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Four years ago, I made a New Year’s resolution to be consciously grateful. Initially I kept a little box with scraps of paper and pen next to my toothpaste holder and jotted a couple notes each evening before I went to bed about what I was thankful for that day. After a few weeks, I incorporated my gratitude into a few sentences at the end of each of my morning journal entries.

These years have resulted in heaps of thankfulness. At first it was easy to write ideas as the universe was open to me. Many appreciations were overtly obvious such as colorful morning sunrises and snow-capped mountains.

Over time, however, I began challenging myself to be more mindful and acknowledge the blessings that I often took for granted. I looked for little moments that made me smile each day. Gratitude jottings helped me pause and think about the day and what was unique and/or special such as juicy oranges and a heartfelt thank you from a stranger.

As I peruse my gratitude notes over the past years, I can identify several themes including nature, animals, people, privilege, and food. Here are a few examples:

Nature

• The full moon rising on a cold winter evening
• City parks full of active people
• Warm days in February
• Volunteering in Rocky Mountain National Park
• Watching approaching thunderstorms
• Sunshine on my shoulders

Animals

• A cuddly brown tabby cat sitting on my lap
  • People dedicated to protecting wild and domestic animals
  • The quizzical looks and sweet mews of elk calves as they follow their moms around in late spring
  • A marmot oblivious to the rest of the world nibbling on yellow flowers
  • Geese that land gracefully flat-footed on Lake Estes

People

• Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream
  • People who make me laugh
  • Dedicated co-volunteers who care deeply about the environment
  • Parents who love(d) me unconditionally
  • The kindred spirits in my writing group
  • Kind and generous friends who offered boundless help after my shoulder surgery

Privilege

• A car that gets me where I want to go
• A warm shower after a cold day volunteering at Bear Lake
• Christmas lights all over our little mountain town
• Asthma medicine that helps me breathe better
• The rights that I have and the responsibilities that go along with those rights

Food

• A little piece of chocolate after dinner
  • A holiday feast with friends
  • White pizza
  • Sticky, gooey cinnamon rolls
  • Rich dark coffee with cream

My gratitude journal enables me to reflect on and appreciate the good things each day. It keeps me grounded in the blessed life I live and the big and little moments that feed my soul.

I am especially grateful today that I got my second coronavirus vaccine. I am beholden to the researchers, manufacturers, distributors, health professionals, and other essential workers who have made this possible. I will be even more thankful when everyone in the world has access to the vaccine. My gratitude is especially huge and visible today, and it reminds me to continue to express my thankfulness with every opportunity I get.

A month after I retired and moved to Colorado, I filled out a survey. At the end it asked my occupation. The last category just before other was retired. For the first time in all the hecticness of leaving my job and moving across the country, I was directly confronted with acknowledging I am retired.

I thought objectively about retirement and planned it for years. I worked with a trusted financial advisor who guided me in preparing to have enough money to retire. Her assessment was, “You will be fine, Karla, just don’t go crazy.” I was a leisure researcher and had written about aging and retirement. I loved being a professor, but I also did not want to be one of those people who “stayed too long.” I wanted to leave when I still felt productive. I had watched both of my parents retire and continue lives that were meaningful to them and their communities. I also had been thinking for almost 50 years about wanting to live in Colorado to be near the mountains that fed my soul and offered me a sense of place.

I never thought, however, about what it would feel like to be retired and to check a box that marked my new identity. Retirement was now an emotional reality and I had to confront my new actuality.

Somewhere along the path of pondering retirement, someone told me that the most successful retirement was about “going to” something new and not “going away” or escaping from life of the past. In living retirement as moving toward something, I embrace how my friend, Linda Erceg, described retirement as an encore performance.

Music, sports, volunteering, writing, and outdoor adventures are dear to me. Even though I worked diligently in my professional career, I was also passionate about my social and recreation activities. My life was heavily scheduled so I could get everything done.  

What I had never done, however, was sit still and just relax. I defined myself as a human doing. Retirement meant putting my energy in other ways besides working, which had been far more joyous than drudgery.

The Covid-19 pandemic taught me more about slowing down than I had learned about retirement up to that point. I started to appreciate the mental energy that I could decrease. When working, I seldom shut my brain off. I was continually thinking about what I needed to do the next day, how I could have done better in teaching, or what more I needed to do to finish a research article. In retirement, I can do something like volunteering and then go home and not think about it anymore. Retirement, and the forced slowdown from the pandemic, has helped me center on living in the moment rather than evaluating the past or always planning for the near future.

A professional colleague, Kathy O’Keefe, sent me a note upon hearing that I was going to retire:

 “Most of us in recreation might have an easier time viewing retirement as walking toward opportunities rather than away from our past. Someone asked me what I want from this next period of life, and I think it’s contemplation, engagement in all kinds of activities and adventurous experiences, deepening of relationships, encounters with the transcendent, and a whole lot of laughs. I wish all that for you too.”

I am making my encore performance all those things. My wish is that others can experience their later life in a similar way.

Snow was a given growing up in Iowa. We seemed to have more snow then and we tolerated it as it was just a fact of life. Snow meant more work on the farm with clearing feed troughs and keeping the animals dry. The fun kid thing about snow was when we had a blizzard and got to stay home from school—Snow Days!

I did not have a choice about snow growing up but today, I choose to live where snow is possible every month of the year. I do not love driving in it, but otherwise I relish snowfall.  Absence sometimes makes the heart grow fonder as I spent 29 years living in parts of the US (TX and NC) that received little snow. A fond recollection in NC, however, was going to the beach in January after an unusual overnight snow. Instead of the ocean water lapping to the sand, it splashed to the shoreline and slowly crumbled the snow into the salt water.

On average Estes Park gets 75 inches of snow a year and significant snow 9 months of the year. Except for a few dirty piles, however, the snow doesn’t stick around much. The solar power of the sun melts it quickly OR the wind blows it away. The mountains retain their snow for months and in minutes I can leave my house and play in snow. Yet, I do not have to live in feet of snow.

I am overjoyed to open the blinds in the early morning and see fresh snow on the ground. It makes me want to go immediately and explore what critters have left tracks on their early morning ambles. I love Carol Rifka Brunt’s quote: “There’s just something beautiful about walking on snow that nobody else has walked on. It makes you believe you’re special.”  

My colleague, Jerry Apps, wrote about farm life growing up in the 1930’s. He poetically described the quiet of winter on a farm. One statement he made, however, reminded me of the Monet exhibit I saw a year ago. Apps suggested that everything in the winter appears black and white. As I reflected on the Monet exhibit, I now understand that Monet saw numerous shades of white when he painted dozens of winter scenes such as the photo above.

Snow is clearly not monochromatic. Nothing accentuates the various white shades of winter as much as when a burst of color comes through—a red rose hip peeking out from the side of the trail, the stark blue sky, juniper bushes with their blue-gray berries, the silver glisten of snow melt running down a rock, a rainbow twinkle of sunshine on a snowdrift, and even snowfall on elk duds (see above photo).

I also appreciate snowflake shapes and patterns. In grade school we took colored construction paper outside to collect (momentarily) snowflakes. No two snowflakes were alike. My co-volunteer, Jon Olsen, is teaching me about the different types of snow as we work at Bear Lake every Saturday and analyze the snowflakes that land on our brown volunteer fleece jackets– hexagonal, stellar plates and dendrites, needles, columns, and rimed crystals also known as graupel.

After years of deprivation, I am romanticizing snow. Yet, I feel a thrill in watching snow fall and experiencing the magic of snow as I wander through the winter.

I wrote my first book when I was 7 years old. I even illustrated it. It was a story about Gus, the lost arrow, that was eventually found. Although an outlandish idea, my love for writing and communicating with words has been a life-long passion.

Writing about writing may be a futile effort–one should just write, right? Perhaps, however, some insights may be helpful to others.

1. Writing is done in different ways for various purposes and aimed at diverse audiences. I enjoyed my academic writing and felt challenged to make writing factual and at the same time, understandable. The first time I was told my academic writing was accessible, I did not think it was a compliment. I thought it meant that I did not sound intellectual enough. Now I believe communicating clearly is paramount. I am comfortable with professional approaches that are also personal in nature. Writing a blog for general audiences is a new challenge to explore.
2. Anais Nin said, “We write to taste life twice: in the moment and in retrospect.” As I get older and reflect on life, I am aware of events that have given it meaning. Writing allows me to ponder the people, animals, places, and ideas that have nurtured my soul.
3. Keeping a journal every day gets ideas down without attached judgment. Journaling has been a part of life since I first read The Diary of Anne Frank as an elementary student. Writing personal thoughts is therapeutic and gives an outlet for ideas. I have not gone back to read 95% of my journals but I know where to go if I want to taste life twice. 
4. Recent political events have punctuated the idea that words have consequences. Writers use words and each word has meaning. I learned from my colleague, Dan Dustin, in graduate school almost 45 years ago. I did not understand how he could ponder over the right word choice for hours. Now I understand how important the precise word is in expressing ideas.
5. Another guideline I learned years ago in my creative non-fiction writing group was “show them, don’t just tell them.” I drove my students crazy in editing their work because I did not allow hyperbolic words in their papers such as “very.” In the writing, show me why I should interpret something as “very.”
6. In launching this blog and stepping out of academic writing, I have lacked confidence. I take heart in what Margaret Atwood said, “If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.” My work isn’t perfect, but I do my best.
7. Being an avid and reflective reader influences how I write. I love reading and noting how other authors have used words to make stories that resonate with me. I pay attention and learn from the way words are used and how sentences are composed. I focus on crafting my voice in similar ways.
8. Writing means re-writing. It requires discipline. I used to tell my students that they should never consider a manuscript/paper done until it had been re-written at least a half dozen times. My friend, Sherryl Kleiman, talked about “spew” drafts as the first round–just get the ideas out there. Then edit over and over. The final product may look different from the spew and should organize those idea kernels. Economy and the right words are the focus of re-writing.
9. The challenge with writing is making the familiar interesting and the unusual familiar for readers. I greatly admire Mae Sarton. She wrote about everyday things in her life and made them exceptional. Her accounts of her home and her life with her plants and cats resonated with me. I hope that the ideas I find interesting will also provide reflection for some readers.
10. Finally, I am learning that writing regularly is the best way to grow and get better at writing. Writing about ideas, no matter how weird, allows me to explore, relive, and reflect on this beautiful and crazy world. Writing sustains my wandering and wondering mind.

Traveling is in my blood. I fell in love with mountains when 8 years old and my family undertook a rare family car vacation to visit relatives in Colorado. I was 10 years old the first time I rode on an airplane. My mom and I flew to Chicago to see my Aunt and Uncle. I did get a little motion sickness, as did my mom, but we nibbled on saltine crackers. The feeling of speed and anticipation was exhilarating as the twin propeller airplane raced down the Cedar Rapids runway.

My love for travel adventure came from my parents. We seldom took vacations (being farmers was a 24/7 year-round job), but my parents relished the opportunities they made for the family including a cross country train trip to visit my grandparents in Arizona when I was in junior high and a much longer flight to California to visit relatives when I was in high school.

My parents also reenforced travel as important with the Sunday afternoon outings the family took to hear the Iowa Mountaineers presentations in Iowa City. Lest you laugh at the idea of Iowa Mountaineers, it was a group that encouraged trips around the world for a variety of activities. My parents loved these vicarious experiences.

The opportunity that changed my life, aside from the initial flight, was my first international trip where I spent six months in Turkey. Almost 50 years ago, I was part of the International 4-H Youth Exchange (IFYE) program to build international understanding among rural people. I lived with 20 families across the country. Living conditions ranged from sleeping in a bedroom that I shared with the family’s children across from a low partition that separated us from the sleeping farm animals, contrasted to a mansion on the Aegean Sea where I had my own personal servant for the 10 days I was there.

The Turkish cultural experience profoundly altered my view of the world and established an interest in other cultures—the food, music, religion, politics, and other everyday aspects that I had not considered. Although I grew up in a low/middle income farm family, I had not realized that most Americans had such material wealth compared to others in the world. I was forever transformed regarding what I needed to have a comfortable life, verses what I thought I wanted or had been socialized to desire as constituting “the good life.”

I have had opportunities to travel all over the world in my professional career as well as for fun. I am one of the few and highly privileged members of the Seven Continents Club. I did not know there was such a thing until I traveled to Antarctica with some individuals who were seeking that “membership.” Although being a member had not been my goal, I humbly accept that distinction.

Covid-19 has hampered my travel style. I look forward to future domestic and international journeys. Although the hiatus in traveling has resulted in yearning to see new places and meet new people, I have also been re-assessing the carbon footprint I leave in traveling. I miss the choices I have for wandering. At the same time, I recognize that one of the best things about traveling is simply coming and being home.

I am hard-pressed to name a mountain mammal that is my favorite, but I do love pikas and marmots. When hiking and wandering in the high subalpine or alpine areas and I hear a shrill whistle or shriek, I know I am in the territory of either or both marmots and pikas. I love seeing animals in their natural habitats and both species are super cute. Equally interesting to me, however, is how they provide a metaphor for ways to think about living one’s life. They provide contrasts that are different but correspondingly compelling to ponder.

American pikas are members of the rabbit family. They are sometimes referred to as Arctic Rabbits. The pika is small, 6-8 inches long, with tiny ears and a little tail. They do not hibernate but spend their entire lives high in the alpine among the tundra meadows, rocks, and snow. They can be seen in alpine areas scurrying around in both the summer and the winter. In the summer they are busy harvesting “hay” that they store in huge piles to help them through the winter. They are sometimes called “nature’s farmers.”

Marmots are ground-living rodents within the same family as beavers, groundhogs, and chipmunks. They also live in the subalpine and alpine areas. Marmots inhabit open rocky country in mountainous regions. They live in burrows usually in colonies. Marmots hibernate during the winter and mate immediately thereafter. They feed chiefly on grasses and other green plants and spend their summer days feeding frenetically or sunning themselves lazily. They can vary in length from 15 – 25 inches excluding their 5 – 12- inch bushy tails that swish up and down and back and forth as they move.

Marmots and pikas often live side by side and benefit from their similar systems of high squeals to warn each other of possible predators. Other than their mutual protection of one another, however, they could not be more different. Pikas are vigorous spending their summers storing food since they will have to have enough provisions to live under the snow in the rocks all winter. They will be quieter in winter, but visible and audible all year around.

Marmots, on the other hand, spend their summers storing up food by eating as much as they can and getting as fat as they can so they can survive in their 8-month winter hibernation. They are a true hibernator. They will go into deep sleep in late September and not wake up until early May when they have their young and start the eating and sunbathing cycle over again.

I relate most to the pikas. I like to be active. I like to have things to do. I like to be out and about in the winter. I relish eating but I really do not enjoy sleeping and would likely make a terrible marmot, even though I think they are really cute. I admire the pikas and their farming habits. I love to hear them in the winter as they evoke their warning calls while the marmots are well underground sound asleep, oblivious to everything.

I worry about the pikas since they must store enough food to last the winter and hope that they get enough snow to insulate themselves to a steady 32-degree temperature underground. They are an indicator species of climate change. They show evidence of being a harbinger of dramatic things to come if climate change continues to create warmer winters with less snowfall. I fear for the fate of both the marmots and the pikas as well as our species if we do not do something immediately about the changing environment. It may affect these critters first, but can we be far behind?

Sunrise over Sprague Lake in the Winter

Simon and Garfunkel sang about the “Sounds of Silence” in their 1964 hit. It was a thought-provoking protest song about the perils of remaining silent. Years later I realized that in contrast to the song’s original intent, sounds of silence is a quiet alternative to the cacophony and commotion in my world. The older I get, the more I appreciate silence in my life. As with all things, it is a balance. I seek silence in the outdoors.

Two events in my life shaped my affinity for tranquility and the sounds of silence. The first was in the mid 1970’s when I moved to Minneapolis for graduate school having lived on a farm, in a relatively small college town, and on the outskirts of a small Iowa farming community my whole life. I realized my first day that the city was NEVER quiet and adjusting to its constant buzz was a challenge. I thought the city noises would drive me crazy because of the incessant hum. After a couple weeks, however, I got used to them most of the time and chided myself for adapting so quickly to something I really did not like. My only solution was to get away from the city and into the country as often as possible, even in subzero weather.

My second profound encounter with silence in the early 1990’s was on a trip to New Zealand. My friend Deb and I were doing some professional work in Christchurch and had a day off. A poster downtown advertised a day long ski trip in the mountains including transportation into the backcountry, lunch, and equipment and a guided tour to cross-country ski.

We stood on a street corner downtown at 6:30 am waiting for our ride, expecting a freshly washed van with company advertising on the side. Instead, a dirty old VW bus stopped, and a youngish, bearded man asked if we were the Henderson party. We weren’t sure where we were going but enjoyed the chat for over an hour as we drove higher into the mountains. We stopped at his home where his wife offered us coffee and packed our lunches. The couple chatted enthusiastically about skiing, their farmstead, and growing up in sheep country.

With our skis fitted we transferred into an old jeep and took off across a field on a rutted road headed uphill. It was a clear blue-sky day with the sun coming over the horizon and high wispy ice clouds visible to the south. After several minutes, the jeep trail became completely covered with snow, so we stopped. We put on our skis and attached the skins that we would use for traction going uphill. I had never heard of skins before as my cross-country experience was on skinny skis on the rolling hills of Minnesota and Wisconsin.

As we moved along, I became aware of how quiet it was. We stopped for a bit and sat on some rocks. It was the first time I had ever noticed almost total silence. No hums, no wind, only occasional rustling of our clothing. I heard way off in the distance the sound of “baaing” at a distant sheep station, but otherwise it was sheer silence. I think of that day often and how it changed my aural life.

I am aware of my inclination for silence and continue to seek natural sounds as well as the hush of the outdoors. This calmness happens most often for me in the winter in the mountains. Some people are concerned about sound pollution and how remote outdoor areas can provide respite from a noisy world.  I enjoy the sounds of people’s laughter and chatter, genres of music, and animal voices. As time goes on, however, I appreciate stillness. I need natural harmonies as well as the sounds of silence to feed my soul.

I am roasting brussels sprouts for Christmas dinner. Moreover, I am making enough to share with 14 people. As I create my dish, and it is one of the simplest things I could offer, I will be thinking about each one of those 14 friends who are going to partake. Additionally, I am remembering Christmases past and future. I will prepare the brussels sprouts with mindfulness, intention, and love. These brussels sprouts are especially significant this year because I won’t be sharing a meal in person with my friends or family.

The last topic you probably want to see anyone write about is how difficult 2020 has been. Like so many others, I wish I could spend Christmas day with my family and/or friends. I am, however, not going anywhere for Christmas except across town to deliver my contribution to dinner. I do not feel safe being indoors with others and I do not want to endanger anyone among my friends or family. Every person has to make her own decisions about what is responsible behavior, and I have made mine. Thankfully, my friends feel the same way.

The changes in how we are doing Christmas leads me to think about what food and togetherness mean. My 2020 Christmas feast is similar to my 2020 Thanksgiving Day. Several households in my mountain town will be preparing food to share. The hosts are roasting the turkey. Everyone else will bring complementary dishes to the hosts’ house. We will gather outside for a few minutes to impart holiday greetings (socially distanced and masked up, of course) and acknowledge the blessings of our food. Each household will go inside to prepare plates to take home to enjoy. Later that day we will have a zoom call to chat further, rave about the food, and perhaps play a game or two.

I have chosen roasted brussels sprouts as my contribution. I once grew them in my garden when I was a 4-Her. They were my choice of something “new” to try growing and I loved them, even though 60 years ago they were not the trendy vegetable they are today!

As I prepare the dish, I acknowledge how interdependent the world is. I have the California brussels sprouts because someone grew, harvested, shipped, and enabled me to purchase them. The extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) from Spain makes them especially tasty. I wish I had grown them but am indebted for all that contributed to the brussels sprouts I am roasting with love.

I am thinking of the decades of making and eating Christmas dinners with my parents and sisters in Iowa. I lovingly acknowledge my family of choice in Estes Park and the care and concern we have for each other as we celebrate 2020 holidays in a safe way. I am comforted in the good food prepared by their benevolent hands. I look forward to next Christmas when we can dine together again. I may or may not prepare roasted brussels sprouts. Time will tell.

I don’t think I have looked forward to a holiday more in my life than the upcoming one. No, it is not Christmas, Hanukah, or Kwanzaa, but the celebration that I am fixated on this year is the Winter Solstice on December 21.

For us in the Northern Hemisphere, the Winter Solstice denotes the beginning of longer days and the progression to more light. This solstice celebrates the symbolic death and rebirth of the Sun. The seasonal significance of the Winter Solstice is the reversal of the gradual lengthening of nights and shortening of days. In cultures throughout history, Winter Solstice traditions have given people hope that sunny days lie ahead.

I’ve always been fascinated by the solstices and equinoxes. However, my most meaningful encounter with a solstice was the Winter Solstice Festival of the Sun observance I attended in Cusco, Peru, in 2014. I had the privilege of experiencing the Festival of the Sun held every year around June 24. Inti Raymi is the Peruvian name for the festival that has been observed for centuries by the Incas. It is a celebration and a sacrifice to the sun of God.

This Festival of the Sun is not just one day but several days of festivities. I spent two days in Cusco during the Festival. One day included endless parades of people walking around the city square wearing their native costumes and playing various musical instruments. The second day was a pageant in the hills near Cusco where the history of the Incas and their gratitude to the Sun for the harvest was portrayed.

Even though the festival occurred on the shortest day of the year, the ceremony celebrated the coming of new light and the new year that would bring more sun to the people. The pageant lasted for several hours with parades of people in bright costumes, plays performed to show history, and the continual aspects of appreciation displayed for what the earth had offered during the past year.

The spiritual meanings of the Winter Solstice for me is a time to reflect on the goodness and kindnesses of the past year. This year in particular, the Winter Solstice seems a powerful parallel reminder that in this darkness, I can connect with hope for the future and resonate with the promising light within me.

I am looking forward to the longer days and what they portend. The challenge to be grateful and hopeful is not always easy, but I welcome the opportunity to see more light coming into the world. This Winter Solstice will provide a time to pause and think about how the celestial cycles are symbolic of ever-present change.

Holidays of this season all have a relationship to darkness becoming light. On December 21, however, I will honor the sun and what it means to me. I will enjoy the sunrise and sunset and light a candle in the evening to reflect on the Winter Solstice as it represents the beginning of my new year.

PS Coincidentally December 21 is also the conjunction of Saturn with Jupiter in the SW skies–a once in every 800 years phenomenon. It escalates my appreciation for the 2020 Winter Solstice.

Sunrise in Estes Park on December 10, 2020

 

“Early to bed, early to rise, makes a [person] healthy, wealthy, and wise.” I remember my mom using that adage when I was growing up.  I am going with those possibilities as a partial explanation for why I am a morning person.

I cannot wait to get up to start a new day. I am one of those perky people that sometimes drive other non-morning people crazy, but I love seeing the first daylight. Everyone has a time of the day that they function best, and mine is early in the morning. In full disclosure, I also admit that I am a coffee addict and LOVE my first cup of coffee within minutes of getting out of bed so that’s a further morning motivation.

Everyone has different biorhythms and I know people who function best late at night. By early evening, however, I am usually exhausted and just want to sit down and do nothing. The longer the day gets, the more I slow down. When I used to teach, I found I was more productive with research and writing in the morning and did better at teaching in the afternoon when I had decelerated a bit (my students appreciated that!) and got my energy from interactions with learners in the classroom.

I always thought my mom and dad were morning people, but I think that was not necessarily by choice living on a farm. There was always far more to do each day than could get done and an early start was important. Plus, the animals were waiting to be fed shortly after sunrise. It was not until my mom and dad moved off the farm that I realized that my mom did not really like mornings. My dad, on the other hand, still got up early even when he no longer had animals to feed. For him, somewhat like me today, it was an enjoyable pattern.

I have pleasant and vivid memories of early mornings on the farm. Our farmhouse faced the east and seeing the sunrise from the breakfast table was often stunning looking across the rolling Eastern Iowa landscape. I liked the quiet of the morning. I liked seeing the new light.

My mom said that a person learned best in the morning. She told me that I would do better on tests if I studied one last time in the morning. I remember as a second grader crawling into bed with my mom to practice my spelling words on many mornings.

Through most of my life, when I needed to get something important done, I could always accomplish more in the morning than any other time of day. Now that I am retired, I do not have to get up early each day. But I do.

I love the morning mountain light and the quiet of my little town. I still relish writing early when I feel my brain is freshest. I enjoy journaling at the beginning of the day and reflecting on the gratitude I hold and my affirmations for remaining positive in the new day.  I don’t think I am healthier, wealthier, or wiser than other people, but I do know I will likely always be a morning person.