"Don't die with your music still in you." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

I thought when I started this blog that I would be dealing with issues we face as we see life moving past us and not feeling fulfilled, but I now see that I will be filling my calling as a wilderness guide, in teaching wilderness skills and teaching others how to go about finding adventure in your own lives.

I have to face the fact that I am a wilderness guide. I keep trying to do other things, and I do them well - I've been a cabinet maker, and did that for years and was very successful. I grew up on a farm and cattle ranch, and I do that well. I have built houses, and I was good at it. I worked for a while on a huge dairy, and learned to trim hooves, and artificially inseminate dairy cows, and go very good at both. I became a licensed substance abuse counselor, and worked with therapists in treatment centers and wilderness programs and saw my clients do a lot of healing. However, it seems that I always circle back to being a wilderness guide. Even in my present work as a substance abuse counselor with a residential program for troubled youth, though I was hired to work as a therapist, the need I saw was for someone to work with the young people who were struggling in school and in the program, and take them out into the hills and let them experience the wonder and healing of the wilderness. Fortunately, when I proposed this change to the administration at my work, they agreed to let me design the work as I saw fit.

I now spend four days a week taking groups of either young men or young women out into the hills for nature hikes and cook outs, and teach them wilderness skills, and hold therapeutic group discussions under the shade of the trees out on the hillsides. One day a week I spend indoors guiding substance abuse therapy discussions. I also do one camp out a month to take the students to see some of my favorite wilderness sites, either out in the San Rafael desert or in the high mountains surrounding where I live. A couple of times a month I take groups out to do sweat lodges or to teach them to catch crawdads - (crawfish/crayfish) by hand and how to cook them up and eat them.

This is not about you watching me have adventures. This is about teaching and inspiring you to move forward in your own adventures and finding your own calling, and feeling that you are actually not just surviving, but in reality expressing the music within you.

I will be teaching and demonstrating fire starting, and crawdad catching and wild food foraging, and dead fall traps and hunting, and camping and cooking in the wilderness setting. I will take you on excursions to ancient Indian tombs and ruins, and demonstrate how that can be done respectfully. I will share things I have learned from other wilderness guides like listening and conversing with the plants around you in the wilderness. (I know, that sounded kind of crazy to me at first too)

I will teach about the high desert, and the alpine mountains and forests and the tropical jungle.
The goal here is to inspire you to self fulfillment. Hang on, it could be quite a ride.