Leaving No Trace

Leave No Trace is an excellent program designed to help minimize our impact on our beautiful natural surroundings.  They run training for youths to adults, helping to educate them about the need to protect our planet.  We especially need to protect it when recreating.  They promote seven principles: plan and prepare ahead; travel and camp on durable surfaces; dispose of waste properly; leave what you find; minimize campfire impacts; respect wildlife; be consider to other visitors.  These are great principles, and the website gives more in depth explanations.

This summer I've been having quite an adventure.  So far I've gone to 8 national parks, several more monuments, and ample viewpoints.  I've followed the principles pretty darn well.  But I still wonder about the trace I'm leaving.  In my pursuit of adventure, I have a relatively large carbon footprint.  NYC has certainly helped reduce this given its abundance of public transit.  That type of transit simply doesn't exist anywhere else in the US, particularly for folks like me who see a sign and decide to follow it.

Though my immediate visible trace is not large, my long-term detriment to the environment and humanity is not the prettiest.  I try to see beautiful and wonderful people and places to encourage stewardship.  In my pursuit, however, I leave an impact that I find increasingly difficult to leave no footprint.  Tinge of Catholic guilt?  Yea, says I!

In comes Ignatian discernment, and I'm still working through it.  So I need feedback from you friends--what do I do about my carbon footprint and need to adventure?

Oh the Urbanity!

Last August I took my vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.  Thanks to that final one, my superiors sent me to New York City to finish up my undergrad and hopefully do a masters.  New York was the one place I asked not to be sent.  That's probably why they sent me there.

In the novitiate, my director asked me to contemplate my images of God.  I was unsure how to tackle this question, having never given it consideration.  Isn't God just kind of...there?  Existing?  A few images came to me as I prayed, one for each member of the Trinity.  Christ is the faces of the poor, the oppressed, the downtrodden.  He is them in their moments of weakness and crucifixion.  Christ is also the poor in their joy, their love, their Resurrection.  Check out this cross from the Creighton Retreat House in Griswold, IA for a good visualization.

The Holy Spirit maintained a bit of that floaty feeling, being very hard to pinpoint.  It's kind of as described in Acts of the Apostles--a rushing wind bearing flame.  The Holy Spirit always seems more of an action than image for me--inspiring, rushing, guiding, creating.  And the Father?  God the Father appears to me as landscape.  Great open expanses, mountains, plains, forests and rivers inspire my image of God the Father.  He is the pure image of wild, untamed and grace-filled beauty.

I discovered on my 8-day retreat that this image has been causing me a bit of trouble this past year.  There is no wild in New York City.  The John Muir in me screams for boundless wilderness that refuses to be tamed, just as God's love behaves.  It refuses containment.  Ironically, I contained my image of God in a rather boundless feature.  My claustrophobia in New York this past year came from missing part of the Trinity.  It was not just the density of people and buildings in New York, but the lack of wild and untamed God-love that I missed.  That God-love certainly lives in New York City, though.  I need help in transforming my image.  I do not turn away or get rid of those old graces and images; but I must also not cling to them.  As Jesus tells Mary Mag, "Let go dude--I've gotta ascend to heaven!"  (Author's interpretation)

Of all the things St. Ignatius wrote, one of my favorites is the Suscipe, also called the Take Lord (Loyola Press has an excellent reflection on how radical the prayer is).  In it, Ignatius offers up everything.  Not only his material goods, but his heart, memory, his entire being.  All he asks is God's love.  In NYC, God is asking me to offer up my image of God and be open to seeing God's love in new and different ways.  I have to adventure into the unknown.  I have absolutely no idea where I'm going.  My urban adventures are in underground subway trains rather than hitchhiking and driving.  But I have good company and the consolation that when trundling into the unknown, I've typically ended up in pretty good places.

I leave you with an older poem (June 2011) and this music video.  Next time: Leaving No Trace


They jut out from the ground and puncture
the sky.  Or perhaps, the ground I imagine
should be there suddenly disappears,
leaving behind alien land.  A mountain
goat doe huddles on a ledge with her young
as a bison bull grazes on the plain below.
The sun burns the edge of a plateau as unimagined colors envelope the rest of
the sky.  A back-lit hawk sits on an unfelt
breeze, watching for any movement of a meal.

 The soil here is too thin, too poor in nutrition 

to support anything that doesn't

belong there.  When it rains, the land is

unsure what to do.  Anything flat explodes

with a dark, lush green.  Any rising erodes

away, leaving a constantly transitioning land.

It is a land to be lost in, for the colors

blend, the markers forbid themselves to

be remembered.

But this is where God lives, breathing, begging
to be found.  This is where the Holy Spirit whispers to me to open my heart and I release it like the flash flood that races through the buttes.
This is where Christ cries out from the
history of the land and those who should live here who shed lives here.  This is where God inflicts my imagination with beauty so fierce, I can never discover it completely

Spirit of Adventure

Greetings from Griswold, IA, happy belated Pentecost and happy Ordinary Time.  I apologize for the incredibly long absence--academic writing unfortunately takes precedent over leisure writing and the blog has thus sat unattended for some time.  But I'm starting some exciting summer adventures.  First and foremost is my 8-day retreat.  I'm starting it out focusing on the Holy Spirit, which is perfect timing given both Pentecost and the summer adventures ahead.

You may recognize this wonderful dirigible as the Spirit of Adventure from the movie "UP!"  In thinking and praying about the upcoming adventures this summer, I realized that I have not looked for the root of my adventuring.  This wonderful retreat is affording me that opportunity.  So far, I've come up with this poem:

Standing high in Navajo country,
a wind rushes toward me
bearing the whispers of mountains
and the scatterings of pollen.
The pollen searches a place to settle and grow,
but home is a place wind will never know.
For it is a contemplative on mission
to spread its redemptive vision.
It pushes me down from mountain to plains
with the hope of instilling in me the same.

In my last blog post (November!?), I discussed the need for a place to return even amidst the adventures.  The poem does not allow for a stationary home.  The place to return often resides deep within us.  In my liberation theology class this semester, we discussed the transcendence of the Holy Spirit.  Transcendence is not floating above, away and apart from.  Rather, transcendence is a radical depth.  The Spirit becomes transcendent by burrowing into the center of us.  The Spirit drives my own spirit of adventure.  I am fairly predisposed to adventure, but the Spirit avidly takes hold and directs.  I adventure for discovery, love and transcendent depth.  They lie deep inside of me and I return there for those treasures of graces.

I leave you with this second poem and music video from Trapper Schoepp and the Shades.

Who resides deep inside me, not far from my xiphoid process.  From there, Who takes control when seen fit, causing my heart to beat like humming bird wings, my mind to move through that I cannot fathom, and my mouth to open for words I cannot control or explain.  But I know Who is their origin.  Not far from my xiphoid process, Who sneaks into an aorta and immediately spreads throughout me, latching like oxygen to my red blood cells.  Driving me forward, never resting like the wind bearing the clouds.
COMING SOON! -- A previously promised piece on urban adventure; some location reviews; and thoughts on balancing environmental stewardship and love of adventure.

Intimacy and Adventure

I owe this post to another Jesuit (Chuck Frederico), who inspired me with a rather wonderful homily tonight.

Today is the feast of St. Stanislaus Kostka.  He had quite a little adventure--Stan ran away from home at 17-years old to join the Jesuits.  Stan's brother greatly disliked the piety exuding from young Stanislaus.  He tried to prevent it at all costs and severely dealt with his younger brother.  Stanislaus, gripped by fervor, fled from school in Vienna to join the Jesuits.  He knew, however, he could not join the Novitiate in Vienna because of the political consequences (his father was Polish senator and well-connected).  Rather, Stan went all the way to Rome to join the Jesuit (somewhere about 700 miles, not to mention the whole mountain range thing).  He felt totally confident of the adventure, though, because of the deep relationship he had with God.

As a Jesuit, this is part of my mission--to have a great sense of where I'm coming from and be willing to go out.  I work to develop a deep, beautiful relationship with God so I can go on all sorts of adventures.  Rooted in Christ, on mission for the Church.  That's my deal.

"That's all good and well, Ken, but what does that practically mean?"

"I'm glad you asked Aristotelian conversation style buddy."

I think practically it means two things--deepening my relationship with God and with those around me.  After all, people are where we find Christ in the world.  The folks I know are pretty good at helping me experience the love of God.  Let's chat the people side first, because I think the concreteness helps.

Whenever I go on an adventure, I know the people that I take with.  Not usually in a literal way.  But the memory of all of you travels pretty neatly inside me.  I carry all the stories we share, the relationships we formed and the love we give.  I can truly say I have deep, wonderful relationships with my family and a good few friends.  I take you some pretty fun and crazy places, like mountainsides in Peru.  I also take you to places that scare the heck of out me, like NYC.

In Ignatian prayer, we ask for graces, certain things/ideas/feelings we need in our lives.  I prayed a lot about the ability to feel at home in NYC, because it still scared the heck out of me even two months after moving here.  It's starting to get much better.  When praying, it's good to store up graces, to reflect back on them and think about what exactly God has offered in our lives.  Being home at NYC is a huge one for me.  I also look back to the graces of taking vows, of my family  and friends surrounding me there; to my month in Peru and getting to participate in the lives of others; to my 8-day retreat and just feeling so good about being a Jesuit.  I keep these things always in my heart, especially when I go on adventures.  As I set out, I make sure I've packed everything I'll need for the journey, especially memories and thoughts of my family, friends, and God.

I think Frank Turner says it nicely in this song:


Intimacy is extremely important for our sense of home.  How can we go on adventure if we don't have some place to return?  We need a place to return both in our worldly and spiritual adventures.  The more we recollect them, the deeper it is and the more home and wonderful it is.

NEXT TIME: An Urban Adventure.  Seriously.

Atlas vs. GPS

As a Jesuit, I try to see the glory of God in all things.  I will attempt to do that in this post.  However, I do have a bias--I had an awful experience with a GPS.  I, in part, blame it on my sister, but I still like her pretty decently.  Maybe I'll forgive the GPS at some point as it may also be New York's fault.  But here we go:

The summer of freshman year of college, I went to Washington, DC to visit my sister Betsy.  It was a wonderful time.  From there, we drove up the East Coast to Fairfield, CT, where I had a meeting of the Jesuit Colleges/University on social justice.  She drove up to visit another friend a bit north of there.  Afterward, I needed to drove back west to Kansas and Betsy needed to get back to DC.  We decided the easiest thing to do would be to drop her off at the train station in NYC and for me to head out from there on I-80.  She bought her ticket from the station in Chinatown, the very lower end of Manhattan.  She jumped out of the car with my credit card because the cops were pretty prickly about "No standing."  I got lost from there, with the GPS telling me, "Turn Left on 7th, now."  It doesn't help when you're at the intersection of 7th St. and 7th Ave...  I ended up taking the Lincoln Tunnel, the Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan Bridge, and many other confusing roads in my desperate attempt to get out of NYC.  I did (until I got sent back here).

So, now that we have that bias out in the open, let's have a good discussion of their virtues and faults.  We'll do cons first, so you leave with a feeling of their goods, since Jesuit discernment says you should always discern between two goods.

Demonstrating appropriate map use.

GPS Cons:
1) The awful voice.  I'm not going to lie, this is one of my number one pet peeves.  "In a quarter mile, turn right.  In 857 feet, turn right.  In 20 feet, turn right."  Yes!  I know!  I'm turning right!  I brushed my teeth as well, thank you!  Pet peeve aside, here come the actual values.

2) No good map.  The screens are relatively small, and the map often shifts while you're driving.  Better ones you can change mode.  But you're still trying to look at a very small map.  You might be on a very busy road and want an alternate route.  The GPS can do that often, but if you're either super rural and there's maybe a neighboring US highway, or super urban and everything is jammed, it's hard not having a map just to look at in big scale.

3) The listed "attractions" are often things like Six Flags or minigolf.  Not interested.

4) Finally, and probably most importantly, I think it takes away from the sense of adventure.  To quote Mason Jennings, "If you never get lost, you can never get found."  That, my friends, is an important thought for both adventuring spiritually and physically.  It creates a bit of dependence on it.  "Well, who cares, just toss on the GPS and we'll be fine."  Essentially, it takes away the skill of adventure, and that's no good.

Atlas Cons:
1) You can't update it, unless you buy a new one.

2) That's a lot of paper.  (But at least it's recyclable)

3) Hard to make quick decisions.  You usually have to plan stuff ahead of time.

4) Those are the only cons.

This is an actual GPS.  I'm not judging, though....

GPS Pros:
1) Updates.

2) Good if you're by yourself and you can't look down at written directions.  Though that voice is awful, at least it's there.

Atlas Pros:
1) AWESOME attractions listed.  Museums, sites, scenic routes, etc.  Has it all.

2) HUGE MAP.  It's perfect for dreaming, thinking of adventures, ease of activities.  All sorts of great stuff.

3) The big picture in general.  Easy to plan around construction, find alternate routes, etc.

Final decision:  I've got to go with the atlas.  It inspires as well as directs, which I think is important.  Though the GPS systems have improved and are great, they do begin to fail after a few years.  Atlases have a timeless quality about them.  They teach you how to navigate and adventure and spring ideas for other adventures or other ways to get there.

Coming up: Winter is cold.  Suck it up and go on an adventure anyways.

Season Hunting

I love going back to the same place throughout the year.  I think it's great to see the transition that a place goes through during the year and over a while, as well.  A sense of adventure is awesome.  But there's a beautiful feeling about being able to return to the same place time and again.  You also get to know the routes and map well enough to drive off on a random highway for a bit and know that you'll hit something else and take it 50 miles east and be back where you need (note: have a good atlas, and definitely not a GPS, especially one on your phone.  This will be a later post.).  My two years at Creighton University, I frequently wandered to Indian Cave State Park, Boyer-Chute National Wildlife Refuge, and De Soto National Wildlife Refuge.  One of my favorite and most trustworthy highways runs the route between all three--US 75, which runs from Dallas to the point where Minnesota and North Dakota hit Canada.  I hope to drive the length of it some day.  Why do I share all this information?  Because having a place to go inspires more adventures, and also somewhere to think and pray about them.

Indian Cave.  Courtesy Tim Nendick, currently in Spain, so he doesn't know.

I think returning to the same place again and again creates a sensitivity to the nuances and things that happen there.  It's a beautiful opportunity to explore hidden opportunities and trials that lie there.  I'm not referring to the environmental seasons--I mean my own.  But having the same physical location throughout the seasons helps as well.  I saw Indian Cave and US-75 in every season and state imaginable, especially as I began more seriously discerning entering the Jesuits.  This picture was a particularly fun camping trip that lots of friends came on.  But I saw it in winter with the sky laid bare by frigid winds.  I saw it in spring with buds starting to push out of the trees.  I saw it in steamy May when the green was almost overbearing.

I saw myself in these same places.  And I return to those same places quite frequently.  It helps me know what I've done, who I was and am, who I'm becoming.  This is a major and important part of discernment.  It can be a small daily return, the Examen.  Or it can be the place I went to wrestle with myself during the 30-day Spiritual Exercises (God is a hell of a personal trainer).  When we are there, we can also explore where to go next.  Standing frigid and sick with swine flu on a river bluff over the Missouri River, a hawk flew just over my shoulder and I realized I needed to move from that place of comfort and great happiness at Creighton to a new journey with the Jesuits.  These same movements come in the Spiritual Exercises as well.

It is also important how we get there.  We do not simply appear at a location.  I associate music with certain roads.  I-29 through Missouri and Iowa is Chuck Ragan,  State Radio and Eddie Vedder.   I-70 across Missouri is Cake and Franz Ferdinand.  If I listen to something different, or especially nothing at all, that deserves a special note.  What was different?  Why?  Was something happening?  Was nothing happening and I felt stagnant?  Was I restless?  Content?  These are all important questions about journey of spirit and physical journey as well.

Let us not forget where we have been, lest we forget the places we are going.

Skipping rock at De Soto NWR.  Again, stolen from Tim.

Next time:  Atlas vs. GPS--Is there Really a Difference?

The Art of Flexibility

                                                                                                                    started 8/28/2012

As I sit here in a Bolivian coffee shop with an awkward hour between the time the health department office closed and the immigration office opens, I can't help but think about how important flexibility is in adventure.  Now, flexibility is an art form.  It requires patience, patience (even more of it), and a lot of creativity.  Needless to say, the beauty of adventure is so often found in our willingness to be flexible--to openly embrace change and spontaneity as our guides.  It won't come easily, but the more you are able to incorporate a flexible mentality into your life, the more you will begin to realize that adventure is everywhere.  You just have to be willing to open your eyes...and your time.

Time.  Time is a concept created by humans and maintained by humans.  This is why attitudes toward time so easily change from culture to culture.  Even after 8 months, the lax attitude towards time is something I'm still getting used to in Bolivia.  Compared to the rushed deadlines and the hurried nature of the United Stats, Bolivia is as close to turtle-speed as one can get.  For North Americans, this is just another thing "to get used to" here, but for me, this is one aspect of life that I'm really trying to appreciate.  Many times, this includes bringing a book or a notebook to any meeting or to any place that may have a line.  It often includes swallowing any immediate thoughts that are about to run out of my mouth when I'm frustrated or becoming increasingly impatient.  It is a constant reminder that time is what I make of it.

What if we were to loosen up our sense of time in our lives--to understand that so often our sense of time is based upon situations outside of our control...how late you were to work this morning because of an increased amount of traffic or how long you had to wait to see your doctor when you had an appointment.  What if you could stop and have a wonderful, unexpected conversation with a friend when you run into her at the store before dinner?  What if you could take the time to walk to the end of the street that you pass every day just to see what is around the corner?

This concept of time reminds me so much of what I learned on retreats in high school and college.  This is God's time--the beautiful conviction of time in which relationships, conversations, and the beauty of adventure take the reigns of our lives.  We are able to embrace the unexpected and focus on the most important parts of our lives.  It is in this sense of time that we find the most beautiful adventures. 

Embrace it and find adventure in every moment :)