Exultant

ex·ul·tant
Pronunciation Key (g-zltnt) adj.
Marked by great joy or jubilation; triumphant.

Have you ever found yourself going through your day and realizing that you are happy. Right now I am. I don't know what is filling me with joy, but I know that I can not stop smiling. I am happy, joyous, elated, exultant,delighted, ecstatic, exulting, transported, flushed, flying, gleeful, high, and jubilant. I had a simple day. I woke early and went and had coffee with a friend who is moving out of town. I then came home and took a walk through the park with two of my housemates. The majority of the afternoon was spent putting my PCT photos on my web page. Now I am just relaxing. And I am happy. Its a good feeling, I could get addicted to this. When have my spirits been this high without prompting from an uplifting experience, I know not. But may this warmth never end. It will, but I don't care...because right now I am happy, and I am making Mac and Cheese...mmmm Must go tend to the stove....

Quandary

Main Entry: quan·da·ry
Pronunciation: 'kwän-d(&-)rE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -ries
Etymology: origin unknown : a state of perplexity or doubt

Today I was offered a job at an Architecture firm. I will take the job, because it is quasi-required for me to take the job. I will make good money, relatively...$15/hr. Here is the problem. I want to return to ODS in the spring, and if I have the money I want to return to the PCT over summer. Now then, I am left with the dilemma of taking a job that I want only to turn around in four months and say that I am leaving. Why? Well I would want to leave to return to ODS. I have found a home at ODS and I like it enough to return another time...maybe two times or even three times. In time I will have to inform my boss that I am leaving to go do what I am passionate about. Why am I not as passionate about Architecture, then this would not be a problem? Any tips on how to work a serious job for four months and then leave to go back to what I consider "reality?"

POEM: Invisible People

They stand on the corner
Invisible People

The bag lady reading "Better Homes & Gardens"
The Jazz Singer sharing how he hurts tonight
How he'll be better come the first
Always waiting for the first

Invisible People
Always jonesin' for their next fix
Be it a dollar, a beer, or a hit

The limping man
With less than a cane
The bicyclist salesman
With a new bike every day

They stand on the corner
Invisible People

You got any smokes
Any Money
Just enough for the bus
Enough to get a hostile room tonight

Invisible People
Visible Everywhere

HAIKUS: Belly Button Lint

Belly Button Lint
Wool knit with cotton fibers
Blanket for an ant

Belly Button Lint
More than often blue and gray
Grow me a t-shirt

Belly Button Lint
Hot Morning showers transform
Your fuzz to pudding

Belly Button Lint
Square and circle define where
Vitruvian Man

HAIKUS: Toe Jam Frenzy

Glorious Toe Jam
How does your morning fuzz ball
Ruin cuddle time?

Glorious Toe Jam
Your Disgusting funk down there
Is fun to pick at

Glorious Toe Jam
Comes from sweat and dirty socks
You're odorific

Glorious Toe Jam
Like dust bunnies under beds
collected from floors.

DREAM: Dying in Dreams

I am at Silver Creek Falls State Park...only it is inside the EMU, by all the ramps on the east side...my father has committed a crime...or is going insane...or both. He is supposed to be arrested for a crime he committed....perhaps his crime is his insanity. I take it upon my responsibility to arrest him...even though i am a civilian...not a officer of the law. In trying to capture him we throw eachother all over the park...building....ramps....area. We fly through the air....in the nature of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. In fact we have a fight with staffs...Bo's...if you will. I grab his ears and slam his head into the ground....blood gets all over the place. We fight some more....until I grab a clear pint glass...empty...and throw it at his face. It shatters sending shards of broken glass all over...bloodying his face. He is now arrested....he shakes my hand....the broken glass imbedded in his hands cuts my hand. I am arrested for assault with a deadly weapon...taking the law into my own hands....something....somehow....I am charged with a crime...sent to prison...given the death penalty....by lethal injection. As I lay on the bed...my final bed....the needle goes into my arm...the pain tickles....aches....hurts...pierces. I feel the drugs surge up into my body....coursing through me...to my toes...my fingers...my arms...my chest....until it reached my head. Things get hazy bizarre wavey...High. Capital "H" My bed turns into blue water, with the consistancy of lava....wavey....bubbley. It bubbles up and around me....as the drugs kick in, I sink into the bed.... I am dying. I know that once the blue engulfs me I will be dead. Blue bubbles pop over my eyes...my legs and arms are now engulfed in blue...my torso sinks into the blue....the end is near....finally all that is...is blue...my head has sunk beneath the blue. I have died...I know it....there is no doubt in my mind. But death is not what I thought....it is an extension of life....with a lack of clarity. All I see looks different....what is it....how is it different. Then it hits me. Everything has lost color....it is not black in white....but rather sketchy....like with colored pencils....it is sandy....like little dots of color with white space inbetween the dots....i have fallen into a anitmated world where everyone is the same....but they lack texture....dimension....reality. I drive around....in a video game like simulation....on a sled that moves forward, to the side, and up....though I travel in no particular direction....but I do know that I am running from something....are the officers now after me. Did I commit a crime again...how could I....I am dead...obviously.....everything is unreal....sketchy....sandy....grainy....dimensionless. I find my way to a restaurant....situated inside the trunk of a tree....I go downstairs....my wifes family is there....the reject me....tell me that I do not deserve to dine with them....that I am no longer a part of their family....I run away weeping...sobbing....bawling...knowing that there is nothing I can do...because I am dead. I am dead to the world....dead to them....unimportant....just a sketch...dimensionless. Dead....Dimensionless.

POEM: Love Love

I love camping

I love fish and chips

The sound of babies laughter

I love the sun light on my face

The moonlight on my back

Climbing over mountain boulders

I love to see kids holding hands with moms

And resting on fathers shoulders

I love the sound of clicking shoes on hardwood floors

And singing songs that haven't been sung

I love double decker p.b. & j's

Rivaled only by the double decker oreo

I love to wake up before the alarm

I love to step on beached seashells

Hearing the crack, a sharp contrast to the constant that is the ocean

I love to compliment

I love to laugh alone

I love curves; be they on women, or grades, or in bell's statistics

I love numbers, saying perpendicular, and formulaic

I love finding cream treats in my donuts, especially if they come from bavaria.

I love love

I love puppets when they dance with their long hair

I love to hear my father wistle.

I love the way the baseball sounds when it is caught in a leather mit.

I love the sound of laughter in the Aparment below me, above me, around me.

I love the sounds of water lapping against a docked boat.

I love watching cattails sway in the wind.

I love the smell of fruit in the morning.

I love music played loudly while I clean house

I love music that cleans the house of myself

I love poems that ring true for everyone

and love that lasts through duldrums

I love sharing with others all that is, was, and will be

I love playing hopscotch when I pass some childs chalk doodles

I love turning around and doing it again

Or running down the street with my arms open to the wind

chasing birds as they meander through the streets looking for scraps of food

I love emotions that hit me like a brick

For it is then that I feel most alive

I love sadness, because it reminds me of the joy that once was, and will come again

I love that yesterday and tomorrow play leapfrog while I am trapped in today.

I love life because without life, love would not be,

and without love, life would not be.

ODS: A Drug for the soul (3rd Reflection)

A creek runs through our Outdoor School site. Actually two creeks run through Camp Adams; Milk Creek and Nate Creek. This splits the large site into two independent sites. Our Outdoor School program was situated on the Milk Creek Site, with generally a couple of cabins over in the Nate Creek site, which we fondly (or not so fondly, pending who you ask) called Hawaii. The confluence of the creek is where the students meet for studies on the Water Resource with Tsuga and Hazel. Further up Nate Creek is the cut bank where students look at a soil profile in the Soil Resource with Snag and me (Moose). If you follow the trail further you can cross over the creek into the Plants Resource area where you would study flora with Daisy, Dakota, and Ricochet. If by chance you do not cross Nate Creek, you can follow the trail close to Hawaii, and study fauna on the Animals Resource with Luna, Morrigan, and Rooster.

Not only this, but also the creek serves me with a metaphor for the progression of my experience at Outdoor School, particularly as I worked with my staff. When I first came to Milk Creek, new to the Multnomah Outdoor School Program, Nate Creek was running low. I looked down at the creek as saw a split creek. On the far side, the water flowed, the near side the water was stagnant. It held unmoving silt clouding the water. The distant side was like that of the returning staff members to Milk Creek. They moved along, aware of how the program works. The new staff members seemed to be fogged over with a wealth of knowledge that was being delivered to them early on. We were still the same creek, but there was a split in the way that we worked. As the winter season neared, we received some rain. This caused the creek to start flowing in a unified sense. This occurred around week 4 of the session. There was still cloudy areas, but for the most part the stream was no longer split into two distinct entities. The team of Program Leaders also meshed around week 4. We started to have a stronger vision of how we were working together. The creek still held foggy areas, as did the way that the six of us worked together. Week 5 was similar, but week 6 held dramatic changes. With the demands of a Halloween, the week was madness. Our first day of field study had torrential downpour. In fact a new record was set for the amount of rainfall on that particular day.

I wandered down to Nate Creek, and saw it gushing down the gully, tearing away at the earth. Frantically assembling a haunted house among other festive delights for all hallows eve, the staff worked together to pull off an amazing experience for the 6th graders. We moved quickly like Nate Creek. Toward the end of the week the stream had cleared. It was flowing quickly, but was clear. Our staff had successfully pulled off one of the best Halloweens that these 6th graders will probably ever experience. We worked well together, much like a consistent flow in the stream. Now all the silt that was gathered on site from Nate Creek and Milk Creek has flowed downstream, off site. In metaphor, I see this as symbolic of how the Outdoor School Experience has effected us and we will take something from site, carry it out of site, and effect something further down the line.

**** An Email from a student leader “I agree with you completely. Right now I’m sitting here in a hotel room in Baltimore, Maryland visiting colleges. Picture me trying to explain ODS to a pearl-and-tweed-suit-clad admissions officer in five minutes in an interview. ODS has been one of the best things I’ve ever done in my short life, but I know that as I get older it will continue being important. I’ve grown up a whole lot since I was a sophomore in this program. It’s unsettling, watching yourself grow up like that in front of your own eyes. “Yesterday I read an entry that I wrote in my journal a couple weeks before I came out for my week this fall. I was talking about ODS, and how apprehensive I was to come out and open up again. Because it’s painful when, again, it ends. It’s scary how numb we all become to real life sometimes. Maybe it’s because I’m at a stage where I’ve grown out of what I have to do everyday (high school), but I’m not quite at what my next stage will be (college). But I don’t know. It’s risky, though, to go out there and just have to deal directly with yourself for once. I finally feel validated, useful, just like you said. It feels good to be with people who acknowledge and complement each other. I always have such a horrible time adjusting back to real life. Going to school on Monday morning is okay, because I get to see my friends and teachers, and everybody asks me how things went. But then there’s Tuesday, and Wednesday, and Thursday and I still think about all of you 100x a day, but I can’t keep talking about it. Nobody cares. I don’t blame them. They weren’t there with me. That’s sad too. Little by little I forget about what it was like too. I hate that. “I hardly ever cry. But god, every time final campfire just gets me. Usually I try to stop it though. I didn’t really this time. It just felt so good. It feels good to cry about something good once in a while. Stop being numb. Just let yourself feel something for once. I think it’s a tendency to treat crying as a symptom of a problem that needs to be solved. We hardly ever treat crying as a solution to the problem. I walked my girls back in the dark and sat on my bunk and just sort of cried while they got their teeth brushed and got tucked in their sleeping bags waiting for a goodnight. It felt wonderful. And then it stopped as quickly as it started and I was laughing and partying and eating cookies. That’s the way it should be. That night I got out a piece of lined paper at 1am and wrote ‘I don’t ever want to forget this feeling. I don’t ever want to forget those words that my ears heard tonight. Somewhere in the really near future these words are going to be so necessary.’ That’s the truth.” **** I sent her my journal entries on my experience at ODS, and this was the thoughtful response she gave me. Around week 4, I had figured the job out fairly well. I was in the groove of understanding how to do my tasks in an efficient manner. I soon realized that many of my returning student leaders also knew their responsibilities. Taking time to teach them how to do their job seemed almost a waste of their time as well as mine. I started to take time to get to know the students as people, as opposed to student leaders. By week five and six I spent most my time trying to impart upon my student leaders something they could take out of Outdoor School with them. Like the silt in the creek floating downstream, I wanted to give them some words of wisdom. I still taught the high schoolers how to teach 6th graders about erosion, weathering, etc. but I tried to also give them something that would help them grow outside of ODS. I am, by no means, filled with infinite wisdom. I learned a great deal about communication while I was at ODS. A coworker taught me to work at understanding the difference between being self-critical and self-aware. I tried passing on this and other things that I learned in the last year of my life. I think that this had impact on some people, because in my final week, I started receiving some letters from past student leaders. Letters of thanks. I was looking at a internet forum for ODS student leaders, and saw my name mentioned a few times. I took the time to have a “Magical Mystery ‘Moose’ Moment” with some of my student leaders. During this I shared a quote, a story, or a poem that has impacted me. Some of the student leaders took what I said to heart and wrote back thanking me for the advice. I even saw applied advice a couple weeks later, which showed me that the SLs were listening to what I had to say.

**** The final week of ODS was madness. We had torrential rain. We had halloween to set up for. We had to take down all the gear and store it for the winter. But our team of SLs, PLs, and FIs cruised through these responsibilities nearly flawlessly. For Halloween I shared “Scary Stories” with the sixth graders. I recited “The Cremation of Sam McGee” by Robert W. Service as a preliminary story. Then I took cues from the sixth graders to create a second “true” story of the missing bride of Camp Adams. My story developed with each group, and by the final group I had a crisp story. Sadly, I did scare a few sixth graders too much. This however gave me the opportunity to talk with the scared ones later, telling them the story isn’t true. It became a secret that I shared with them, telling them to keep the story “alive” for the other students. By the end of the week, there was a few sixth graders who came to me and thanked me for sharing a secret with them. They were able to listen to their scared classmates, yet feel secure in knowing the truth.

**** At the end of the week, one sixth grader came up to me and thanked me. She received all the beeds, a rare honor. I think around 200 sixth graders have received all beeds in the 40,000+ students under Cherokees as Site Supervisor. This young girl and I had a similar sense of humor. We sat at a table together once for lunch and without talking, just started staring up at the ceiling to see how many people we could get looking up. Soon our whole table was staring at the ceiling, she looked over at me and smiled…mission accomplished.

**** Its the small stories, the tiny connections, the simple day-to-day experiences that you get to share with people that make the experience at ODS so wonderful. I can not explain it, but those there understand what makes ODS a drug for the soul.

Happy Trails, Inner Peace, & Harmony