Vinyasa is a style of yoga that transitions between two sustained things evenly, as one flowing movement. Like many sanskrit words, there are other meanings, but what I like about vinyasa is the impermanence of each position (if you’ve had your limbs shaking in class, you know I don’t just mean this metaphorically). There is also a particular mindfulness to cling to nothing, push away nothing. Let your mind be teflon.
That is this blog. These short moments will be the stories that make up the continuous flow of growth. Or, as Bukowski puts it, the lifedance: the interaction between experience, mind, and soul. However evenly (or unevenly) the movements may be, this blog is the setting of intent to document the stories that accompany these transitions.
Don’t be fooled: this blog is not about yoga.
Nor is this blog about weighty daydreams about life. The most appropriate parallel for living wrapped up neatly in verbose imagery is worth nothing to me. It’s fancy and expensive; cuisine that you can’t cook over a fire.
What interests me is the marrow of the thing. All the beautiful thinking in a lifetime is worth nothing if there is no muscle, no meat to it.
4am first pitch Durrance [Devils Tower, WY]
An alpine start is generally waking up in the darkness and hauling your freezing cold ass up a mountain around midnight. Why? To be able to both summit and descend in daylight, to avoid falling rocks (loosened when peak heat hits the slopes in the middle of the day), to avoid getting struck by lightning, etc. The alpine start maximizes the level of adventure while minimizing the threat of death.
Summit
Adventure isn’t a gradient of experiences made more worthy, or more extreme, by how many times you roll the dice. It’s neither blind risk nor the volume of the applause afterward that qualifies it. In my book, adventure is about ultimate exploration and calculated limit-pushing. If you want to complete mega routes, go ultra far, really dig up some life, then get up before dawn and switch on that headlamp.
Devils Tower Summit Log
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