Starting my morning with extra strong coffee w sweetened condensed milk, steel cut oats with brown sugar, walnuts, & ground flaxseed, and what will surely become my new best friend… The A.T. Guide.
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Sometimes I consider …
Sometimes I consider just selling everything I own before I hit the AT and, then when when done, moving to someplace like Tuba City or Needles Outpost or or maybe getting a job in any of the National Parks … or as a ridge runner.
Then I reconnect with some of the wonderful people here in Rochester who I so dearly care for, both family and friends. There are so many reasons to love this city but mostly, it’s the connections with some of the most best people ever.
I hope to wander the world and have adventure upon adventure but this place and the people here will always have my heart.
♥
A lot of friends have expressed interest in following a blog of my 6 month Appalachian Trail adventure and I’m really grateful for this!
As I work on putting it together, what kinds of information or features will you want to see in the blog?
I’m already thinking of:
1. text … a semi-regular written account of some aspect of my trail life/thoughts.
2. photos of vistas, other hikers, myself, trail food, and … ??
3. videos! I’ve already promised granddaughter Ev that I will shoot video of critters and plants. Are there videos you’d want to see?
4. link to my Amazon wish list! LOL
5. a link to an interactive map of the AT
What kinds of photos will you want to see? Pics of blisters, ticks, privvies, mud? LOL
My new tattoo!
All womyn who come through the gate at Michigan Womyn’s Music Fest are greeted with “welcome home” even if it’s their first time there.
Tattoo by Colleen Kaster at Doc Yager‘s in Rochester, NY.
Lying here trying to get sleep …
… thinking about my upcoming 6 month AT hike and trying to identify and face some odd underlying fear I can sense. Really that’s the only way to deal with fears, right?
And suddenly it hit me where this fear is coming from.
I dearly love my kids, grandchildren, and my friends here. And you see, when I was a child, my family moved a lot. In fact by the time I graduated high school, I had moved 18 times and each time I left behind my friends… and had to find new ones.
But that was then; I was a child and had no control over any part of my life. Now I’m an adult and able to maintain contact with people while I’m gone. They won’t forget me while I’m gone. They won’t stop loving me while I’m gone.
Wow! Serious wow.
♥
why is it …
… I will strap on a 28 lb pack and walk miles in the woods, but won’t walk 1/2 mile down the street and back to the store for milk?
Up way too late …
… waiting for ibuprofen to kick in and struggling with a name for my AT blog.
I’m really looking for a simple, easy to remember name that speaks to what I hope will be a spiritual journey for myself and a method of raising awareness about violence done to women world-wide.
I do not underestimate the tremendous privilege I have to be able to safely undertake such an arduous and expensive challenge. In most parts of the world, if a woman puts everything she needs on her back and walks 2000 miles, it’s to save the lives of herself and her children. Even making the trip would mean risking her life, especially solo.
Look what happened to Jyoti Singh, 23 yo medical student in India, as her and a male companion rode a city bus. I want people to know her name. I want people to know Jyoti Singh was raped and beaten and brutalized with a steel rod until her intestines were pulled out and then she was thrown from the moving bus to lay in the street bleeding. She died 13 days later.
I was raped at the age of 13 by a man twice my age in a backroad gravel pit; not with the brutality that Jyoti Singh underwent but it left scars all the same. Think: I was 13. I was a child.
This is the risk women face at the hands of violent men. We risk being beaten, we risk being raped … merely by virtue of being female.
OK ….. so this post has become more about what male violence can do to women rather than “what do I name my blog?”
But these are my thoughts as the pain in my back subsides (thank you medicine) and I can perhaps finally get to sleep.
There have been so many of us but please let us never forget her name … Jyoti Singh. Let her death not be for naught.
it just now occurred to me …
… that my 6 month commitment to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail is going to be longer than an embarrassingly large number of my “relationships”.
WHOAH!
😦