Travel Bug (Key) Update:

Sometime ago, I received this e-mail concerning The Great Disappointment travel bug:

Hi Bug,
Sorry to tell you but your tag is still in the Morgan cache, but I don't think your key is. Sometime somehow you became discombobulated. Have your owner let me know if I can help.


Ah, discombobulated... interesting choice of wordage geocaching friend. No help, thanks! Besides I was never the owner, just one of the many that held the key for a short while. A way-to-long, short while.

The key is gone, out of my hands, and that is a good thing. My optimum desire. I won't lie and say I wasn't interested in seeing it through to the end of its journey, because I was. But, it is gone... traveling maybe, home? Regardless, I am happy to have sent it on its way.

Travel Bug (Key) Update:

Realizing it could take a lifetime for my travel bug key to find its home, I've changed its travel plans. I'd like it to get home sooner, rather then later. Instead of traversing 50 states, now with the help of geocachers who log onto geocaching.com, it must travel to each of the 29 counties in Utah before reaching its destination in Utah County.

The good news, it started in Cache County then moved to Salt Lake County. Now it resides hidden in a travel bug cache in Morgan County. Which may or may not give it some serious competition for traveling. Let's hope there are not too many travel bugs to choose from and that someone will rescue the key among the many and send it packing to a new county. Only 26 more counties to go!

Good News!

Jesi and I's cache (Letters Never Sent) we placed in Steamboat, was finally published on geocaching.com. Now, I'm anxious to hear of it being discovered by some lucky geocachers, and will look forward to returning back to Steamboat in the future, to read some great letters.

Also, our Travel Bug (The Great Disappointment) key was officially picked up at Merlin Olsen Field (Big Blue Turf), and is making its journey southward. I'm guessing the keys next stop will be Nevada.

A requirement on the keys travel dictates it has to venture to all 50 states before returning back to its owner in Utah. Mick asked me how long I think it will take to travel, given the distance of Hawaii and Alaska. He says 20 years, I'm giving it 5 ...at least. Time will tell. For now, I'm just excited it is traveling home, and that I am able to vicariously travel with it.

Lucky key.

Where do you think it's headed next?

The GREAT Disappointment

“I would like to beg you… as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.

Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything.

Live the questions now.

Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answers."
(Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet)

I'm no stranger to asking questions and expecting a direct, honest answer. Asking questions, then receiving answers, has a way of challenging my thinking, opening my consciousness to a new idea or thought process and either directly or indirectly changing me. A summation of individual growth per say. Question answer sessions have been invaluable in my life.

Living the questions is another story. This has not been my forte. "I want to know now!", is more along my idea of answer receiving- in whatever from they should come. As I have aged and begin to see more of my life- both past and present, answers are hard to come by, especially when I seek them from others, aside from myself. The struggle really does lie in learning to be patient for an answer. Again, patience not being another one of my fortes.

Trickiness comes in living the questions whose answers are out of my control to receive. I have understood ever since reading the above quote, the hardship and power of loving the questions, living them and waiting for life's answers to sum themselves up.

Never did I anticipate the emotional impact of finally receiving answers to questions I have been living for nearly two decades. Living those questions was difficult, a cat and mouse kind of game that has been exhausting- to say the least. Receiving them nearly brought to surface almost more than I could take as each puzzle piece seemed to miraculously find its perfect fit and then illuminate a whole picture.

So it is with gratitude to the whole process of asking, living my questions, and living into them, that I chalk so many up to "The GREAT disappointment" and move forward from here; thankful that although some choices brought more questions, more living of those questions, and hardships associated from living them- they also brought more faith and greater understanding.