A River Named Jim

Justin and I were moving slowly south, reluctant to relinquish the quiet of our time in the Arctic. Between the late summer snowstorm spent holed up in our truck in the Brooks Range and several days spent wandering along the Middle Fork of the Koyukuk river laughing over driftwood campfires, we glimpsed only a small handful of people from a distance as they raced one direction or the other along the Dalton Highway.

We relished the solitude. We relished the simplicity of concerning ourselves solely with the basics of life: warmth and weather and nourishment. We fell into the rhythm of the place, listening to the chalky river push around the rocks lining its bottom and watching the shadows move across Sukakpak Mountain’s massive marble peak as the days passed.

The last of August’s summer warmth fled the moment September arrived and we welcomed the signs of fall that greeted us everywhere. The alders and aspens and birches tucked in among the spruce were suddenly all golds and yellows. The blueberry and lingonberry turned deep garnet, the mountainsides and valleys rolling seas of fiery reds. Tessie’s fur thickened in the chill, but even so, we pulled out her down jacket so she could sleep alongside the fire in the sort of comfort to which she’d grown accustomed…

Simplify! Simplify!

One of my very favorite (possibly true, possibly not) literary anecdotes of all time is when Henry David Thoreau exclaims, “Simplify! Simplify!” in Walden, and his friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson offers the feedback, “One simplify would have sufficed.”

Doh.

I think of this story often. It represents the bulk of what holds me back in life (and I’d venture to guess I’m not alone here):

I overcomplicate a whole lot of stuff that doesn’t need to be complicated.

I go on and on with two “simplifys” when one would have sufficed….

Permission Granted

I was running on the treadmill at the gym last Tuesday (not nearly as good for me as running on a trail, but sometimes done is better than perfect, you know?) and, as sometimes happens on the treadmill, I was really, really, really bored.

The music wasn’t helping. The weird tv screen six inches from my face that kept suddenly turning itself on (reminding me that at some point in the last year I’ve grown to need reading glasses) wasn’t helping. Making up hill workouts and speed workouts that would let me fiddle with the controls every tenth of a mile…you guessed it- not working…

Creep

It creeps in sometimes.

The urge to revert back to old truths, old behaviors, old patterns that I know don’t work.

To buy into the “I’m so busy” mentality, running around like a chicken without a head and a sense of martyrdom wrapped around me like a a comforting straightjacket, justifying all the reasons I’m not doing what I said I’d do, why I’m not enjoying my days, my work, my life.

The urge to back away from the life I really want because it’s hard, because I’m scared, because I’m afraid I’m not enough or that I’ll learn something about myself that will unravel all the threads that hold me together…

The Slow Grow

I can be impatient.

Like, seriously impatient.

Once I decide I want to learn something or accomplish something or build something or renovate something (are you getting the idea yet?), I impatiently want to dive in headfirst and DO IT ALL RIGHT NOW!!!

Which looks like motivation for about five minutes and then quickly turns to overwhelm (cue the “ohmygod there is soooooooooooo much to do here” voice of panic)….

Multi-Passionate: Gift or Excuse?

We were sitting on the bus driving back to school after a swim meet, talking about our futures in the way only 16-year-olds can and I commented that I wanted to be a teacher. Or maybe write novels. Or work in a museum. Or maybe be an archeologist.

My friend, Steve, just looked at me long and hard in the special way that particularly driven young men seem to excel at and finally said, “You do know that you are going to have to pick ONE, right? You can’t do everything, Cindy.”

“Sure, I guess,” I hedged uncomfortably…

A Couch and A Fork

I was eighteen years old and sleeping on the couch of the dingy apartment I shared with Naomi, John, and Brad.

I didn’t have a bedroom of my own, so my nights were often disrupted by the comings and going of my roommates. Naomi’s late hours arriving home from her job at The Wild Zebra “Gentlemen’s Club” that our apartment shared a parking lot with. John’s drunken rages at Naomi, fueled by convenience store malt liquor, jealousy, and impotence. Good nights meant broken dishes and bad ones meant broken bones and another trip to a new emergency room with a sobbing Naomi defending his latest outburst. Brad was a quieter presence, eyes sleepy from whatever he’d smoked and occasionally even interested in a book I was reading. He’s a background player in my memories of that time, shadowy and indistinct…

Win The Morning

I have a weird fascination with morning routines. I’m obsessively interested in how everyone and anyone spends their waking hours and what works for them. It has always amazed me how varied routines are and how utterly different the things that people need to begin their day well really are. (I’m also obsessed with people’s work or studio spaces as well as their creative processes…I can’t resist any reference to them!)

There is a lot of advice out there about productivity and morning routines and I think just about everyone is now familiar with Tim Ferris’s famous “win the morning, win the day” quote.

While I suppose I’d like to “win” the day as much as the next person, I find myself less interested in the purely “productive” aspects of people’s routines and more interested in how their routines impact things like how they feel about their days, their work, their creativity…

Lifestyle, Road Trip, TravelCindy GiovagnoliFebruary 13, 2019mornings, morning routines, coffee Comments

The Next Best Step

I think I’ve mentioned that part of why Justin and I are in Seattle for the year is to help my Dad do some big renovations on his home here. After doing some quick cosmetic updates on the bedrooms, our first big project is a bathroom gut job. And I mean gut job- we spent nearly 10 hours bashing out drywall and tile and took this baby right down to the studs. It was a blast…

We Drove North

We drove north, looking for the quiet places in between.

We drove north, sometimes turned back by wildfire, or rockslide, or the suggestion from a roadside stranger of something not to be missed.

We drove north, unfurling that space within us that sometimes gets cramped, sometimes grows small under the pressures of paychecks and laundry and getting the dishes done….

Editorial, Lifestyle, Outdoor Adventure, Road Trip, TravelCindy GiovagnoliJanuary 30, 2019road trip, British Columbia, Yukon, Alaska, national parks, wilderness, campingComment

How To Be Like A Stalagmite

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last two weeks painting walls and ceilings and trim as we’ve begun the renovations at my Dad’s house and have been carving out a bit of quiet space to sleep and work amidst the piles of tools and materials and soon-to-be-torn-down walls….

Lifestyle, CoachingCindy GiovagnoliJanuary 23, 2019incremental action, goals, taking action, small steps, life coachComment

Love & Loss

We lost our Tessie girl on Sunday and we are just heartbroken.

She was about 13 years old (it’s hard to tell for sure with a rescue of unknown origin) and has been slowing significantly over the last year (I mean even slower than she was…she was never what you might call “energetic”), but we thought we had more time than we did and this still feels quite sudden. We are still reeling, honestly…

Lifestyle, Outdoor Adventure, Road Trip, TravelCindy GiovagnoliJanuary 16, 2019 Comment

Landing

Have you ever come back from traveling somewhere and thought, “Was I really just in Bermuda/Nepal/ California/wherever or was it all just a glorious dream?”

It’s a feeling that has become so familiar to us over these last years of travel. Each time we settle into a new place, the last one feels like perhaps it was all just a lovely dream…

Editorial, Lifestyle, Outdoor Adventure, Road Trip, TravelCindy GiovagnoliJanuary 9, 2019travel, travel nursing, road trip, home, finding homeComment

Done + The Shitty First Draft

I’m writing this from a cheap hotel room in Fort Nelson, British Columbia. It’s -9 degrees fahrenheit outside, so we’ve been crossing our fingers and hoping for pet-friendly hotels open in mid-winter as we’ve criss-crossed rural Alaska, then the Yukon, and now British Columbia as we make our way south to Seattle, praying that we don’t end up huddled under sleeping bags in the back of the truck (just because you can doesn’t always mean you should)…

Ten Years Ago

It’s been ten years since we celebrated a wedding that wasn’t exactly a fairy-tale (but a great story…). Since we stood in that dark garden and made promises about a future we could only imagine, a future we knew nothing about. Made promises about a life we were only beginning to build….

Cindy GiovagnoliNovember 28, 2018 Comments

Breadth & Depth

We are closing in on the end of another year and I have found myself thinking more and more about what’s next for us, where we go from here (both figuratively and literally…our time in Alaska ends December 29th!).

We’ve been talking a lot about home lately.

Again. (When you move every three months, this is a topic that comes up often.)

We’ve been asking ourselves if we want to keep traveling as we have been or if we want to begin the process of really figuring out what we want next in our lives. Where we want next in our lives…

Byron Glacier: A Photo Essay

We walked in sub-freezing temperatures across a rocky and snow covered landscape to reach the base of a massive wall of ice. We walked inside that wall and stood in awe of its power, touched the prehistoric stones caught in the ice, looked warily at the cracks in the turquoise ice creating a spiderweb over our heads….

Editorial, Lifestyle, Outdoor Adventure, Road Trip, TravelCindy GiovagnoliNovember 14, 2018Glacier, Byron Glacier, Anchorage, Girdwood, Alaska, snow, winter, hiking, Church State Park, AlyeskaComment

Summer Lore

So often, when we remember the magical moments of our childhoods, those memories are doused in golden summer light. Long days and sunburned noses and the smell of cut grass and hot asphalt and maybe the feel of popsicle melting down our hands. We remember heat shimmering off of cracked sidewalks and drinking tepid water from garden hoses and hair that felt crunchy with salt water.

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