One of the things we most wanted to do on this trip was see the Bluebonnets, a spring phenomenon in Texas, thanks to the efforts of Ladybird Johnson. We spent about a month in the Texas Hill country waiting for them to bloom. Later, we saw lupine (the flower family to which bluebonnets belong) everywhere. This is the last Appendix, a photo gallery of lupines.
I have been procrastinating writing this blog post for a month. I didn’t want to do it. I still don’t want to do it, but it is time.
I even have another post drafted and waiting, ready to release, but this one needed to be written first.
This post should have been written while it was fresh and lively, but it won’t be that now. If I had done it sooner, it wouldn’t have lived on my To Do List niggling at my peace because it wasn’t finished. Writing isn’t hard, but writing this post is.
I don’t want to write it, because writing it makes it true. Actually, writing doesn’t change the truth of it, but it changes my perception of the truth. Writing this post means that sabbatical is over.
This is the post for the last week of our motorhome trip. Once we got back, I jumped into teaching, we moved back into the house (and it was a move), and we switched back into old habits.
While this post could be writing about our fabulous visit with our friends in Laramie, Wyoming, gushing about the old cookbooks Jill introduced me to on making homemade mixes, or how our kids wanted to make their kids cousins, my sorrow that I’m not in a friend’s kitchen sharing life together overshadows it.
This post could also be about beating the Missouri heat and humidity during our short stop visiting cousins. I could tell you about the eleven second-cousins swimming or cousin Clay’s concert in St. Joseph, Missouri. But the heavy heat that engulfed Joshua as we drove home lingered in Tennessee, too, a burning reminder that the trip is over.
I know that I tend to be a private griever, and I’m sometimes abrupt in endings as I privately process. I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise that I’m doing it here, too.
Writing this post means putting a THE END at the bottom of the trip. I still plan a summary to officially conclude the blog, but this ends the experience of it, and I am not ready to let it go.
We just had the experience of a lifetime. We traveled around the United States in our own home, enjoying a spectacular spring that lasted nearly half a year, bonding as a family. We didn’t have any disasters that marred the experience. I wrote a book that I am super excited about. Naturally, I knew it wouldn’t last forever, but I am genuinely sad to see it end at all.
I feel radically different from the journey, but I’ve stepped back into my life that hasn’t changed much. Our old routines and habits cover us as comfortably as the clothes we brought back to our closets from the basement. The simplicity is fracturing into a faster paced, multi-project life with less meaningful family time and less spontaneity.
Yet, I am experiencing subtle shifts, too. Because I am different. Without planning or adding a task to my list, I’m naturally thinning out the amount of things we have. Even after unpacking the bin of bathroom items from storage, I have empty drawers and closet shelves. Space. That’s a gift I got from Sabbatical.
There is a natural thing that happens with grief. At first, it feels stunningly sad, like a crashing wave. At the same time, it has an undercurrent of other, sometimes opposing, emotions tangled together like strands of seaweed. That’s where I’ve been the last few weeks. Mostly, I’m sad that it has ended. Maybe we’ll never do anything like this again. But I’m also excited about the new school year, joyous to see my Mom and colleagues, stressed about the increase of emails, eager about a new podcast, frustrated with a big house to clean, comforted by the familiar, grumbling about the sticky heat, and grateful to be safely home.
I think today I am finally ready to type the famous words concluding this blog and this adventure. I trust that new, but different adventures will come. I can even add an appendix to summarize highlights. (Yeah, I know there aren’t appendices in blogs, but I am still an academic.)
Thank you for taking this journey with us and indulging me as I make sense of this transition. Here is where this journey ends.
THE END
I am currently reading the book A Trip Around the Sunby Mark Batterson and Richard Foth. With the subtitle Turning Your Everyday Life into the Adventure of a Lifetime, you can see why it caught it my eye when browsing at the bookstore. I have a need for safe adventure, and Mark Batterson is my favorite contemporary Christian writer.
In chapter 1, Mark writes about his early memories and how they taught him lessons about life, what Alfred Adler called the style of life. Style of life reflects how people consistently respond to the main tasks of living, which Adler classified as friendship, love and work.
The earliest memory I have is from around age two at a pool. Older kids had finished eating a popsicle and were filling the plastic sleeve with water from a spigot. I thought that was a great idea, and if they could do it, I could, too. So, I did. I learned that other people have good ideas that are beneficial.
I am not a trailblazer, although I march to my own internal beat. Trailblazing is too risky for me, too unknown. That is not my adventure, but ideas are. Most of my ideas are not original, but the way I put them together and teach them is my own unique dance. I recently felt the reward of that when I came home and taught two play therapy courses.
First, I teach these classes as intensives. One semester in four 10-hour days. That isn’t a new idea. My first professor job was teaching graduate courses in three weekends. However, I don’t know anywhere else that teaches an entire play therapy course in four days. I suspect that others would come up with a list of reasons why that isn’t even advisable. Yet, this method for this class is profound in the results.
Second, I teach the classes experientially. That means that students learn the treatment modality of play therapy while they are also experiencing it. They practice as clients, and they experience the skills I teach through the way I teach. Again, experiential learning isn’t a trailblazing idea, but students tell me that they learn a tremendous amount and they have never had a class like this. I mean never.
“Alfred Adler, the famed psychologist, is said to have begun every counseling session by asking his clients to tell him about their earliest memory. They would share those memories, and not matter what their answer was, Adler would say, “And so life is.”
Mark Batterson
I learned academic collaboration filling a popsicle sleeve with water after seeing other kids do it. I recognized a good idea and wanted to know if I could apply it to my own popsicle sleeve. It worked. The book I wrote on this sabbatical is my adventure of living out that lesson.
The ideas themselves aren’t new, but the way I apply them, well, I think it can be life-changing. Lots of people travel in a motorhome, write books or take a sabbatical. We just put all those ideas together. It has certainly changed and forever bookmarked this chapter of our family life. These great idea that worked for us with our own unique twist.
And so life is.
We have lots of photos of our adventures this week, but we’ll just share a few. We started Father’s Day in Idaho Falls, where the kids learned a new game at church called “Sneaky Jesus.” Hmmmm. It was a take on freeze tag.
From there we drove to West Yellowstone, Montana, where I made New York strip steaks to celebrate Father’s Day. To celebrate Tim a bit here – he hates that kind of attention – he has been our driver this entire trip, safely shuttling us from state to state. Thank you, Daddy!
The next few days we spent in Yellowstone, the very first national park. We saw Old Faithful, Mammoth Falls, geysers, hot springs and mudpots.
We saw herds of bison and bison babies, elk, and two little black bear cubs.
We boondocked next to a lake on the way to Grand Tetons National Park. This was our view as we watched the sun rise and the white pelicans take a morning swim.
After coffee with a ranger, we went to Jenny Lake with a stunning view of the Tetons. They have a boat shuttle across the lake, so Z, ZA, and I took the boat across and did a hike to Hidden Falls. Then, we hiked to Inspiration Point where we ate a picnic lunch with a friendly chipmunk.
From there we camped on Bureau of Land Management land. We should have done this sooner. Ten bucks, hook ups, and wide open spaces made this a stellar place to watch the sun set.
Next, we paused at an RV park in Rawlins, WY, to ride out a storm with gusty wind. As they say in Hawaii, no rain, no rainbows, and we were treated to a beautiful one after the storm passed. Kind of metaphorical for me with this sabbatical.
Idaho, Montana and Wyoming were this week’s states. We loved the cool weather and wide open spaces. We learned about the volcanic activity underneath this peaceful place, and we savored spring babies growing quickly before winter. This was our last vacation visit on our way home, but we’ve got a few more friends and family to see before we hit the Tennessee border.
Maybe you weren’t born with a silver spoon in your mouth, but like every American, you carry a deed to 635 million acres of public lands. That’s right. Even if you don’t own a house or the latest computer on the market, you own Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and many other natural treasures.
John Garamendi
I don’t want to go home.
I really like Nashville, my job and my friends. I’m excited that my mom and my sister are in the same state, and it’s a beautiful, scenic state.
I just have enjoyed this opportunity to live two dreams simultaneously so much. I wrote a book and made a big loop across the western half of the United States with my family in a motorhome. Sigh. I hate for this to end.
Sadly, though, it’s time to go home and back to my full-time professor responsibilities. This will post on the day we will get home. Sniff. I’m not at all sad about being back home, but I am moping about leaving this extended spring, migrating to new sights and people each day.
As you can tell if you read this blog regularly, I’ve been mentally preparing (and grieving a little) for about a month. That’s how I process endings. I count down and think about it, and when it happens, I quickly shift to the next thing.
One of the interesting things that I have noticed that I am doing is figuratively packing up and cleaning up. I’ve cleared my laptop desktop to get ready for work. I’ve been clearing out and organizing my photos – 2,800 and counting from this trip, but I’ve gone back to photos from 2012 – setting up systems for work flow, and regularly seeing email inbox zero. I’ve tallied summary lists of states we visited, national parks, and people.
It has felt luxurious to have time to think and order my to do list, but I think that is how I am preparing myself to ease back into a busy schedule. It’s how I hope to make the transition easier. It’s how I am trying to keep the sabbatical pace and peace when I step back into juggling work and family. It’s how I am preparing for the transition.
Weirdly, now that the end is immanent and even though I would prefer to continue traveling in our 300 square foot home on wheels, I am ready. I am excited about teaching an intensive class next week. I am excited about starting a new play therapy podcast (something I’ve had time to plan and prepare). I am excited about interacting with students again.
I’m still nervous about losing this happy balance with family time, but I feel better equipped. Actually, I just feel better.
Really, aren’t those the best kind of endings? When you leave wiping a single tear because it hurts a little to go. When you look back because you aren’t quite ready to look ahead. When you avoid saying goodbye because you don’t want to admit that it is over. Aren’t those the best endings? It means that it was good, great even. It means it was meaningful and mattered. It means that something touched you deeply. It means that life is different, better, because of what you experienced. Yep, that’s the best kind of ending, so it must be a little sad. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be as good. I’m grateful to be sad about this ending.
God’s creation is a life-giving inhale for all of us, and Sabbath is the exhale.
Shelly Miller
The past two musing posts have been about how to keep some of the sabbatical pace when I get back home. I love the simplicity and slower pace of this sabbatical, and I want to hang on to that when I go back to “the real world.”
I determined that I wanted to limit my projects to just two to three at a time, leave open chunks of family time, and keep a flexible weekly schedule instead of an insane daily list. But to pare down and have more open spaces and flexibility, then I have to give some things up. During this trip, I’ve had the luxury of paring down hours of meetings, office hours and teaching time that are required when I get back.
I listened to a podcast recently that gathered data from teachers and learned that they average about 58 hours a week, and some much more. The data didn’t come from professors, but I suspect that most professors work well over the standard 40-hour work week, too, for many of the same reasons. Even even when not working, we think about it a lot. It isn’t that the job requires working so many hours. I can be a great professor without working around the clock. It’s just that most of us love our students so much that we really pour ourselves into our work. It’s rewarding. So, work expands to fit all the time we will dedicate to it.
The first thing I need to give up, then, is allowing work to expand past my set work boundaries. There will always be more I want to do, another email to read, or another thing I want to create to make material easier to learn. This means I need to map out my work hours and have firm ending times.
Related to that, I want to “close the shop” to use a phrase from author Brook Noel. I’ve been practicing with 7:00 in the evening, but it will have to be 8:00 or 8:30 on teaching nights. Closing the shop just means that I’m truly off-duty, including things that need to get done at home. I love this idea! It gives me a couple hours to relax before bed, and it automatically creates time to read, watch TV or play games with the kids.
Finally, the most important thing I can do is just pare down the projects. I am delighted to report that I have. As I’m prepping for the new school year, I’ve finished things and let things go without filling those spots. Some of that I did as preparation for leaving on this trip. My list is much more manageable for this school year than it has been in the past seven.
So, to keep this sabbatical pace (and peace), I’m going to create specific work hours, keep the practice of closing the shop, and keep a shorter projects list. This opens up the time and space for focusing on just a few projects, having open chunks of family time, and keeping a flexible weekly schedule. This is much more how I want to live.
Sabbatical may have just changed my life!
This week marked our official turn of the steering wheel back towards Nashville, but not without a few more fun stops on the way.
We left Washington and dipped back into Oregon to see Multnomah Falls. We didn’t get to that on the way north, and it was mostly on our way. The falls were pretty, but the thermometer was rising and we prefer to be cool weather travelers.
We crossed Eastern Oregon quickly, already missing the Pacific breezes. Tim had a teenage memory of visiting Emmett, Idaho, so we stopped in the small town, plugged in, and turned on the air conditioning. We landed there for a couple of days. Aside from a walk-up burger and shakes meal at Roe Ann’s with prices from the ‘80’s (when he last ate there), we enjoyed a couple of afternoons at the library with librarians who clearly love their work. Let me just say again that we love local libraries!
Idaho has been the most surprising state on this entire trip. I didn’t know much about the state other than its reputation for producing tons of spuds and snow for skiing. Sometimes, Idaho has the record for coldest temperature in the continental United States. Brrr! But like my misconception about deserts always being hot, Idaho isn’t always cold. The other three seasons are pretty amazing.
It’s still full spring here, and spring is beautiful. Yes, we have been enjoying spring since February, our longest spring ever. The sun doesn’t set until nearly 10 p.m. this time of year, giving us luxuriously long days.
Another Idaho surprise was Craters of the Moon National Monument. We’d never heard of it before, but the host at the visitor center suggested it as a must see on our route to Yellowstone, so we stopped to see. I’m so glad we visited with him because he was right.
A lava rock moonscape eerily stretched for miles. We hiked the unusual geology, created by lava bubbling up from fissures, not a volcano. The highlight for the kids were the lava tubes, where we scrambled over rocks so much that we were all pretty sore and slow the next day. After earning their junior ranger badges, the kids hiked them again without a single complaint of being too tired. The highlight of the day was meeting new friends from the Netherlands.
We drove through Sun Valley and then finished the week in Idaho Falls. A recurring thought for Tim and me all week was, “We could live here!” Who knew Idaho had so much that we liked? (Don’t worry, Mom, we aren’t planning to move… to Idaho.)
Next week we’re planning Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, so check back next Friday for our next update.
If you read last week’s musing blog post, two posts ago, you know that I’ve been considering how to keep the sabbatical pace when I return to Nashville.
I need to define what I want to keep. During the last six months, I had two things that I needed to get done: write a book and rest. We also homeschooled, traveled, visited friends and family, and kept up with work, but the entire time, I was extremely clear about those two objectives. It wasn’t all I did, but it was all I that knew must be done.
I wrote a chapter a week and slept more, adapting rest to sunrise and sunset. I had highly focused writing time in the morning, and family exploring in the afternoons. I read books for fun to rest my mind, and journal articles to include in my chapters. It was a great balance between writing and rest. Because of that, it was easy to feel successful. That is what I want to keep going forward.
I want just a few clear priorities that balance each other. I want to trust that other important things will also get done, but only those few things are essential. Life back home felt like playing tennis with ball machine locked on super sonic speed. A better pace means only one ball at a time, spaced apart.
Another thing I want is time with my family. When it comes to relationships, quantity is important. One of my favorite things this trip was asking the kids about their high/low of the day. Lately, we’ve changed it to looking for something great that happened. Most days, it is a difficult choice to pick just one great thing. When we hike, I get to learn about the kids because we have time to talk. I am a counselor, so I really value this talk time!
Back home, I worked a lot. My husband jokes that my job is flexible. I can work my 80 hours a week any time I want. I don’t work THAT much, but I was writing in the early mornings, trying to add homeschool instruction in the mornings, going to work, and teaching graduate classes a couple of evenings a week. We had very few family hikes, and I was so tired that I didn’t think to ask about the high/low when I got home. I want to do a better job of protecting that quantity of time together.
Finally, I was able to be flexible on this sabbatical trip. I am a planner married to Mr. Spontaneity. All too often back home, Tim would ask me to do something spur of the moment, but I had not planned for it, so he’d often go without me. He didn’t have a partner to have fun with, and his wife would often be bummed about missing the fun.
We both needed the fun outing together, but I couldn’t switch everything I had planned around fast enough. On this trip, I’ve learned a few things that allow me to still plan, but with the flexibility and time cushion to adapt. It helped tremendously to not have so many plates spinning. I secretly loved not always knowing where we be the next day or how long we would stay.
These things aren’t easy for me, but there are the three things from sabbatical that I want to maintain when we get home. Maybe simplifying for sabbatical can have a lasting impact.
Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.
Rosa Luxemburg
The Clock Is Ticking
I have been procrastinating on writing this blog for the last few days. I usually enjoy these blog posts, but I found myself putting it off repeatedly, so I asked why.
Today, I am ready to deal with why I wanted to distance myself from this next post. Today, we are officially beginning to head Joshua’s hood toward home. Today, the countdown begins for when we need to be home. We have three weeks, 21 days.
That sounds like a long time if you think of this as a vacation. A three-week vacation in the United States is long and luxurious. But we aren’t on vacation. This is a sabbatical trip, and it has been our way of life since January.
This 21-day ticking clock is more like a moving date drawing ever closer while we still have so much we want to do. The thing is, I don’t want to move. I just want my yard to keep moving as we travel in our home.
Once we get home, life will go back to what normal was before we left. That’s what I needed the sabbatical away from. I want to hang on to this pace of life, this time with the kids, and this chance to reconnect with friends and family. I feel my hands grasping to hold on, but it’s like trying to hold on to sand that keeps escaping between my fingers.
And that is the dilemma I have been wrestling with for most of this trip: How can I live at this pace when I return?
I don’t know.
As I prepare for my classes, which I truly love to teach, I feel the pace quicken. As students start asking questions (we have outstanding students are eager to prepare for the July class and know the wisdom of planning ahead), I can feel myself jumping into problem solving mode.
If I’m honest, I enjoy all that, too. If I only had a career to consider, I’d be happy as a clam with a highly fulfilled life… except I’d be lonely and wistful about the family I didn’t have. Thankfully, I do have a family, and that part of life is so full that loneliness is occasionally appealing. I love them even more than my career, but they also require a quicker pace, answering questions, and problem-solving.
These six months have felt more balanced (whatever that is) between work and family. I’ve worked, too. I’ve written a book, kept up with emails, prepped my classes, and planned a podcast launch. But work hasn’t grown to boulder size, squeezing out precious family time. On top of that, I’ve been able to travel, hike, see new places and visit people we haven’t seen in a long time.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
I’m afraid that I’m going to lose everything I have gained.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
I know I can’t stuff all of the sabbatical experience that I want to retain into all that life back in Nashville and contain it all week by week. Instead, I’ll have to cherry pick exactly what I want to keep with me (family adventures, hikes, writing, and having enough time) and what I will let go (yeah, this is the part that is hard).
Tick. Tick. Tick.
And I have to figure it out in 21 days.
“Time is the longest distance between two places.”
Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie
If you keep up with the blog, you know that I’ve missed a week of posting. That is because we took a week off to renew our wedding vows. After a big push to complete editing the book draft, I took some time away from writing, including the blog.
I didn’t stop taking photos, though, so I’ll share some extra with you today.
For those of you who don’t know us, Tim and I renew our wedding vows every year in a different state. This was his idea because we wanted to stay committed to our marriage in a culture of divorce. Marriage is hard work! Without intentionality around this commitment, it would be easy to lose it even though we value it. This was our 23rd anniversary, and we renewed our vows at Crater Lake National Park in Oregon.
The kids and the dog served as our witnesses.
We almost changed the plan because it was snowing there and the rim road was completely closed. (We didn’t know at the time that they don’t expect it to open until July because of snow.) The weather reports said it was snowing, and we were concerned about the roads. Thankfully, we decided to at least see what it was like.
The roads were perfectly clear as far as it had been plowed, and the snow was beautiful. The average snowfall at Crater Lake is 44 feet a year! We don’t see snow like that in Tennessee. We were not expecting so much fun in the snow in late May. By the fourth day, though, the snow had melted considerably.
In case you are wondering we have renewed our vows in:
A lake so vibrant in color that it looks like a fine art painting.
Stefanie Payne
