Personal Reflections

14 Jan

Posted at 17:00h in Personal Reflections, Uncategorized

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever." -Steve Jobs I’m writing the foreward to my book, before my book even exists. A few nights ago, lying in bed, a simple message popped into my head, “Write the foreword” was all that it said. I woke up, turned on the light on my nightstand,...

09 Jan

Posted at 17:01h in Adventurepreneurship, Inspired Adventure, Musical Mountaineers, My Adventures, Personal Reflections

A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. -Leopold Stokowski   [caption id="attachment_2738" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] The Musical Mountaineers, Rose (piano) and Anastasia (violin)[/caption] I never imagined that I would be one half of The Musical Mountaineers. Even now, when I watch our videos or look at the photographs from our adventures, I have to pinch myself - "Is this real life?". When I decided to jump in and blaze my own trail, I knew it was going to be beautiful, but I never imagined...

07 Jan

Posted at 11:27h in Adventurepreneurship, Inspired Adventure, Musical Mountaineers, Personal Reflections, Poetry

My official “poetry training” is as follows: I started writing poems as a child on an old, manual typewriter. That’s it. I’ve never taken a class on how to write a poem. I vaguely remember learning something about, “iambic pentameter”, but I would need to use Google to remember what it means. I know what a haiku is, but otherwise, if you are looking for some sort of definitive poetry training, I have no clue what I’m talking about – and I’m so incredibly thankful...

04 Jan

Posted at 08:00h in Adventurepreneurship, Inspired Adventure, My Adventures, Personal Reflections, Uncategorized

“You were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life?” - Rumi   One year ago today, I almost lost everything. My mom and my husband and I were driving home from the most incredibly wonderful day of snowshoeing, when our truck hit a patch of black ice and went spinning across the highway - directly into the path of an oncoming semi-truck. To this day, I cannot explain why I am still here. There is no feasible explanation for how we did not get struck...

21 Dec

Posted at 18:05h in Adventurepreneurship, Inspired Adventure, My Adventures, Personal Reflections

One day, before I believed that everything was possible, I wrote, “You can’t force magic” on the back of my hand. I didn’t even know what it meant – I just knew that I needed to understand it. I had been living in a world of “can’t, shouldn’t, won’t, will not, don’t” for so long. I was trapped in place by fear of the unknown. I believed that every “what-if” scenario in the world was involved in a giant conspiracy to prevent me from being...

23 Nov

Posted at 08:00h in Personal Reflections

I recorded a podcast on Thanksgiving Day called, "You are a miracle." I cried through the entire recording. If you listen closely, I'm sure that you will be able to hear me wiping the tears off my face. You can find the link to my podcast here.

When I started my podcast, I did not know it would be so emotional for me. I did not realize that I would be sharing my heart in such a tender way. When I first...

19 Nov

Posted at 23:45h in Personal Reflections

WHY is a question that I get asked a lot these days – specifically in reference to carrying my violin onto the summit of a mountain before sunrise to perform for nobody just as the sun crests the horizon. These musical mountaineering trips can be anything but fun at times – on one of our last climbs, I found myself huddled in a ball, shivering… wondering why I was standing on the summit of a peak holding my violin in 30 degrees weather wearing a...

10 Aug

Posted at 18:50h in Personal Reflections

It’s never mattered to me that I’m a woman who loves adventure. I don’t mean that in a negative way – I just never saw it as a limiting factor or as something that was even remotely out of the ordinary. As a young girl, I spent my days exploring the creek behind our house – digging up crawfish and searching for snakes, and, once, even outrunning an alligator (true story). I dangled from tree branches, watched anthills for hours and scampered...

16 Feb

Posted at 20:51h in Personal Reflections

Last week I shared a story about how I accidentally ended up moving to Washington State, and about the importance of following your dreams.  Fulfillment is no joke - without it, we humans tend to struggle.  Personally, I know that finding fulfillment in my life is absolute a critical piece of everything that I do.  Unless I feel like I'm somehow contributing to the greater good or helping to serve others in some small way, I find myself feeling lost....