kentonandrebecca.com

And it snowed, and it blowed . . .

‘S’ decided she would like to do the Ice and Fire challenge, so it was into the water again. It was a fairly warm day, and we were both interested to discover that once we were out of the water, we were fairly warm. After we came out of the water, we walked back to an area of trees and ‘S’ started a fire for us with her flint and steel.

The icy dip came after one of the most memorable Metamorphosis adventures yet. ‘S’ and I had gone up to camp and done a ‘fire race’, where we both attempted to start a fire as quickly as possible. Since she’s pretty adept at fire-making, we imposed some limits, banning birchbark. These ‘woodland fires’ can be the most challenging to start, mainly due to the difficulty of finding decent tinder material, which must be very fine and wispy. This was matchless, of course.

Sitting around the fire once the ‘race’ was over, I brought out a plastic bag filled with the ‘camp biscuit’ recipe I’m trying to perfect. Instead of butter or oil, it uses ground Chia seed, which forms an oil-like gel with a bit of added water. All would have gone wonderfully if I hadn’t forgotten the tin pot. Hungry enough that we had to make biscuits, we coal-burnt a bowl in an old piece of what was probably ash wood, and using a heated rock to melt snow, began to harvest water. We couldn’t help but laugh hysterically as our ‘water’, which was black from the coal-burnt wood, was poured into our biscuit mix. Nevertheless, we soon had a sticky dough, which we wrapped around sticks. Not too much later, we were eating nicely browned biscuits. I thought they were fabulous, and after I hypnotized her and planted enough suggestions, ‘S’ thought it was ‘passable’ too. Oh well =)

How To Become an Adventurer

Becoming an adventurer doesn’t mean that you have to go climb Mount Everest (everyone’s done that) or explore the Sahara. The most unexplored territory in the world is Your Life. Becoming an adventurer means making a commitment to explore your life each and every day.  All it really takes is a shift in focus — a movement toward breaking out of our usual ruts and grasping the adventure in every moment.  But if you like a more outlined approach, here’s how to become an adventurer in Nine Easy Steps.

1. Make an Adventuring Pack – This is both a functional tool and a powerful symbol of your commitment to adventuring. If your adventures will take you into the wilderness, you’ll be using the pack extensively. If you are more prone to other types of adventuring, the pack may spend most of its time in a closet, only coming out when you need to remind yourself of your inner adventurer’s nature.

First, find a very sweet-looking pack. It needs to stir your imagination, and still be functional if you’re going to be using it in the wilderness. Mine is small and light, and can be easily removed if I have to quickly climb up a tree or run away from a wild dog. But it’s still roomy enough that I can keep some basic gear in there that would make a long-term wilderness exploration pretty plush.

Second, equip your pack. The contents will be unique for each person, but here’s what I keep in mine.

* Gear Notes Below
Third, USE your pack. Either take it with you on wilderness adventures, or look at it often to remind yourself that in real life, you’re an adventurer.

2. Choose Your Adventuring Grounds – This may be forests or swamps where humans seldom tread, or it may be your local coffee house. Choose areas where you are likely to encounter situations that will excite and challenge you. If you are a people-person, try festivals, social events, or public gatherings. If you are very urban-oriented, consider urban exploration. If you are excited by the inner world, adventure in your mind through meditation or contemplation.

3. Add to Your Skill Sets – The more skills you have at your disposal, the more you’ll be able to meet the challenges that adventuring brings. If you are doing the coffee-house type adventure, develop your ability to guide conversation into interesting places or put people at ease so that they’re more likely to share ideas or personal stories with you. If you’re drawn to wilderness adventure, skills such as wilderness survival, swimming, and lost-proofing are essential. Learning to climb can be of benefit in both the wilderness and in urban settings. Some ability to wild-run or practice Parkour is handy. Even skills such as gourmet cooking can open doors to adventure. Indeed, almost any skill will create opportunities if you find a way to use it creatively. Make a list, and try to notice any obvious gaps. Then see if you can fill them with skills relevant to your adventuring life.

4. Increase Your Fitness Level – If your adventuring has a physical aspect to it, then there is a direct relationship between how fit you are and how much of the world will be open to your explorations. The better you can climb, crawl, leap, or swim, the more you’ll be able to get over that cliff, make it out to that island, or slide your way through that cave.

5. Gain Knowledge – Knowledge opens doors, and is great for making you sound worldly in conversation. With the internet, you have more knowledge at your fingertips than any human has ever had in all of history. There is SO MUCH to learn about. I make it a personal quest to learn more about things that I thought I knew about. I do this especially with food. I’ve discovered that most of the food that I thought was really good is actually pretty mediocre. There exist chocolates which will make your legs go weak. Tuna that is so delectable that you can eat it straight from the can. Butter that can’t be fully enjoyed unless you eat it spread upon nothing.

It’s easy to get locked into a world of knowledge that doesn’t reach far beyond the trappings of our everyday life. Once in a while, sit down at Google and type in something random.

6. Explore Your Fears — Your biggest obstacle to adventuring is fear. Most of us harbor a whole litany of fears, nestled into our hearts. We may fear other people, our emotions, the dark, heights, water, relationships, or what we’ll find if we ever stop for a moment and examine our lives.

Fears close the doors that lead to experience and adventure. They block off entire sections of our life so that we shy away from experiences even slightly resembling the objects of our fear. Identify your fears, and then explore them. Feel what happens when you encounter them – the tension in your body and your mind. If you look at the sensations plainly, you’ll often discover that the greatest power of fear is in our resistance. If we can just experience the sensations our fears produce, it’s not that bad. It’s when we tense against them that we really get tangled up.

7. Get Some Help – There are plenty of people and organizations that will help you explore new means of adventuring. Check out your local spelunking club, take horse-back riding lessons, get your motorcycle license, see if there is a public climbing wall you can join. Your local community probably has many more resources than you’re aware of.

8. Be a Tourist – Cultivate a tourist mentality. You may think you’re familiar with your local area, but you’re probably not. What would a tourist do if they were exploring your community? What is the regional food like? How about the art scene? What is your town like at night? What flora and fauna populate your wildlands? Who are the strangest characters in your community? What’s the history of the area in which you live?

The tourist mentality is magical. With it, you can find adventure everywhere. You can take one square foot of your own yard and be amazed at what is crawling between the blades of grass. Realize that ‘familiarity’ is really a synonym for ‘complacency’.

9. Let Passion Be Your Guide – This is the most important part. Have the courage to ask yourself what you’re passionate about. What stirs your blood, excites your sense of wonder, or fires your urge to explore? This is personal for each person, and you should never let yourself be spoon-fed a list of ‘accepted passions’ sanctioned by our culture. Then we’d just be watching TV all the time.

Get inspired by those who are passionate about what they do – whether it’s cooking, photography, sky-diving, meditation, gaming, or people-watching. Then commit yourself to experiencing what you’re passionate about. Make it a priority.

Adventuring is a lifestyle. It’s a commitment to passion, and living each day so that if your life was a novel, it would be fascinating to read. Each day you don’t challenge yourself, you grow a day older.

* Gear Notes: Magnesium firestarter and tinder/charcloth are used instead of matches to ensure a fire despite water immersion. Could probably accomplish this with a plastic bag around some matches, but that wouldn’t be nearly as much fun. Two knives are carried because the Swiss Army knife has multiple tools attached (never know when you’ll have to open a bottle of wine!), and the fixed blade is carbon steel – allowing it to serve as a backup firemaker if the mag starter is lost. In my usual terrain, fresh spring water is not difficult to find, but if I was in other areas I’d include either a water filter, iodine tablets, or a container for boiling water.

One of our favorite winter games is to do Winter Tracking Adventures. After a virgin snow, one person goes out ahead of the others, perhaps with a 20 minute lead. The ‘quarry’ tries to leave a confusing trail, using tactics such as backtracking, balancing across logs, burrowing under the snow, or leaping down hills. At the end of the 20 minutes they hide (preferably in a place where they can watch the trackers wander about on the hunt) and wait for the trackers to come. If the quarry can mislead the trackers for a stated amount of time, the quarry wins.

Last week Rebecca helped me dream up a more advanced version of this game, which I then prepared for ‘S’, one of my Metamorphosis clients. In this scenario, ‘S’ was in charge of tracking a child that was lost in the woods. I went out early in the morning to set the tracking-trail, and since ‘S’ is an excellent tracker, I made things challenging. Very challenging. The track was laid over extremely rough terrain, and I used just about every trick in the book to throw her off the trail. Wherever I left a near-impossible trick that ended in a dead-end, I’d leave a little joke in the snow . . .

‘S’ had about six hours before nightfall, which was our window for finding the lost child. In the end, she was successful, and we came back home just as darkness fell. The more I think about her adventure, the more impressed I get. I remember just last autumn how quickly she tired in the woods. During this adventure, however, she plowed through snow that was often thigh-deep for six hours, going up and down hillsides, climbing up steep ravines, and picking through creek bottoms (where stones and logs lie buried beneath the snow). During the entire trek, she had to be constantly aware, watching my track patterns to see if I had backtracked, and trying to unravel the track-puzzles when the trail seemed to simply disappear.

I don’t think I know of many adults 40+ who could have hacked it. It’s a real challenge to maintain enough mental clarity to follow those puzzles during a six-hour intense plow through the deep woods (keep in mind that this is a longer intense sustained energy level than many people experience when running a marathon). Because she wanted to leave the quarry’s tracks unmarred, she usually chose to have us walk through virgin snow, which made things even tougher. By the end, my old Turkey-Chasing knee injury was giving me a tough time, so she broke trail during the trek home to give my knee a rest.

This was the longest, most exciting tracking adventure I’ve ever had with someone. We got home for some hot tea and told Rebecca and Mirabelle all about it. Yipeee!

If you’d like to play the Tracking Game yourself, you can find more detailed directions, along with some ‘track tricks’, on this post — Tracking Game.

It all began with a very simple question: Cloth diapers or disposable? During Rebecca’s pregnancy, we tried to fill the exciting but unarguably long waiting period with lots of research about all things baby. The cloth/disposable debate was one that we could never quite come to a conclusion on. We weighed the various environmental impacts, read about parents’ experiences with both options, and peppered our midwife with questions.

Then one day I suddenly had a strange thought. “Hey Rebecca. Did it ever strike you as weird, or slightly barbaric even, that we make our babies sit in their own waste? I mean, what did people do before Pampers?”

It was one of those moments when time sort of freezes, and you realize that The Way Things Are Done may not be the best way to do things. So we sat down at the computer, Googled ‘Diaperless babies’, and LO AND BEHOLD! It turns out that most of the people in the world don’t use diapers. It’s a distinctly Western concept that has a lot to do with parents’ perceived convenience (though we were later to find that EC is much more convenient than messing around with goopy, poopy diapers).

While going diaperless is normal in much of the world, here in the United States we have adopted a fancy name for it: Elimination Communication. Called ‘EC’ for short, this name is truly apt because the heart of going diaperless is not, as you might first be tempted to guess, about early potty-training, but rather all about developing a higher level of communication with your infant. Just like you learn to know when baby is tired or when baby is hungry, you learn to know when baby needs to go.

The more we explored EC, the more excited we grew. We also became suspicious of ‘Big Diapers’, especially when we were at a friend’s house (they were expecting, too) and happened to glance at a book on their coffee table that was written by a national pediatric association. Curious, we flipped open to the diaper section. Here was a purported scientific medical organization, and there was not even a MENTION of Elimination Communication in their book. They broke down the advantages and disadvantages of disposables and cloth diapers, and made a good case for disposables being the way to go. Fine and well, except that on the front of the book, in bold color, was a huge banner that said ”Huggies’. Could it be, we wondered, that Big Diapers dropped a little cash here and there to make sure most parents never even hear about going diaperless?

We began our journey with a book — The Diaper-Free Baby, by Christine Gross-Loh. This served as a great guide as we began to entertain the possibility that we really could go diaper-free. Today, we go through perhaps three or four diapers a day, and those are mostly used at night or during hikes to catch pee. We can’t remember the last time that Mirabelle pooped in a diaper.

If you’d like to try EC for yourself, here’s our quick-and-clean guide to how we’ve been doing things.

• For the first two months, we simply paid attention to when Mirabelle went to the bathroom.  She wore diapers nearly all of the time (a mix of disposables and cloth), except for occasional periods of ‘air time’ where we kept her clothes-free on a folded cloth diaper.  Whenever she went, we paid attention to what she was doing and the signs she was giving just before her potty. While she was going, we made ‘psss, psss’ sounds as a cue. That’s all we did, besides trying, once in a while, to see if we could get her diaper off and catch the potty before it happened. We didn’t do this with any regularity — just when the thought struck us.
• At two months old, she was holding her head up on her own and didn’t mind being held in the potty position over her little toilet. We concentrated on catching poops. By now, we knew her cues, and when she started to give her poopy cues, we’d take off her diaper, hold her over her toilet (or just a plastic container), and make our ‘psss psss’ sounds. She seemed to recognize the connection, and would start grunting and pushing. We had the definite feeling that she was trying when we cued her, and it was remarkably easy. Almost every time we’d read her cues, she’d respond to ours, and we’d get a poop in the bucket. From the time we got serious about it, we went six days without a poopy diaper. Now it’s been much longer.
• In short, we just watched her carefully, used our ‘psss psss’ cues, and then one day we ‘officially’ started, and the watching and cuing paid off. Now she spends about half the day in diapers and half the day without. When she has diapers on, we’re watching her just as carefully (though by now we have to try not to notice, since her cues are quite recognizable most of the time), and we simply pull the diaper off and hold her over her toilet when she has to go. It’s that easy.
• Of course, there are times when we still rely on diapers, especially where Mirabelle’s ‘comfort’ is concerned. For instance, we still leave Mirabelle in diapers at night as she has a difficult time with transitioning from being deeply asleep to being woken for an EC– we’ve chosen to trade a bit of a wet diaper in exchange for all of us getting some much needed rest. We’ll also use diapers for a car trip, and we often use them when we have guests over or when we are visiting friends and family.  That’s part of the beauty of EC–you can be as flexible as you like about how and when you practice, yet every time you do you are building a rapport.

The most amazing thing about EC is that it fosters more connection and communication between you and your baby. They are delighted when you ‘catch’ a pee or a poo, and it’s nice to know that your baby doesn’t have to get poop all over their skin whenever they need to go. As parents, there’s nothing that says you have to do EC full time. Whenever you’re around your baby, just tune in to their actions, and if you think they need to go, hold them with their back to your belly and your hands under their thighs– a sort of assisted squat– over a container. It’s a pretty cool feeling when you catch your first pee or poo. From then on, it’s bare bottoms all the way!

It happened rather insidiously. Our September 2010 issue of Bon Apetit arrived with the usual excitement and the small but heart-felt bit of drool as we gazed on the cover’s juicy cheeseburger with watercress sprigs and red tomato slices. We weren’t even aware at the time, as we paged through recipes for Watermelon Granita with Gingered Strawberries and Bacon and Cashew Caramel Corn, that one recipe would come back to our minds again and again . . .

“Did you see this one, Kenton?” I asked as I flipped through the culinary masterpieces. “It’s called ‘Crack Pie’.”

“Yeah.” His casual reply led me to think  he had already read through the recipe, twice.

“What a weird name. Why do you think they call it ‘Crack Pie’?” I was trying to determine if it was worth reading through the string of instructions for it.  After all, the Total Time said 15 hours (okay, so that included the cooling and chilling time, but still . . .)

“The description said that anyone who’s taken a bite of the dessert immediately knows why it’s called ‘Crack Pie’, it’s supposed to be that good.”

Sure enough, as I read on, the tempting words stuck with me: “Once you start eating this rich, salty-sweet pie with its oat cookie crust, you won’t be able to stop.”

But a perusal of the ingredients left me in doubt.  How could butter, brown sugar, oats, eggs, and nonfat dry milk powder really yield something addictive?  After all, where was the chocolate?

Time passed and the September issue was replaced with the October issue, and then the November issue, and on and on. So it was a bit surprising that, when we were recently asked to make a dessert for an upcoming gathering, we turned to each other and both said, simultaneously, “Crack Pie”.

Daunted by the recipe (15 hours, remember), we decided we should do a practice test. (Okay, so maybe we were hoping for a little extra of the dessert just for ourselves . . .)

Kenton was the baker for this one, as Mirabelle and I read from the recipe:  . . . Bake until light golden on top . . . Using hands, crumble oat cookie into large bowl . . .whisk sugars . . . add melted butter . . . filling may begin to bubble . . . It was rather torturous to wait until the next morning to take our first bite. Our forks cracked through the soft shell on top into the ooey-gooey-oh-so-chewy filling and the shortbread crust. We set the morsels into our mouths and . . .

Buttery. Golden crispiness. Sweet. Very sweet . . . too sweet?

The result of this recipe was like a cross between an oatmeal cookie, shortbread, and a pecan pie without the pecans. While it was decadent, it was almost too decadent. The rush from the sugar was like pure adrenaline (perhaps the real reason behind the name?). We started discussing tweaks– less sugar, take out two egg yolks, cook at a lower temperature– but by the end of our first piece we weren’t sure . . . Well, we were sure it was good, but was it too much? Would this be something we could consciously offer to friends without issuing  a warning first? CAUTION: CRACK PIE IS DANGEROUS TO YOUR SYSTEM. CONSUMING LARGE QUANTITIES MAY RESULT IN ERRATICALLY WILD  BEHAVIOR AND/OR SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION.

In the end, the pie took care of itself. We had consumed almost 3/4 of the pie, still not certain if we dared make it again (for the upcoming gathering, remember). Each piece left us feeling that a helping of veggies was in order to balance out our gastric degradation, and yet we were drawn to eating more of it. I was placing the pie in the fridge, thinking that a carrot or two would be a good follow-up to my most recent affair with this dessert, when the pie plate slipped from the shelf (alright, perhaps my hand was shaking as a side-effect) and the glass exploded across the floor, skittering shards and pie everywhere. We now had a new reason to call it Crack Pie.

The odd thing was that neither of us felt disappointed at losing the remainder of the pie. In fact, we’re not sure if we’ll ever make the dang thing again. With every bite we found ourselves longing for a bit of fruit thrown in, or a side of apple sorbet. Something to take the edge off.

We’ve since moved on to baking the Best Carrot Cake in the Whole World, which, while not technically that much healthier, at least has carrots in it . . .

For those of you who simply must flirt with danger (or long for a new variety of sugar fix), here is a link to the Crack Pie recipe.