Celebrating 10-Years of Blogging!

Just a gal living the #vanlife working on this blog post

It took me a long time to start calling myself a writer. I thought that to use that honorific title, I needed to have some kind of claim to fame. I needed to have had a book published or be widely circulated in a well-known mag or literary journal or something. Turns out, that was a rubbish way of thinking. Thank goodness I figured out how to replace it with a more accurate view. 

Fun fact: This month marks 10-years of my being a regular contributor to the blogosphere via this WordPress (WP) site. My blogiversary, if you will. My first post was crafted on June 24, 2012. According to my WP stats, I have a grand total of 984 blog posts to date. That’s an average of 8 blog posts per month, if you dig that sorta break down. 

Starting this blog 10-years ago is what unexpectedly launched me into becoming a full fledged writer. Prior to that, I was what I might call a wanna be writer. I loved writing but rarely made time for it. The blogging platform changed all of that for me. It gave me the necessary umph I needed to start up a regular habit of writing. I don’t know, something about having an online audience – small as it was and still is, relative to other blogs out there – helped me to hold myself personally accountable for continuing what I started. 

#Vanlife

This post won’t appeal to everyone. But then, what post does? If you’re curious about #vanlife logistics though, this post is for you!

I’ll set the scene on the quick. In October 2021, my husband Mike and I sold our 550-square-foot house of 18-years. Then we spent a few months on retreat at Deer Park Monastery in southern, CA. And ever since we returned home to Montana in early April, we’ve been living the van life while on the search for land we can afford to buy, located within a one-hour radius of our hometown of Missoula, MT. 

We sold our house in order to liquidate our assets, so we’d be ready to rock and roll on a land purchase. After weighing our options, we decided not to take out a loan and instead are trying to work within our means and budget on hand. There are pros to trying to buy land sans bank loan, but it greatly reduces our reach as to what we can afford with the limited money we have on hand. 

We rolled the dice and bought a 1989 Chevy G20 conversion van off craigslist last August and thankfully, it’s taking good care of us. In 2000, we drove up to Anchorage AK after we got married in a similarly styled & aged Ford Econoline conversion van, and then toured around the states in it in 2001 for a few months, when we came back down to the lower 48. So in a way, this is us, now in our early 40’s, returning to our roots. 

Nowadays, at least around here, van life is booming. We see live-in style vans on the regular. A lot of folks have bigger, more outfitted, way more expensive rigs that what we have, still, we’re all one big van life family. We’re van livers on a low budget. And while it was a conscious choice to sell our house and move into a van, we’re van livers more out of necessity than by passionate enthusiasm for the nomadic lifestyle. We were active land searchers last year before we sold our house too. Properties were just moving too quickly for us to keep up. In order to compete with out-of-staters rolling in with cash in hand, we felt we had to get rid of the hitch in the giddyup, which for us meant selling our house so we too could have cash at the ready. 

Balance

Alongside my daily reading of poetry, a book by a death row inmate at San Quentin. Accompanying my propensity to smile, a willingness to hold space for difficult and painful things. Paired with my uplifting Twitter feed, filled with stunning photos of animals & landscapes and insights by wise teachers, headline worthy world news stories. Stay in touch with the beauty & goodness, also the sorrows & struggles, I remind myself often. 

Balance is what I aim for when it comes to most – if not all – things. A balance of work and play. A balance of to-do lists and unscheduled time. A balance of healthy food and junk food. A balance of thinking and feeling; of intellect and heart. A balance of town time and tree time. Of activity and rest. 

And wouldn’t you know it, every day is a little different when it comes to such things as balance. What might be a good balance one day might be a little off the next. Then there are the days when I’m not sure what the heck I need. But what I tend to know most days is this: This balance I’m referring to. This quality of well-being. This feeling of being able to meet the moment as it is and not how I want it to be, is of the utmost importance. It is no trivial or trite matter. It’s worth investing in; striving for; crafting my life around. 

I know this, too. My sense of balance will be different than yours. Your sense of balance will be different than mine. No one thing works the same way for everyone all the time. 

Just like how the rain can be a sight for sore eyes and dry fields or a deluge of trouble and torrment, really anything can be a help or a hindrance depending. 

Balance to me is about having boundaries and a moral compass, without becoming dogmatic or overly bound to any one way of doing things. Balance to me is about embracing my fullest self, while keeping close in mind that I will always have more skill-building to do. Balance to me is about learning when to jump in and when to lean out. 

It seems a worthy pursuit to form a relationship with what our own individual balance looks like, day-to-day, moment-to-moment. Without a working kinship with balance, it’s far too easy to fall into reactionary and habitual ways of engaging with life’s many and perpetual ups and downs. 

So this is me contemplating balance today. This is me currently listening to both the steady stream of traffic cruising by on the nearby highway, and the sound of birds singing amid the greening fields.

Things You Can’t Tell By Looking At Me

Yesterday, as part of Pride Week here in Missoula, I attended an educational session hosted by TransVisible Montana entitled: Allyship Through the Genderverse. As part of our session, we paired up with someone else in the room and shared our name, preferred pronoun, and one thing that others would not be able to tell by looking at us. We then came back together as a whole and introduced our partner to the group. One of the messages the trainers delivered centered around not making assumptions when it comes to the gender of others. The partner exercise was a clever way of helping to show by way of example that so much (hmm, maybe even most/all) of who we are, cannot be known simply by looking at us.

This poem-ish writing is inspired by this important remembering:

Things You Can't Tell By Looking At Me

I don’t drink alcohol
I’ve never smoked pot
I own & operate my own motorcycle
and some days I love riding
slightly more than I love
my husband

Imma a sucker for all things
clay & pottery

If there’s a baby in a 100-foot 
radius - even if I’m in a non-social
mood - I will gravitate towards it
with genuine enthusiasm, but
I’ve never wanted my own
biological children 

I have an invisible 
physical disability 
and live with chronic pain

Imma sucker for all things
tofu 

I am not good
at giving advice

I break for 
Little Free Libraries 

I am an only child

I am not good
at anything having
to do with numbers