BY THE NUMBERS
MY 2017 FAVORITES
THE HIGHLIGHT REEL
JANUARY
We rang in 2017 at Brandon's cabin with floating on ice chunks on Superior. Friends and cousins visited, with many trips up the North Shore to catch up and get cold together. I tried on new glasses.
FEBRUARY
In February I visited cousins, both in the cities and all the way down in Asheville, NC. Sarah and I loaded up her car and drove down for the grand tour of Laurel's adorable home in the south, and I set foot on the Appalachian Trail for the first time (and also promised myself it wouldn't be the last).
MARCH
In March, I started half-marathon training. The weekend runs were cold, but the scenery was worth it — and usually followed by lots of waffles. Kelly was 8 months pregnant with Hudson and we had her baby shower in Rochester.
APRIL
April was when winter finally started loosening its grip, and I realized just how much I loved being outside, how much I loved the sunlight. I'd been climbing more. I had lovely friends visit me in Duluth, and they brought some much-needed conversations with them. I went on my first long trail run and cried because I was so happy.
MAY
On the first day of May, Hudson was born — and his little life happily shattered and reassembled our family all in one day: Mom & Dad became Grandma & Grandpa, Kelly & Marty became Mom & Dad, and the rest of us became aunties and uncles to this little man. I can't wait to see his little soul grow and stretch and learn. The rest of the world bloomed that month too, and I went to my first Wisconsin Point bonfire of the summer. I climbed outside for the first time.
JUNE
We celebrated Linnea graduating from high school — the grand finale to us being "kids". Turns out, she likes sushi so we got some and ate it in a private park that we were afraid we'd get kicked out of. Summer got into full swing with Amy & Sarah driving up the North Shore for some trail running, camping, hiking, Trouble, and mountain beers. I ran Grandma's Half Marathon.
JULY
Started out July by busting up my knee a bit and had to take a break from running, but there were plenty of other things to distract me from that. The climbing crew took a trip up to Canada for some climbing and hobo meals and Molsons. Chelsea visited and we ate pizza on the lake. I ended July with a perfect canoe trip in the Boundary waters with Sarah and Amy and the Dads where we paddled swam and ate mac and cheese and battled mosquitos.
AUGUST
In August I rang in the big 2-5 with dear friends and Sir Ben's and homemade gyros and cheesecake. Kelly, Marty & Hudson visited Duluth on vacation, and Hudson really blossomed into his chub-phase. Our small group went camping in the Apostle Islands and we found area of the shore that was super shallow and beautiful. I went on my first 20 mile run and actually really enjoyed it.
SEPTEMBER
In September I finished my first marathon in my goal of less than 6 hours (which was a struggle... no thanks those the last 6 miles over Moose & Mystery mountains). When I got past the finish line and saw 5:55, I fought back happy shaky tears. Sarah also finished her 50 mile race and that night, and as we both tried to fall asleep in the tent, our brains were still telling our leg muscles to dodge roots and rocks and kept jolting us awake. It was so bizarre and wonderful and made me re-up my bucketlist item from "Run a marathon" to "Run a 50k". We also visited Kelly, Marty & Hudson again in Fargo for his baby dedication.
OCTOBER
October was a crazy busy, crazy, beautiful month. It started out with a trip out to Washington with Sarah, where we WWOOF'ed (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) at a dahlia farm, went backpacking in the North Cascades, and caught a couple of Isaac's hockey games in Canada. Honestly, it was a draining trip in a lot of ways but it made me realize how much I do love backpacking, even when literally everything goes not-according-to-plan. The rest of the month was spent outside squeezing every last bit of fun out of fall – both backpacking up the shore, and of course hiking through swamps at deer camp.
NOVEMBER
November was family-filled and fantastic. We all visited Fargo for Brent's band weekend and got to hang with Hudson too. In Duluth, I tried to keep getting outside even though the weather was getting cold – Meg joined me for a much-needed hike with good questions and future dreams and everything happy. A couple weeks later the fam all went home to Rochester to celebrate Thanksgiving – cousin time, lots of eating, christmas tree shopping, and decorating.
DECEMBER
December has been a month full of pulling back and slowing down – really enjoying Duluth, spending time with some photo & video side projects I'm interested in, reading, writing, reflecting on the past year and dreaming about the next. In a couple of days I'll be with the family again in Rochester to celebrate Christmas and I can hardly wait.
TOP 5 THINGS I'VE LEARNED
(in no particular order)
1 extraordinary things are just collections of a thousand ordinaries
i think about the things in my life that have been the most rewarding or brought me the most joy, and every one of those things were built up of smaller, much less significant efforts. training for a marathon consisted of a ton of really ordinary (and sometimes really inconvenient and awful) runs; but actually finishing the marathon felt so extraordinary. editing a video feels so painfully ordinary: watching and rewatching and tweaking the same 5 seconds over and over can really drive you creatively crazy. but when the story comes together and you get that feeling in your gut that it’s done — it’s so extraordinary. then there’s the day after day of reading scripture and praying and trying to see god in the everyday... it feels really dry and ordinary most days, and that gets hard for me spiritually. but to know god, to really know him — even the smallest glimpses of clarity i get — it’s the most singularly rewarding thing in my life. solnit says that “we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured”. let’s not lose sight of the extraordinary things that are happening in the ordinary all around us.
2 learn how to listen to your body
last year (meaning 2016) i tried to train for a half marathon. it sucked. i had done one before so i thought “oh i know how this goes” and trained way too much too soon and denied the warning aches and pains that led to a knee injury. in comparison to training for a marathon this year, the difference was night and day simply because i learned to listen to my body. I learned the difference between pushing it to its edge, and pushing it over its edge. I learned that half of making progress is resting and recharging. And I think that it’s easy to think that there’s a special formula to being “in shape”, but really just listen to your body, move more if you eat more, and enjoy it all.
3 let the immeasurable be immeasurable.
as a person, i love to know things. i love to understand how things work, how they interact and fit into the way i understand the world. so when life throws me big messy complicated questions with no black and white answer, it throws me into a mental feedback loop that ends in me feeling tired. There are those bad things that happen and i can’t understand why, when people are hurting and i don’t have a way to fix it, when two opposing views both seem right and i can’t reconcile them... i’ve come to accept that some things are more beautiful when we embrace their complexities, their dualities, their un-measurables. This doesn’t mean that there is no answer, it just means that you’re finite and can only understand your finite slice of the universe. i find rilke’s words comforting in this: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
4 the desperate importance of a good question
while dealing with and working through the unknowns or “immeasurables” in life, i’ve learned the importance and power of a good question. the questions we ask of others and of ourselves can either dig deeper and form connections, or they can harden exteriors and entrench us in the things we consider “certainties”. especially in the political and social climate recently, i realized i need to be conscious of the questions i’m asking people and the attitude with which i ask them. krista tippett refers to the power of questions: “Questions elicit answers in their likeness. Answers mirror the questions they rise, or fall, to meet. So while a simple question can be precisely what’s needed to drive to the heart of the matter, it’s hard to meet a simplistic question with anything but a simplistic answer. It’s hard to transcend a combative question. But it’s hard to resist a generous question. We all have it in us to formulate questions that invite honesty, dignity, and revelation. There is something redemptive and life-giving about asking a better question.” i can think back to a few extraordinarily needed conversations from this past year that felt less like exchanging answers, and more like discovering the answers together... and all of the best conversations ended with even more questions than we started. i want more of those in 2018.
5 your life is rich in love, and that love doesn’t have to be romantic
i realize that one might come across as “i was really bummed about being single but now i’m at cool with it” but it was a little more backwards than that. i’ve been content with and generally really enjoy being single, but seeing friends get married and having friends try to set me up with people made me start wondering “am i like... lacking something by being single? i don’t feel like i am... but maybe i’m wrong?” and over the past year i’ve learned to put words to the way i’ve always felt: that there are so many sources of love in my life, and that i am not lacking in any way. krista tippett writes about it so well: “Strangest of all, on this planet, is the way we continue to idealize romantic love and crave it for completion… This is the opposite of a healing story — it’s a story that perceives scarcity in the midst of abundance. I have love in my life, many forms of loving. As I settled into singleness, I grew saner, kinder, more generous, more loving in untheatrical everyday ways. I can’t name the day when I suddenly realized that the lack of love in my life was not a reality but a poverty of imagination and a carelessly narrow use of an essential word.” i’m learning to always broaden my perception of love, because it’s always more vast than i think it is, and romantic love is an incomplete piece of that vastness.