February 9, 2017
I hope that my writing drought is over. The last several months
have found me unable to sit down and share in written words about our
adventures, as they have not been the kind of adventures that easily
lend themselves to enthusiastic narration. Lots of loss and death
amidst the normal progression of life has left me sapped, but I feel
a turning in my spirit after some time sitting in the Florida Dry
Prairie. Nature and silence, as well as the ever awe inspiring night
sky is restorative. I am following this post with one I wrote on
January 20
th when I felt stirred to share, but haven't
published it until now. Since then we have busied ourselves with our
volunteer positions at Kissimmee Prairie Preserve State Park, north
of Lake Okeechobee in south central Florida. It has been warmer and
drier than last winter. A great respite after the unseasonably cold
weather we endured while finishing up our stint at Amazon in
Kentucky, and Maryland for the holidays.
My spirit was healed by a hectic week with our almost two year old
granddaughter who visited at the end of January. Introducing her to
this amazing environment made us feel that we had a hand to lend in
the unfolding of her consciousness of the natural world. She saw
alligators, snakes, turkeys, deer, vultures, crows, cara-caras,
wading birds, butterflies, lightening bugs, horses, dogs, and met the
amazing staff and volunteers that give their care to the 54,000-acre
preserve we are living on. She was awestruck even at her young age by
the night sky and the “twinkle, twinkle little stars” arching
over our campsite every night.
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Let's go for a ride! |
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This lock won't keep a 2-year-old in. |
We are beginning to formulate our plans for the time after our
departure from here at the end of March. After a quick visit back to
Maryland to visit family and take care of business, we hope to
quickly head to the Southwest and have two months to wander to
favorite places and new ones. Then we will return East for some
summer workcamping. I am looking forward to returning to the nomadic
lifestyle for a short time. Our lifestyle has been far too planned
out and not spontaneous enough over the last two years! Enjoy some
photos of our time here and if you feel inclined to, please read the
introspective post that follows. Thanks everyone for your patience
with my hiatus from the blog.
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The road into camp |
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Our campsite |
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Our daily visitors |
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Prescribed burning to rejuvenate the prairie |
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Some of the few winter wildflowers |
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Mama with 8 babies |
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The dry prairie still has some very wet depression marshes. |
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Golden Orb Weaver - Florida's largest spider. Lying in wait for an inattentive bicyclist. |
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Repairing a hiker/ATV bridge |
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Good friends in the volunteer community |
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Heirloom orange from a pre-WWII cowboy camp. |
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We meet snakes on the road almost daily - Eastern Corn Snake |
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Very grumpy Water Moccasin |
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Blue Striped Garter Snake |
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Red Shouldered Hawk trying to make dinner of a Striped Crayfish Snake |
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Florida Diamondback Rattlesnake, not happy to see our car. |
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Warm sun on a cool afternoon |
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Crested Caracara |
January 20, 2017
Living in the Moment - The Beginning and the End of Life, and the
Unfolding In-Between
We sat quietly at lunch in my father-in-law's assisted living
dining room, and tried to give him the open spaces in the
conversation in order for him to share what popped into his mind. At
96 years-old with congestive heart failure and short term memory
issues, he is winding down a life filled with a passion for business
and for his family. Greg and I had been filling the time with tales
of our nomadic lifestyle when we paused, while Dad looked at the
single rose on the dining room table. He commented that roses were so
amazing because they start out so tightly wound up, but push from the
inside of the rose to unfurl into a fully blooming rose. I was a bit
surprised to hear such a thought from him. My mother-in-law had
always been the one more attuned to the details of nature. Greg and I
commented about the beauty of the pink rose on the table, paused, and
then resumed our stories.
Ten minutes later Dad again jumped into a conversational pause and
commented again on the awesomeness of the unfurling rose. He had
already forgotten his earlier comments. His mind easily reaches back
to commanding a troop carrier in World War II, but the current
moments slip away too quickly. The longer his life stretches, the
more he is living in the moment, and then the next, and then the
next.
Our little grand-daughter does the same. At not quite two years
old, everything is new. Living in the moment is natural, organic to
her developing mind and spirit. She is just starting to understand
the progression of the days, but too young to understand how long a
week is, or when she can anticipate seeing Pah-pooh and Gramma again.
She will come to visit us soon, and we are looking forward to the
refreshing that a young life bring to our spirits after the past year
with its ups and downs coordinating life on the road with the needs
of our families.
Writing for the blog slipped into the back seat during the past
year. Those of you who have followed us know that my first two years
of blogging I wrote frequently and excitedly about our adventures
roaming North America. We covered a lot of ground and it was fun to
share our discoveries. At the end of our two year “sabbatical” we
realized that we were hooked on our nomadic lifestyle. To continue we
needed to find a way to stretch our monetary resources and be
available to family in the East which included three elderly parents
and a soon-to-be grandbaby.
The last two years have yielded fewer posts as we adjusted to
workcamping. My creative spirit has not always adjusted well to our
new work lives, but that is a topic for another blogpost! Throughout
our changes I have struggled with the notion of living in the moment.
I have always been future oriented, planning, dreaming, envisioning,
looking around the next turn in the road. But, living in the moment
allows me to accept life's changes as they come, and the space for
peace to flow in. The last few months with deaths and changes and
more death to come, have felt heavy and cumbersome. Living in the
moment has been difficult.
I was reminded of the need for conscious, momentary living in
order to allow the unfurling of our day to day purpose during the
middle parts of our lives, by the momentary living of those at the
beginning and the end of their lives. Both times are so elemental,
basic. They are times for the first lessons and the last lessons, and
they cannot fully reveal themselves to us unless we live in the
moment. For a toddler it is normal, and perhaps it is as well as an
oldster, if we allow it for ourselves as we near the end. But, how do
we allow those lessons to unfurl in the time in-between?
Sitting at the dinette in the RV, in the quiet of the Prairie
Preserve I am struck by the randomness of my day. I started out with
the idea of a disciplined day to write. I knew that on Inauguration
Day I would want to take a news fast. I would live in the moment,
recording my thoughts, writing on the blog, working on my book.
Instead, I fell down the rabbit hole that is Facebook, and the
political news postings began to come in. One upsetting post after
another. Living in the moment wasn't working so well!
I share all this in order to get to where I am today. We started
our almost three months volunteering at Kissimmee Prairie Preserve
State Park in Florida on January 7
th. Before arriving here
we finished out our time at Amazon in Kentucky. It was a slog until
the end. I wanted to be gone in order to begin grieving my Dad and
evaluating the future. We went back to Maryland and had a lovely, but
hectic time with extended family during the holidays. I needed to
spend a lot of time with my 88-year-old mother trying to improve her
living situation. We babysat and hugged our amazing grand-daughter,
had some doctor's appointments, resupplied the rig, and took off down
Interstate 95, that dreary, crowded southern route accompanied by the
rest of the January snowbirds bound for Florida.
We both breathed deeply as we drove onto the 54,000 acre preserve.
Greg said it was good to be home. He jumped quickly into repair jobs
around the park. I began my two days a week working in the ranger
office. We are back in last year's campsite, the one at the very end
of the road with only trees and prairie on three sides of us. It was
hard to sleep at first. It is so quiet at night. We have been
watching the deer, turkeys, ravens and raccoon parade through our
site. The sun filters through the live oak trees and the breeze comes
and goes. The moon and stars work to try to outshine each other at
night. But, I am restless, and now that I am in a place that it is
conducive to living in the moment, I struggle. Without the
perspective of the beginning and the ending of life, how do we unfurl
and appreciate the unfolding in the middle? Can a true nomad be still
long enough to live in the moment and not yearn for new vistas and
fresh experiences?