Dreams are made of this...

Camp Zed got chaotic today. A phone call from a co-worker with a kid in bad shape called and so I went. June missed part of her morning at work watching Zo, then almost got locked out of the house because our back door sucks junk...All that and I got asked to go to Africa.

Wait...what?

That's right. There's a group climbing Mt. Kenya in February 2013, they are led by a few experienced mountaineers (several just summited Everest this past Spring) and dragging along 16-20 young people and support staff with them. It's a life changing endeavor dreamed up by a couple of big dreaming, life changing dudes, and my friend Joe just dragged me into the fray for a meeting next week with the organizer. Apparently my name has been firmly connected to the project, especially with my rapport with many of the potential young people involved, and my so-called "dubious leadership skills," and so Joe was given the charge of dragging this agent back onto the reservation, in FBI-speak, to contribute.

Africa.

I used to talk about this stuff like it was my next big thing, but living tends to get in the way of dreaming, and I never got to Africa. Never saw a sunrise from above the clouds, and never found myself dangling from a dream. I remember leaving a press box behind and dabbling in this world for a short time after I left U of M but I got tired of sleeping in sleeping bags on floors and wandered back to reality. It was okay to dabble in dreams but until you're living one already, it's tough for others to materialize. Now I'm doing what maybe, or at least what it seems, I was supposed to be doing all along...I'm good at it...I have an unbridled commitment and passion for it...and now the dream finds me. If you don't believe in synchronicity and the energy of getting back what you put in, well, you're a fool.

Africa.

And people wondered why all the anxiety, why the stress and all that fumbling through this most recent part of my life. This was why. These were the kind of stakes that I was playing for. I knew that I was sitting at the high roller table, despite other people's insistence that things were cool, they were not. They were tenuous. They were weighty with the fat of failure and opportunity. There were possibilities dangling like carrots, and I saw them. I knew that they were there and the thought of not being able to reach them was excruciating.

Africa. Unless something goes very, very wrong, I'm going to climb a mountain in Africa doing exactly what I want oh-so desperately to be doing with my life. I have a feeling that it's a lot easier to change a life with a mountain involved. Stay tuned, I'll be able to answer that question in approx. a year and a half.

The dreams are drifting through these days like Marin fog.

Africa.