Life is always another first step each day!

As we go through life there is always another first step to take each day when you wake up on this road called Life.  As I have traveled along with the experiences in my life the concept of the journey (making your way along the different paths and highways) has been a recurring theme for me.  Creating the “Where’s The Flamingo” Facebook page is my attempt at writing about this subject so laugh with me when I make mistakes and forgive me as I learn where I am going with this.
 Placido Flamingo travels started when I left Alaska as I traveled from there to where I am currently.  It doesn’t really matter where “here” is now because for some of us it changes with time and circumstance.  Home has been so many places I have traveled and most felt like a places where your comfort level was how you made the best of the where you were.  It might be lying under the stars on a hillside winery in northern California or sleeping in a metal conex box “apartment” in Barrow Alaska at minus 60 below zero.  It is what you make it to be.  We adapt to the surroundings and make a choice to live a good life wherever it may be.

I have always been a storyteller and as I traveled down Life’s highways I met a lot of people who gave me inspiration and material for more stories in my Icewind’s Ramblings blog so the idea and concept is to put some of my stories in writing and to maybe show some of the things I have found interesting about life and where I’ve been.  One of my goals for retirement is to travel the country and write stories about the places and people met along the way.  Slowly the next first step leads to that reality.

Along the way I found that I could carve out a story or two as I sat and find myself on my laptop trying to make sense of it all.  I like working with wood and the feel of things you can make with your own hands.  I guess it is the pride that comes with a good project or item comes to completion.  Now I’m not saying I’m a good wood worker, but I do still have five fingers on each hand but I will admit they carry more than their share of scars.  We all have scars in some form or fashion whether kept on the inside or shown on the outside but it is interesting to me how the words flow from our mouths and onto paper or computer ‘paper’ when we have something on our mind.  It keeps us occupied and we learn more about ourselves and those around us.  Communication is the key to almost anything in life.  The old adage if you get two people or more together and they start telling stories there is no hope for the truth.  There is probably only laughter, fellowship, and a warm feeling among everyone listening to the good stories.

I spent a lot of my life in the back country of America doing things I loved like hang gliding off majestic mountaintops or chasing the elusive fish, moose, elk and a few bear or two then one day I came to the realization the animals and nature were smarter than I, so I put up my weapons and picked up a camera.  From then on when I traveled through the back country of Alaska, Canada, the United States I kept track of my adventures with pictures.  Now in later years I am going back through my pictures and wishing I knew how to paint so I could put them on canvas. I find as the memories come back I can almost smell the flowers or the sun warming up the fir trees and I can hear the rushing of the water as it flows down the river or stream.  I see the hole where the elusive trout is hiding behind that rock in the stream and I wonder if I could paint should I paint him leaping after a mayfly or hiding under the rock waiting of the next meal to float by.

Today I remember a beaver pond that I came across in the high country of the Wasatch Mountain Range in eastern Utah close to the Wyoming border.  I fished there before I moved to Alaska.  It was an interesting little pond surrounded by a grove of Aspens turning yellow in the fall sunlight and a Bull Moose standing knee deep in the water of the pond eating.  The sun was shining on the orange and yellow leaves turning the hills to gold.  I sat and watched the scene until a storm rolled in and the snow began to fall. When I left I took a second picture from the same location of the first photo except in the second picture everything was grey, dark and foreboding.  By the time I got back to camp there was six inches of snow on the ground.

As I remember this outing I have both photographs sitting side by side on my desk and I realize how life is like these pictures.  You can be on top of the world with the sun shining, the birds singing and along comes a strong breeze and it changes your perspective on things and if you aren’t careful it will show you the dark side of life.  The thing to remember is it is a passing phase.  If you have patience the sun will come back out and life continues down the road.

Ice

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