BUDS ARE THE BEST

Who knew how much the constant presence of new warmth could just turn me into a life-loving sun-basker?

The seasons are the best. They help give form to the changes in life. Each season has a tone. Spring is self-explanatory because so many things emerge from their hiding places. We come out of the house for once and start doing things outside. There is a sense of renewal and revitalization.

Rivers and Roads

We don’t have a house to emerge out of. But boy, oh boy, does that not mean that we do not spring. I think I pop out of bed ten times faster as the mornings get warmer and lighter.

Our home (a Subaru Outback) has reached a new era this year—one in which we understand deeply how everything functions, where things fit, and how to operate day to day. It is just over 100 cubic feet, but everything finally fits just right (unless we go to Costco… then everything fits horribly, and we tell ourselves we are just going to buy mangos next time).

But, let me tell ya—it has been a long work in progress.

When we first started traveling full-time for the Leave No Trace Organization, we had the challenge of building the storage system from scratch. At the time, lumber was particularly expensive, and our budget just covered the industrial-strength drawer sliders we wanted to install to hold our cooler. I subsequently went to Craigslist, scouring the posts for free used furniture that I thought would make for good scrap wood. One particular post caught my eye. It was a 6 ft armoire made from dark wood. The post said you can have it if you can move it. So I message the owner.

I arrive at the house, and Mary greets me and shows me to the room where the armoire is. I didn't realize there would be stairs between me and this large furniture piece, and she probably didn’t think it would just be me arriving for pickup. We look at each other and silently acknowledge the challenge in front of us. We only lightly scrape the side of a wall corner as we maneuver down the stairs. We get it into the Subaru, I take it back to the office and set to work.

The first build was like trying to feed a family of six with just the scraps in your fridge while your stove is broken. The supplies were limited, there were a ton of constraints, and the backdrop of the construction was the parking lot of our office. I just had the ground to cut things on, but I relished in this challenge.

After acquiring a free TV stand off Craigslist, I had just about everything I needed. I slowly constructed different “rooms” in our car. We had our personal rooms on each side of the middle row, the atrium, which was the middle of the middle of the car, and the snack aisle, the bear can that kept all our snacks accessible while driving. From the back trunk access was the bedroom (where we kept our sleeping bags, pads, and tent), the kitchen, and the pantry. We used a normal Coleman cooler as our fridge and had a basket with all our dry goods. Our assortment of plates and containers were wedged in various bins, and our water jug slid tightly behind the pantry.

The coolest part of the whole build was the stove setup. This, I am proud of.

When I took apart the armoire, there were a ton of hinges and a door slide that I decided to use to make a fold-down platform to put the stove on when cooking. We then could store it upright and slide everything back in with the cooler platform. It was an experiment. I had no idea if the combination of hinges would support the weight of the stove and whatever we put on it. But it worked!

We use a Coleman Peak1 stove connected to a 5-pound refillable propane tank. I love the stove and the fact that we don't have to burn through multitudes of little green cans that no one knows how to dispose of. I love that the stove doesn't need the windshield because they are built into the burner design. I love that it folds down and back up seamlessly while never hindering our access to the cooler.

By some miracle and maybe some construction genius, we had a build.

We set off on the road and iterated over the course of the next few months to get additional shelves and improve our storage. The build lasted two quality years, but one day, last fall, the shelf in the back that held up our bedroom items started tilting. We realized that it was no longer properly attached to the vertical supports. There was absolutely no way to fix it at the time, so we made a tower of our acquired cups and used that as structural support for the shelf.

Come winter 2023, we finally had the opportunity to renovate. Jesse’s family had a sizable supply of scrap wood and every power tool my heart desired. They even had work tables! It was the most luxurious renovation situation I could have imagined…. except that we had to finish in the three days before Christmas, and it just so happened that it was about 20º F outside.

With a much tighter time crunch than the first build and access to official tools and lumber, there was more pressure to build this “properly” as opposed to experimentally scrapping together something that does the job. We‘re talking trigonometry and leveling, metal-less joinery, and deconstruction considerations for when we need to move cars. We also wanted to drastically cut down on the weight of the build since the previous build's TV stand was made of heavy particle board, and our car’s suspension had struggled with the load.

This time, we had anchor points in the car, triangle supports for shelving, and perfectly aligned cuts. We added lightweight shelving in the middle section for our personal belongings. The improvement of the structural soundness has brought more peace of mind than I expected.

As we clean out our winter gear and transition into spring, I understand how we are connected emotionally to the surroundings we engage with daily. When things are messy or falling apart, I feel stressed. My tolerance for mess might differ from the next person's, but I am so happy to have a high-functioning, reliable home space where everything has a place.

Hot Topic

STRESS’S MESS

This letter almost feels like a check-in after the New Year. In many older cultures, the “start of the new year” coincided with spring rather than winter. This makes way more sense than having it in that dark, cold period. Personally, I feel way more motivated to take up new things and improve my life in the springtime than in the dead of winter.

As we live our crazy lives, our health and well-being fluctuate. But it seems like there is nothing more indicative of “how we are doing” than our stress levels. This can feel like pressure or anxiety and is described in many other emotional terms. However, the way that stress impacts our physical bodies is tangible.

We have evolved to respond to environmental stressors, and that helps us survive. But our society creates many situations that impose physically damaging chronic stress. This prolonged stress can worsen digestive health, cause headaches, and even lead to heart disease.

How much of our stress is related to our profession? There was a study that showed that lumberjacks and people who worked in agriculture and forestry are some of the happiest and least stressed people on earth. And it makes sense. They get to work outside. They see tangible results of their efforts. They put in the physical effort (as the cost), but we now know there can be more long-term costs to sitting sedentary for long hours than working your body throughout the day.

Though it seems counterintuitive, setting the goal of avoiding stress altogether actually tends to drive people into negative behaviors. We might procrastinate to push off stress till later or try to dull stress through self-medication or drinking. Is there a healthy way to manage stress?

The better we understand what stress’s purpose is and how it works, the easier it is to see it not as this big scary thing but rather as a part of life that fluctuates…just like the seasons. Stress gets our bodies to jump back from a spark and can momentarily improve our immune system. But chronic stress is exacerbated in our minds. We can go into spirals. The good thing is that we can also practice controlling stress in our minds.

By finding some meaning behind the stress we are feeling and understanding how it can be useful, we might be able to go back to the shorter, helpful bursts of stress that get us to perform at our very best.

Things You Didn’t Notice

FRIENDS FOREVER

As I get older, I see more and more jokes from people my age saying how they cannot believe how social they once were. Now, the most satisfying thing is getting to bed at 9 pm and having a good sleep. It is easy to joke about avoiding people and not wanting to do things. I do recognize that it takes more effort to start building relationships from scratch again with new people. I don’t want to replace the older relationships, and I feel my time is a limited commodity. Fascinatingly, people do have a limit to the number of ongoing relationships they can uphold—about 150.

There is a wealth of evidence that shows how friends help us live longer, healthier, happier lives. (Thanks, friends!) But the catch is that we often misconstrue people who we are friendly with as friends. And quality matters. We want to have buddies who can help us through times of stress. What is crazy is that living in isolation or having poor-quality friends is a greater risk factor for early death than smoking 20 cigarettes a day.

Of course, it all connects back to stress!

I highly recommend reading the article published by the American Psychological Association because it goes beyond the importance of our closest friends. People now more than ever, “avoid conversations with strangers, assuming they will be awkward or shallow, but research suggests those worries may be overblown.” When waiting in public lines, everyone, including myself (unless I consciously avoid it) pulls out their phones. It is fascinating to NOT fall into this trap and imagine what this line would be like, how many opportunities there are to meet our neighbors, if we struck up a random conversation with the people around us.

Seems daunting. But that is only because we decided it was. Can we do something different? Can we go back to the time before mobile phones, for friendship’s sake? You never know who you’ll meet in these fleeting moments.

Refresh

• Household: In the last week, I spent an average of one hour on Instagram per day. That is insane. If you asked me how much time I thought I spent, I’d say about 20 mins per day. The problem is that social media fills the time when people used to be bored. It is too easy to open our phones and start scrolling. So, what can we gain by breaking that scrolling habit?

• Mentality: What is Reiki? It might be just luck, but Reiki hopped on my radar after three people recently told me I must give it a try. People laying their hands and moving my energy seems like an ode to Avatar the Last Airbender, but after watching a few videos and getting brain tingles, call me intrigued.

• Health: How do we know how processed our food is? A good rule of thumb is to see if the ingredient list contains things you wouldn’t cook with at home. In this day and age, it isn’t simple to eat simply, simply because we have so many fancy new chemicals and preservatives that allow food to last longer and get shipped around the world.

• Community: Check out the work the Blue Zones Project is doing to “make the healthy choice, the easy choice” in communities around the country and some of the great results they have seen. If you do not know what a Blue Zone is, watch the documentary “Live to 100,” available on Netflix.

Mouthwatering

LENTILS AND ONIONS, BFFS

Feeding ourselves healthy food is hard. It takes so much time and effort to prepare whole-food meals from scratch. There are so many tempting shortcuts, but they always seem to add plastic waste or extra preservatives into the equation.

I am realizing that the first time I try a new recipe, it takes me twice as long to cook it compared to the second go. Practice applies to cooking too! I can make boatloads of bean salad in 15 mins (I eat a lot of bean salad). Once I experience how things are done, I get way more efficient with multitasking and improvising substitutions based on what is going bad. It is a thrilling evolution.

I hope you get to experience that evolution with this recipe, which I have loved eating variations of for a long, long time. It is so simple in concept and so delicious, but once you make it the first time, you realize you can meal prep it like crazy or sub in quinoa instead of pasta or spinach instead of kale—basically find your own shortcuts.

Check out the recipe here: Pasta with kale, lentils, and caramelized onions

Ingredients:

• green or brown lentils

• chicken or vegetable stock (or water)

• olive oil

• yellow onion

• (Tuscan) kale

• small pasta: tubular, penne, rigatoni, and even quinoa works

• hot pepper flakes

• parmesan cheese

Game Time

#LEAVENOTRASH

In honor of earth month we have a big challenge for you this week. Leave No Trace challenges us all “to clean up the Earth, one scrap of trash at a time.”

By recording trash that you pick up from a public place, you are helping us measure the collective impact we can have when we all take small steps to leave the earth better than we found it.

Get Involved Here!

leavenotraceorg

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