I don’t know why I find so much amusement in doing this.  I remember reading Endurance while in a wind storm in a deep antarctic field camp with the sound of the tent walls flapping a deafening sound, immersing me in what I can imagine Shackelton and his crew were experiencing.  Well, a much nicer version of it, in a world of C130’s and C17’s that I know will eventually come retrieve me from the vast white continent…eventually.   So when I found this book here on the island, a woman’s first hand experience living on one of these atolls in the northwest end of the Hawaiian archipelago, I knew I needed to take it out to the beach to read it.  I was reading the chapter she wrote about monk seals, while one was soaking in the sun, just like me, about 100 or so feet away.  I got a kick out of this, hopefully you will too…

It reminded me of my backpacking trip to Patagonia.  I had just finished a hike and met a cool couple from Germany/Australia.  We got a box of wine and went to chill it in the glacial lake.  I opened my little pocket guide book to get ready for the next days trek and noticed this page…

Its these moments where you just feel like you’re in the right place at the right time.  Like when I was at field camp and it was a “nice day” out.  When the sun was out and the wind was calm, I liked taking long walks down the empty ski-way where the planes would come in on.  One of those days I was walking, listening to my iPod shuffle when I looked around and with each step I took the light reflected off these giant snowflakes like giant diamonds all around me and in the distance for miles.  It was that moment I noticed the lyrics Bob Dylan was singing “I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it.”   I was like, “whaaaa???” what in the world was Dylan experiencing that he wrote those lyrics cause I was like totally on a highway of diamonds with nobody on it, and I’d put money on it that he wasn’t walking down the Ski-way at WAIS Divide Camp when he came up with that lyric. (Read that blog post here – A Highway of Diamonds)

Its in these moments that I stop questioning life, I live in the moment and it overwhelms me.