Three months of walking, more than 200 miles accumulated, and striding through obstacles that include multiple family illnesses, injuries, overcrowded schedules, and unanticipated speed bumps, one journey has to come to an end so another may begin. From the very beginning I've acknowledged that this was a trifold journey, and while I've made deliberate strides along the physical, the mental and spiritual journeys have progressed less successfully. After some studied reflection in recent days, however, I've decided to make a crucial step for both.
This blog has to end.
I am a writer by profession and my career demands 60-80 or more articles, blogs, newsletters, and other pieces of writing each month, along with countless hours of emails, promotion, and research that amount to tens of thousands of words. This blog does not count toward that total. Too often extra entries fall by the wayside in the crush of payable work, and every moment that I spend on additional words feels like an extension of work rather than a refreshment of mind and spirit. To give more time to both the mental and spiritual journeys, this blog is going to cease, but another will continue with occasional updates along this 1,000-mile path.
The one hobby I have (though not the only one I long to have) is birding, and I chronicle my feathered flights on another blog, Backyard Birds Utah. It is there that this journey will continue and fittingly so, as while the season warms and days grow longer I hope to spend more of my accumulated steps tracing miles of backcountry and mountain trails in search of winged wonders, something I do far too infrequently these days. But when I take one day to hike such a trail and see such a bird, I simply don't have time to do two blog posts about the same integrated event.
I hope you'll join me there, flying along this goal even as I walk each further mile. I'm not going to stop counting my mileage (you'll find the mileage tracker from the right hand column here replicated and continuing its updates there), but I'm going to make it less a part of work and more a part of mind and spirit. Maybe that's the first mistake to learn from - focusing on the physical is not the way to make the changes that are necessary, but once the mind and spirit are in sync, the body will follow.
I hope you'll follow along as this new part of the journey takes flight.
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