When in doubt, reframe your story...
Hey February. What the hell is wrong with you? I have been running in shorts, leggings, heavy layers, no layers — all in the same week. February is always tough. Here in North Carolina it typically hosts the coldest temperatures. And many of the January new year dreams are already devolving into nightmares lol.
Schedules also begin to require commitments. We have an entire year to navigate.
Opportunities to speak across the globe continue to frequent my inbox requiring big decisions and planning. I consulted with a friend of mine that lives on airplanes traveling the world sharing the Art of Perception in the most influential rooms on the planet.
Amy graciously offered to mind meld and help me create an itinerary full of opportunity but in true Bonny fashion—I unilaterally decided to spend 9 days between talks in Amsterdam and Switzerland running the trails in Chamonix, France. Not scheduling additional talks, although a few face-to face impromptu coffees are up for grabs.
Don’t get me wrong. I love facilitating conversations from the stage that invite us all to consider different perspectives and expand how we frame important questions.
But I think I also have the soul of an intuit. I am easily overwhelmed and require frequent pauses to reset and apply the knowledge and lessons learned…
The right thing to do (for me) appears to be buying back my time and pausing in this brief, brilliant, beautiful world and taking it all in.
A recent exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt introduced me to Es Devlin. I love YouTube for allowing deeper dives and archived conversations. Es mentioned something that resonates with me daily. While reading, her hand drifts to where her phone should be — although engaged in something else our brains appeared to have been sensitized to what else we could be doing or reading.
Another reason to practice mindful engagement. My new focus on uninterrupted book and journal article reading has paid off. I am here to report it wasn’t seamless. Dare I say a wee bit uncomfortable at times? Not because it was difficult but that it was persistent. A brain ping nudging me to see if so-and-so responded to a query or did that meeting actually get scheduled. You get the idea.
To launch a narrative though, you have to be engaged. The ability to listen is becoming a lost art form. Storytelling isn’t something you learn from someone telling you how to tell a story. The best resource is probably the Maltravieso cave in Cáceres, Spain dated around 64,000 years ago.
Described as the earliest depiction of cave paintings, I am curious how orated history suddenly became the visual. Now there is a story — real or imagined.
The Smithsonian Magazine shares these images and it reminded me of the best way to learn how to tell stories. Listen to them. Read them. Imagine them.
Think about what inspired you or pulled you in.
Surround yourself with new ideas and simple tools. I discovered the rebirth of a beautiful magazine being brought back to life in the most creative way possible.
Media, especially outdoor media, is broken. The old advertising model is dead, the new way of delivering content is too reliant on affiliate sales, click-bait, and pay-to-play gear reviews. Social media, and the internet at large, is sort of trash.
Nobody writes stories about the joy of going outside. Nobody is interested in tales about how people live, work, and play outside. Nobody, that is, except for those of us working here at Mountain Gazette. Through print, Mountain Gazette aims to deliver stories straight from the hearts of mountain town people to your inbox, feed, and mailbox. And you know, it's working. We sold out of our first revival issue in six weeks. We’ve sold out of every issue since then. We’re great at making magazines, if I may be so bold to say so, because of the collective people it takes to make each issue entirely unique. — Mike Rogge, Mountain Gazette
I am looking forward to reading the stories. Rediscovering the sacred. The joy of being outside on the planet. This tiny little speck that went from a gaseous explosion to literature, art, and music — its amazing what primordial ooze can do — think about what we can do collectively in service of a better space.