A spring evening thunderstorm travels along the Jackson Hole valley over Mount Moran in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.
Jackson, Wyoming…this is all going to make sense momentarily, just bear with my rampant train-of-thought diatribe (maybe a bit harsh but such a cool word). There are times in my life when I struggle. I fight failure. I look at myself with question. And wonder when it will all get better. In the same breath, I am a dreamer, drifter, and quite often a dumb-ass. I would say that overall, I move forward without hesitation and often press the damage control button right after tossing the hand grenade into the room of nay-sayers. I often speak my mind without any type of purity filtration and maybe that keeps the world slowing down some radical, out-of-control anarchist. I know that those who drink my very special brand of Kool-Aid keep coming back for more, so I may be on to something, although I find it extremely hard to isolate the statistics.
If I sit here and ponder my life to this point, I recognize something. One finite thing. ALL of my dreams have now come true. I believe that could be the most profound and truthful statement that I have ever made. Dreams are powerful things. They drive many of us. Possess many of us. Allow us to lose a bit of our daily realities – if for only for splits seconds of time. Dreams are meant to be…just dreams though. Having some way of visual follow-through for a dream seems more of an impossibility than an easy accomplishment. Like all dreams though, the goal is to never let them turn to nightmares.
I traveled to Jackson, Wyoming for the first time at the young age of 18 for a winter break ski trip. It was my first trip with friends and without parents. That seven day trip was my first experience skiing bottomless powder to the tune of 18 inches a day for the whole seven days. At the time I had only been skiing for about 4 years. It was a new and wonderful experience. That is the day in my life where a piece of the dream puzzle came together. “Wouldn’t it be awesome to live here?” A blanket statement which more often than not has more negative connotations then positive ones. Shrugged off for years, always in the back of the grey matter arena. Half a life of travels, girls, kids, homes, and even careers later, I found the one. The one girl who drank the Kool-Aid I set out, the one girl who rode faster, skied alongside me, made me help in the creation of two wonderful, yet equally crazy children, and in very much different, yet similar ways, dreamt the same.
She glued the fallen pieces of my often hand grenaded life back together and then added in a bit of her own creative thinking. And managed to become the final piece of a puzzle that was truly only a pipe dream. She went out and got a job in Jackson, Wyoming. So Cinderella, the slipper does truly fit. Now, a life full of hard, cold realities has to be modified so we can move into the dream full tilt. Crazy. And once this aspect is complete, then what? Well, like most who live their lives through dreams, something else pops up. It could be something so tiny at this point that its clarity falls off of the edges. But one day, one day soon, when all your dreams are black, it will come rising to the top to fill the unsatisfied void. In other words, it never ends. It continues. Our dreams can become our goals and our goals then become what we live and work to achieve.
So now that I have the dream career, have the dream lifestyle, have the dream family, and finally have the dream location. Where I am headed? I see many stories yet to be told. Many of which are just cloudy specks out there in the black microcosm. You will inevitably be part of the roller coaster, all you have to do, is drink the Kool-Aid and come along for the ride. I’ll see you in Jackson, Wyoming 83002. Let the economical workshops begin.