throughout the country. He was no stranger to challenges, and it was his faith that led him on as he shared the gospel with Atlantic pirates and poor Welsh villagers alike.

His trust in God never wavered. On his deathbed, he admonished people to be joyful, to keep their faith, and do the little things in life.

In future posts, I will describe the thrill of running rapids, racing through deep snow to find the orange control flags at an orienteering competition, and rappelling down the steep sea cliffs in a wildly beautiful, breathtaking country. But today is Saint David’s Day, March 1, and I am thinking about “doing the little things” that, when added up, make for a life of meaning and service…things like sharing a meal, sitting with the sick, imprisoned, or widowed, taking on extra at work so a co-worker can get a break, driving your car without ranting at other drivers, keeping your space neat so people don’t have to live with your mess. Joining folks in their sorrow. Saying thank you.

It’s rarely about the thrill, is it? Life is about trusting God that he made you to lighten the burden of other people. It takes trust to step backwards off a high cliff. To paddle over a waterfall, or to run in deep snow after hidden clues. But to trust in God is so much grander. It means that all will be well, even as waters pour over our heads, even as we slip and fall, even as we persist in the mundane. The secret is in staying focused on the little things of life! Happy Saint David’s Day!   Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus!

~ J.A.P. Walton

Photo Credit: Google images (because mine are all slides!) My chorale class sang a Christmas Concert here on a cold, snowy evening in December 1978.  For more information about Wales, see here: Wales | History, Geography, Facts, & Points of Interest | Britannica.com      Wales travel guide

Cancer, Creation, Darkness, death, Faithful Living, God, Hope, John Muir, Lessons from the Wilderness, Life's Storms, Prayer, River, Sierra Nevada, Spring, Trees, Uncategorized, wilderness, wisdom

The Geese, the Floods, and John Muir

This Side of the River

Geese flew over the house this morning, with a honking so hauntingly welcome that it stopped me breathless with the happy assurance that winter is losing its grip. This has truly been a winter of discontent, to borrow from John Steinbeck (my favorite author of fiction). We lost a loved one. Another continues to decline. We are sending up prayers for too much cancer, too many bullets, the sword-rattling of our enemies, and the deaths of two great men of prayer and faith, R.C. Sproul and Billy Graham. This week we had days and days of rain atop melting snow, sending our creeks and rivers out of their banks.

To dwell on all this too long leaves us as drab and lifeless as the snow-matted flood-stained grass. We defend ourselves with intentional numbness. Yet the geese remind us that goodness abounds, that life is not snuffed out entirely, and that there is work to be done. This week, as Trout Creek rose higher and faster, swelling and bullying itself downstream, I thought about the nature of things-water most especially. How it gathers to itself, seeks out the lowest places, dwells and swells with an abandoned playfulness that lurks with deadly innocence too. Water has a voice and a rhythm. It sings and swings down its course, sweeping everything unrooted away with raw power. What other than our faith can anchor us amid the flood of evil tides?  But water is also life-giving.

I have spent this winter reading the selected works of John Muir because his writing is extraordinarily uplifting (winter is long in the north, so I strategically choose reading that will edify and encourage me). Muir’s prose is divinely poetic, and his love for God and Creation oozes from every page. He often wrote about the waters that fall from the peaks of the Sierra Nevada in California, carving out passes and canyons-

“The happy stream sets forth again, warbling and trilling like an ouzel, ever delightfully confiding, no matter how dark the way; leaping, gliding, hither, thither, clear or foaming: manifesting the beauty of its wildness in every sound and gesture.” 1

Muir shows us that part of the water’s power is in the way it glories to be on its way, hailing any who would heed. Spring is coming friends. Won’t it be glorious to be on our way, doing the work God has given us to do, righting wrongs with energy, and pointing others to the same hope we have in God? May you “set forth again” and rise up out of your banks with a renewed vigor, confiding in one another no matter how dark the way. Look up. The geese will show you the way.

~J.A.P. Walton

We have almost reached 500 readers. Help me get to 500! Please SHARE with your friends if you like what you read.  (just click the SHARE button!). And if you haven’t, sign up to FOLLOW!

  1.  John Muir Selected Writings, A.Knopf, New York. 2017,p.178.  This excerpt is from Muir’s first book, The Mountains of California published in 1894. (an ouzel is a bird)