Every ending is also a beginning. I learned this first in yoga, then saw it manifested everywhere I looked in life. Our crime is when we’re faced with a beginning, but we refuse to trust and move forward with the lessons of the ending.

This month is the anniversary of our exodus from “normal” life. Year number four on the road presented a couple non-climbing related challenges: everything we owned that we couldn’t carry with us was stolen from our property in Kentucky, and Alexander SuperScamp was killed in an accident. Our material world was turned upside-down, not once, but twice. We found that having things taken from us and our home destroyed did not conjure the same liberating emotion as selling our house and a majority of our belongings four years ago.

It was after leaving Hueco that the accident that killed our Scamp happened in Deming, New Mexico. In the same year that most of our belongings were taken, our home was destroyed. Two big wrenches had been thrown at us, but we’d each said goodbye to a parent within the first two years of our travels, and the contrast between missing a person and missing things was not lost on us. And besides, “if you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball,” right?

So. Here we go ‘round again, for the next three-sixty-five. The Journey. The Process. The Here and Now. All the cheese whiz on Ritz crackers you can eat.