12 Ways to Recover from a Traumatic Brain Injury

Over the last 60 days of 2021, we successfully crowdfunded printing and shipping costs for Liberatus Volume One. During that time, I was personally in contact with 184 stakeholders, from quick texts to conversations lasting up to 90 minutes. Ultimately 31% of those stakeholders backed the campaign, and today, there are more than 200 copies shipped to supporters across the political spectrum and across the country.

In the final months of 2021, I went all-in for the campaign to make sure we made it across the finish line, based on the high-quality work of all of our creators. To create it, we filled 224 pages with photos; long-form stories, firsthand perspectives, and interviews; and policy research to help us all become leaders for American unity. During that time, to make sure my immediate needs were covered financially, I had active accounts on the Uber and Instacart platforms. The weekend before Christmas, I spent about 30 hours over three days, as I recall, driving for Uber and earned about $998 for the week. Uber, by the way, isn’t a situation where you drive people across town real quick—it’s a situation where you drive for hours, giving customer service and conversation to passengers, playing music, following GPS, keeping track of where traffic is and how, if at all, to navigate around it, avoiding hitting pedestrians—whether in crosswalks or in the middle of K street pushing a grocery cart (I’m not making this up), cleaning up pet hair out of the back seat when necessary, finding grocery stores for restroom and snack breaks, concentrating despite weather—from bright sun to pouring rain to dark unfamiliar streets, and on and on. In short, it’s a job that requires a high level of alertness, concentration, and high-quality customer service to do it right.

I first learned my way around DC driving for a Member of Congress, and I’ve had up to four Members in my car at one time. In the past, I have worked regular 12+ hour days on the Hill covering both scheduling/operations and policy; I pulled an all-nighter to effectively lead the team to put Mark Bauer on the ballot in Texas in 2020, and worked six days a week leading both an Instacart team with a roster of about 60 members and the Liberatus team while training for and running ultramarathons.

Running and fitness were how I stayed sane-and still are—and how I would rig the days to make sure I got as much out of them as I could. On the days that I would drive for Uber in 2021, I would run first thing in the morning, work on Liberatus through the morning and early afternoon—then restart the day by swimming in the pool mid-afternoon. After an early dinner, I’d drive through the late afternoon and evening.

It’s surreal that almost three years have passed.

Time now is condensed; the passing of time feels like a collapsed heap of rubble, not a coherent sequential order.

Recovering at Virginia Beach, Virginia

A family member told me that you rebuild your life brick by brick. What follows are some of the bricks that I recommend for healing from a traumatic brain injury. I woke up one day in a hospital, in a different body. I could feel that something more painful than running an ultramarathon had happened, but I don’t have any cohesive, clear memories. There are some memories that are cut out from any timeline—they are out floating in the universe somewhere, disconnected from any before and any after, but I assume from the moment of impact and shortly after.

They say I was hit from behind by a running horse on a hiking trail. It’s clear to me that an overwhelming amount of force hit my body, and these are the bricks of rebuilding—the damage happens in an instant; recovery takes years.

1.      Do resume and increase activity after two weeks and keep pushing. The ER gave me notes that say things like “don’t do crossword puzzles” and “don’t do homework.” It’s still not clear to me how to not think—and there was no clear timeline for how long to “not think.” While I rested early on, I have since learned that after two weeks it’s better to start pushing. Ultimately, I did, but it wasn’t clear to me for a long time if pushing was hurting myself or if it was recovery, and I had to figure that out on my own. My right leg was a mess after—and I still feel the injury every day—so I especially recommend getting back in the pool as soon as possible. In addition to being calming and fun, I’ve also found it helps with balance and was recommended to me by my vestibular therapist.

2.      Do get to a concussion clinic very soon after the injury. Doctors who have worked with brain injuries know what to check for and don’t minimize anything. I should have had more tests done right away with more therapy recommendations—especially for balance, gaze stability, and eye convergence.

3.      Do not take medications with side effects. Ultimately, this is up to the person to decide. Over the first two months, my sense of sound and light were horribly out of whack. Sound, like music playing or traffic on a nearby road, wouldn’t sit in the background—it was full force, full volume competing with all other sounds for attention. Bright light also seemed to agitate everything, so I would wear sunglasses in the grocery store or even at home. The first neurologist I saw recommended an anti-depression medication that doesn’t work, but does work to calm brain chemicals that get out of whack following a concussion. It also gives you constipation and severe depression—which is why I don’t recommend it. I also took medications for memory—that brought back some memories, or brought others to the forefront of my mind, including a nightmare I think I had the night after the injury, and some other negative memories. I do think it helped with general clarity—but it also increased dizziness.

4.      Do try BrainTree Nutrition. Created by neurologists and former NFL athletes, my impression is that BrainTree has helped significantly in terms of mental clarity and alertness. My impression is that I experienced some limited benefits in the first week of taking their supplements for mental clarity and stress, and that these accelerated after two months. My cognitive focus also is affected by weather significantly now, so a good weather month can also be the reason why I might feel good and clear-headed. I am also experimenting with their Brain Water mix for days when barometric pressure is changing or when storms are moving through the area, and my impression is that this may mitigate some of the effects.

5.      Do keep a journal of how you’re doing. The biggest reason for this is that it will help track trends—in my case, time was condensed and I experienced memory loss, so it was always difficult to say if something happened two days ago or two and a half weeks ago—and there were several instances when I would go back and look at my notes and be surprised by how much time had passed. Most importantly though, it gave me a way to track how consistently I experienced various issues, which itself is empowering because it means that I regained a sense of what was going on.

6.      Do know that what we know about the brain isn’t necessarily very advanced, and terminology can be weird. One of the biggest examples is describing brain injury survivors as “irritable.” It’s an outside-in perspective. If you’re sitting next to a campfire, and the smoke suddenly shifts direction with the wind and starts blowing in your face and you jump up, cough, and move to another side of the fire, are you irritable? Nope. Real changes mean real reactions, and this is why talking with doctors in places like concussion clinics—who really understand what’s going on and don’t blow it off—is so helpful.

7.      Do eat healthy and stay hydrated. It matters all of the time, but it matters more after a TBI.

8.      As noted above, do get in the pool ASAP. It’s calming, great exercise, recalibrates balance, relieves stress, and improves sleep.

9.      Do your PT routine, if you have a physical injury—and know that improvements will take time. I have no idea the number of needles that I’ve had shoved into my leg, but dry needling certainly helped. It also took 2.5 years to regain feeling in my lower right calf, and now that it’s back I can feel a trigger point I stretch out every day. Ultimately, between physical therapy and vestibular therapy, I have I think 66 variations of exercises and stretches to do—currently I’m focused on what I think will help the most and conversing with my therapists about that question specifically.

10.  Do give herbal tea a try, like spearmint tea or Evening in Missoula, spend time in nature, including cold plunging in the ocean, take deep breaths, and give it time for the stress to wear off—in my case, the psychological stress has been mostly survival after the fact, not the event itself, although the stress my body sustained was extreme, and as my vestibular therapists says—The Body Keeps the Score.

11.  Do get a brain DTI. I personally found it validating and clarifying to have a scan that shows all of the issues that seem vague (and not necessarily believed by others) show up on a brain scan. I was confident that if technology existed, it would show some kind of damage, and I was surprised by the fact that a DTI can show precise damage to precise brain areas which control precise functions. My doctor noted that DTIs have been used for members of the military after concussions sustained by attacks by Iranian rockets, and help put imagery and language to what would otherwise be mystifying to many.

12.  Do speak up for what you need. On the day that I woke up in the hospital, I found out I was being sent home as soon as I woke up. So I ultimately got up and walked out—I immediately chose to focus on recovery and the steps necessary to recover, even though moments before I had no clue what had happened, or where I was, and I intentionally moved my arms and limbs to make sure they could still move. For brain injury survivors, there can and should be a straightforward plan with the goal of resuming normal life. Speaking up for what you need is about making sure that the plan gets put in place to thrive; it’s about tenacity.

Recovery at Virginia Beach, Virginia

Solar Eclipse - April 8, 2024

There are four components of human energy, according to The Energy Project and the authors of The Power of Full Engagement. Their breakdown of physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual energy is a helpful way to frame and evaluate performance. An injury to my brain and body in 2021 has depleted all four.

And yet my sense of purpose has deepened. Spiritually, I believe that God participates in human suffering—but from my injury to war in Gaza, it’s still incredibly incoherent.

I think it’s up to us to create culture and ways of existing that support human life. While followers of Christ should explore motives for work—especially in American politics—the solar eclipse of April 8, 2024 reminded me that we were created to reflect our Creator. Creativity and mastering a craft shouldn’t be stifled.

Ultimately, the eclipse as I saw it from Alexandria, Virginia was a chance to regroup and restore energy and hope that one day the chaos will end, and remember that until then there are natural forces beyond our control or ability to create.

Just after the moon reached its fullest coverage of the sun at 3:20 PM, someone walked over and handed me an extra pair of eclipse glasses. Kayakers rowed into view under the moon-like glow.

Earlier in the day, I accepted admission into GW’s graduate program in New Media Photojournalism. I’m eager to learn more and grateful to have placed another creative marker down—with a lot more to learn and create in the future—even while recovering and rebuilding.

Consistent

“Is this real?” was one of the top of mind questions when I woke up in what I assumed was a hospital bed on December 28, 2021. Truthfully, I also assumed I was having a weird dream. Over time, the reality of the injury—getting hit from behind by a spooked, runaway horse on a trail in Joshua Tree National Park—has sunk in slowly.

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The photos here were taken in June 2023 in my basement apartment in Alexandria, Virginia. To push myself creatively during a season where I am recovering from injury and spending 8-16 hours a week on physical and vestibular therapy, I set up my camera and tripod in my mostly empty apartment, turned on the timer, and photographed exercises in my routine. When I moved in last April, I was struck by the angles of light in the unit despite being in a basement. For these photos, I wanted to capture some of the unique and bizarre poses that therapy exercises create in the setting where I did them, with light at different times of day creating interesting angles and shadows.

The photos here include shots of me balancing on a cushion, losing my balance on the cushion, reaching to touch a soccer ball while standing on one leg on the cushion, drawing out the letters of the alphabet with a soccer ball, and rocking forwards and backwards on the cushion.

Prompted by the necessity of updating my portfolio for GW’s Master of Arts in New Media Photojournalism, the purpose of the photo essay is to fight to recover and fight for creativity in a very catastrophic season of life. When I look at these photos, my photographic skills remind me of how I felt with running years ago before I started running marathons and ultramarathons and had not yet found my stride or fallen in love with it. I’m eager to get to the place where creating a photo set like this feels routine and the end result is high-quality. I’m also grateful for the chance to document the present as it is. The photos are blurry, grainy, and not perfect. They are disorienting. And yet, they capture a disorienting season and the fascinating ways sunlight brings life to the world.

PS: I’ve set a goal for Liberatus of raising $2,000 in monthly commitments by the end of the year so that I can create critical leader training and compile Volume Two. If you’d like to create the mission to inspire American unity with me, you can set up your donation on the Liberatus website. Look for the option to sign up as a Liberatus Advocate. Thank you!

Lock 21 to Harpers Ferry

 

A note on a new running goal, injury recovery, Liberatus, and a new creative offering to help other leaders be their best. Logo design by David Paxton.

It was April 17, 2021, and spring flowers lined the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal trail at Lock 21. The fresh green, blue, and purple colors vividly marked the finish of the 26.2 mile course that started in Old Town Alexandria.

What I remember feeling as I finished those final paces, and sat in the sun in my Houdini jacket, was gratitude that I could get up and run 26.2 miles on my own and feel great at the finish. I remember thinking that there would come a day that I might not be able to do so, and as my sense of gratitude deepened with those last strides, I decided that if this had to be my last marathon distance, it would be okay. It was a perfect ending.

It was not the ending. I went on to run 26.2 miles a month later, and then completed a personal goal of running marathon distances on back-to-back weekends in October, and followed that up with a fifth run, a 50k, at the Liberatus Ultra & Trailfest in November.

On Christmas Day, 2021, my sister and I ran 20 miles in Joshua Tree National Park, starting at sunrise. It felt great. After the run I noted that I didn’t feel like I had done anything. It was a perfect way to spend Christmas morning.

On December 28, 2021, I woke up in a bed made up with white sheets, surrounded by a yellow-ish curtain and bright flourescent lights overhead, and assumed I was in a hospital. I was not wearing clothes that were mine—my Houdini jacket, hydration pack, and other clothes had been cut off, and I felt drugged, confused, and exposed.

I moved my right leg to make sure I could still move it, wondered what happened, and how long recovery would take.

As of this writing, that question remains unanswered, and I’m grateful for the physical and vestibular therapy routine I have that now includes 30 exercises. Between the two, therapy has been taking up to sixteen hours of my time each week—while trying to manage the catastrophic financial loss from injury, and make sure that my brain fully heals.

I’m committed to therapy because I see what’s on the other side of regaining strength and stability: I still hope to set PRs in marathon, half marathon, and ten mile distances, and I hope to tackle a new ultra distance of 50 miles.

As I rebuild my brain capacity and my body, and notice significant improvements through therapy, it’s time to project into the future and plan for a new distance.

After that run that ended at Lock 21, I mapped out a route from there to Harpers Ferry, with hopes of finishing that portion of the trail, which intersects the AT. Next April, as I enter the last year of my 30s, I want to finish the 44.3 miles of the route in one day as I build towards the 50 mile goal.

I want to run in solidarity with everyone who gets back up from injury, and fights to recover. I want to run in solidarity with the displaced, many of whom have traveled many more miles by foot through dangerous areas to escape violence and oppression. I want to run in solidarity with people who have done what we asked them to do in the military, and whose service includes trauma worse than mine at no fault of their own. I’m going to run in solidarity with everyone at the so-called bottom of the economy, who aren’t paid for the wealth they create. And I want to put this new distance on the calendar now as I look ahead through ongoing recovery to keep fighting for what I believe in.

By planning and completing this run, I want to highlight the vital work of the Liberatus community. There’s a direct correlation from how we organize to how we govern, and inspiration for American unity is a piece of the answer for how we can make our country more just and free, strengthening the American mind to help us all become stronger leaders. It’s a critical piece of creating a culture where solid leaders are viable, and it’s up to all of us to create that culture in beautiful and artistic ways. While I am still writing Liberatus Volume Two and onboarding for new leaders, I also want to take the time to acknowledge that we as an organization don’t have the resources necessary for me to lead effectively and survive professionally through ongoing recovery and the catastrophic financial fallout it caused. Endurance is the defining value of the Liberatus community, and as I build endurance for the long-haul, I want to take time to heal and recover with my focus on a new and big personal goal so that I can be ready to move forward when the backing exists to charge ahead serving more Americans all over the country through the bigger professional goal of biannual publication.

With this run, and because of the significant financial loss from injury and the Volume One cycle, I also want to introduce a new offering here on my personal site to help candidates, campaigns, brands, and leaders define their values, their stories, and craft a campaign narrative that’s rooted in how we could and should be leading right now. We cannot continue on the path of suffocating people in the streets until they die, or of attacking the Capitol when our political goals are rejected, or of shutting down outdoor recreation when the times call for doubling down on health and wellness. While Liberatus is a community mission and reflects community participation from many diverse stakeholders, my work here will be a solo offering. Taking what I have learned over the last eight years of working with professionals in American politics and government, my skill in crafting stories and core values, and a much deeper view of how we should go about leading the country, I am available to help any campaign, candidate, brand, or leader say something that matters. Click here for a full overview.

I know what it feels like to be winning internally even when circumstances say otherwise. The wealth we need to build right now is internal and relational—and as I recover, I want to help you win on election night, or at any climactic moment of your career, regardless of injury, and regardless of the vote count.

Let’s go for another PR! If you’d like to participate in the run as a fellow-runner, pacer, or crew member, or connect for a conversation about your campaign narrative, message me through the tab below.

Write Me

Write Me

Virginia Beach, VA

“Columbian College of Arts and Sciences is pleased to admit you to the M.A. program in the field of New Media Photojournalism effective for the Fall 2023 semester.”

The photo here is one that I included in my porfolio with my application to graduate school at George Washington University, and was taken in Virginia Beach, VA, January 2023. I took this photo to explore my own personal style and ability. The interplay of light and water creates endless possibilities for photography because the color, mood, light, and water all shift and change throughout the day, and every second.

What follows is a portion of my statement of purpose, and I hope that I will be financially and professionally able to complete the program.

I’m convinced that developing and strengthening other leaders means I have to find ways to develop and strengthen my own talents as well. I think that it’s true that I can only lead people as far as I have gone myself—and yet leadership is also about asking people to go somewhere we have never been either.

My purpose in applying for the New Media Photojournalism program is to take the time to deepen my understanding of visual storytelling so that I can not only create beautiful work but also lead others to inspire American unity too. Politics is a tough field where one can only thrive through strong relationships, and I’m eager to form deeper ties with other creators who share the same passion for artistic excellence.

My work is inspired in many ways by my grandparents, who demonstrated what it means to love others as they loved themselves and also how to be conservative and liberal at the same time. While work in Congress was always about conforming to a political identity, when I was with them growing up, I was free to be human.

One year for my birthday they gave me a disposable underwater camera. Looking back, the idea of photography as it relates to water was magical to me—and it’s one of those natural creative choices that I wish I had paid attention to and pursued earlier in my life.

But it was also at my grandparents that I would often pick up, read, and look at the photos in publications like Time magazine and U.S. News & World Report. It was at my grandparents that I watched footage of the aftermath of the attacks on September 11—a day that arguably influenced my choice to study politics because it was clear then how much leadership matters.

Going to grad school at this point in my career is about starting over with what inspired me in the first place. And it’s about taking my knowledge of the political process and how movements are formed and using that knowledge to inspire our country in beautiful, artistic ways to choose unity again. It’s about becoming a better leader and creator so that I can develop and strengthen other leaders too.

Campobello Island, Canada

And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

What is our motive for creating, for advocacy for the displaced, for unity? With the Liberatus Volume One creative cycle complete, these are the opening questions to the creation of its sequel.

The photo here, from the northern edge of Campobello Island, Canada, taken in August 2016, has become one of my favorites as I look back over the years of taking thousands of photos for Liberatus.

With one monumental creative cycle complete, and another one just beginning, here’s to looking back, looking forward, and letting the Spirit of God guide as we follow Christ to create something new, as beloved children of God.

A 5.5 Year Creative Journey Ends

Liberatus Volume One arrived rolling down the middle of the street on a hand pallet truck. August greenery towered above, creating a jungle-like backdrop.

David, the delivery driver wearing a dark green polo, left the boxes stacked on a pallet in front of the steps to the house.

It was August 16, 2022, and it was the beginning of the end of a creative journey that officially began five and a half years before on February 15, 2017. Liberatus now has supporters in twenty states and local communities of support in Greenville, South Carolina, and Alexandria, Virginia.

It was a team project and a team mission to inspire American unity, and we made it here because we had a spirit of endurance. We launched the Refuge theme in the wake of a horrid church split, and continued during a global pandemic, through the hell of seeing George Floyd’s final moments, and we imagined a new way forward after a failed crowdfunding campaign, after the attack on the US Capitol by our fellow Americans. We finally successfully reached a crowdfunding goal and completed the refining work on its 224 pages while I recovered from a brain injury.

How, in the end, did we make it here, and how might one survive a five-and-a-half year creative endeavor? As a practical life habit, endurance means taking risks, giving up what doesn’t contribute to the end goal, and consistency. We made it here by putting in the work; you have to run a marathon to run a marathon. Making it here for me meant working long hours six days a week for a solid two years of the creative cycle. But the desire for risk, sacrifice, and consistency begins in the heart, mind, and spirit.

Sin is “humanity’s endless capacity for self-rejection,” Richard Rohr says Henri Nouwen once told him privately. And it’s easy to see—now that we’ve made it to the end of this creative journey, and our work is out in the world, on your coffee tables and in your conversations with friends—that all of the openly hostile comments along the way were nothing more than self-rejection on the part of the person who delivered them. Internalizing what they said is self-rejection, too.

Creativity is an adventure in endurance that requires us to face our inner dragons, to find ourselves alone on the trail and decide for ourselves what matters and what we will create to better humanity with the power that we have. We can’t live creative lives and self-reject at the same time.

Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the “Beloved.” Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence.

-Henri Nouwen, January 10, 2022 Daily Meditation

Once upon a time, we were created to reflect our Creator, and that’s the adventure we live. The adventure will continue.

“In him we live and move and have our being.”

The photos on the pages of Liberatus Volume One pictured here were taken by Anastasia Waltschew and Border Perspective. The pages of Volume One pictured here and the South Nixon logo were designed by David Paxton.

Joshua Tree National Park

Desert sand tumbled beneath every falling stride, as if running on snow. The air—clean, dry, natural—had tasting notes far different than the mucky breath exhaled by the Potomac. Here in California, before landing on the trail I drank my coffee with the magical effect of waking up on Eastern time while the clocks read Pacific.

And now just after sunrise two days before Christmas 2020, morning light fired across Joshua Tree National Park, striking the tops of the rock piles and walls before gently falling on the full landscape. As I see it, the park is the original Magic Kingdom, and this morning run its parade of sorts.

“I savored that first physical awakening, that brilliant moment before the mind is fully clear, when the limbs and joints first begin to loosen and the material body starts to melt away. Solid to liquid.

Faster, I told myself. Faster.”

— Phil Knight, Shoe Dog

The return to Joshua Tree was a parade of memories, of first coming here in 2011 after seven grueling months of establishing a congressional office, and again in 2015 after four years of working in it. During that second trip, a road-side shot of the drive through the park that my brother took became the first image used to convey the intent of the Liberatus online journal that we would launch in the coming weeks. The desert would depict a place of authentic words, where the superfluous noise of political speech would be stripped away, where we would journey to find and express reality. Now at the end of 2020, just weeks after coming off of managing a congressional race, just weeks before launching a Kickstarter for Liberatus Journal Volume One, the sand tumbled beneath every falling stride, and the twisting branches of Joshua trees floated by in the air with that same feeling of fireflies rising at dusk as far as one could see.

Liberatus Volume One design by David Paxton. Photo by Anastasia Waltschew.

On Christmas Eve in the late afternoon, I returned to take photos as moody clouds hung like ornaments dripping precipitation over the desert. There’s something spiritual about returning to the same place over and over. Run its trails and the place will run inside you—it’s this internal ethos of peace that I imagine can define American politics.

One of Nike’s mantras is, “If you have a body, you’re an athlete.” It was in part this energy that years ago inspired my own drive to create. Maybe good governance needs its own spark of electricity. “If you’re a human, you’re a peacemaker.”

“And then it happened. As my young heart began to thump, as my pink lungs expanded like the wings of a bird, as the trees turned to greenish blurs, I saw it all before me, exactly what I wanted my life to be. Play.

Yes, I thought, that’s it. That’s the word. The secret of happiness, I’d always suspected, the essence of beauty or truth, or all we ever need to know of either, lay somewhere in that moment when the ball is in midair, when both boxers sense the approach of the bell, when the runners near the finish line and the crowd rises as one. There’s a kind of exuberant clarity in that pulsing half second before winning and losing are decided. I wanted that, whatever that was, to be my life, my daily life. ”

— Phil Knight, Shoe Dog

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Join the team behind Liberatus and back Volume One on Kickstarter. It will give you inspiration for the journey to overcome us vs them narratives and become Americans the next generation will love.

Now through February 5, all new pledges up to $5,000 will be matched.

Indian Beach

Sunrise beams caught each wave as they jumped from the ocean to Indian Beach, North Carolina. Here at the southernmost isle of the Outer Banks, the sun climbed to the horizon slightly behind my left shoulder.

Questions swelled in my mind about life, about why it was doing what it was doing. Some days when the sun rises, you find you’re exactly where you should be, but where you should be makes no sense, not for yourself, not for others around you.

But following a calling doesn’t answer questions: it provides direction, and not usually in an ego-flattering way.

Sometimes we find ourselves begging reality to be different from what it is. But even if we could change our reality to meet the demands of our ego—or basic human desires, aspirations—we can’t change our calling to be true to ourselves, true to our purpose on this earth, to respond to reality based on the way we are called to respond to reality.

Looking back at these photos from that sunny morning in May 2017, something about the way the light caught each wave drove me to look beyond current circumstances and see the beauty in persistency, in deepening authenticity, in letting the energy inside us create something new over and over every day.

In the January 17 meditation of Henri Nouwen’s Bread for the Journey, he writes that “It is very important to realize that our vocation is hidden in where we are and who we are. We are unique human beings, each with a call to realize in life what nobody else can, and to realize it in the concrete context of the here and now.”

But what about the days when our vocation doesn’t lead to good caffeinated feelings? Accepting the rhythms of our vocation, whatever that means in the here and now, means that we find the mental space to begin forgiving reality for being what it is, as Richard Rohr articulates. Forgiving reality changes our center by changing where we are centered, opens the door to gratitude, which allows us to hope again that our deepest questions and desires are no longer driven by cynicism but by inspiration to create something beautiful again today.

Old Town Alexandria

Above the budding tree tops in Old Town Alexandria, cool evening sunlight swirled with pink-hued clouds, casting a warm glow across the neighborhood. Running these streets on average four times a week—according to Strava—I’ve seen spring gradually devour our city. The branches outside my window started growing again, before buds were noticeable. And then the buds came, and blossoms on this tree, and then that tree, and now the sun rises slightly to the north, enough to squeeze direct rays into my northward facing window, and the grass that was dead now needs to be mowed and the birds are back, having all-day parties in the trees.

“Be surprised by joy,” Henri Nouwen writes. Moving back to Alexandria from Atlanta last summer, we fell into the dark (chocolate) season too fast and I thought perhaps this time it would be final.

But every day we move closer to the best season, the one with 84 degree days and 72 degree nights, the one where the pool is open and you get a good tan while you run, and cold showers are fun again, I am surprised. This year, I’m surprised it’s working again—life is working again.

Being surprised by joy means we can not only see with gratitude sunlight warming the windowsill and the palm tree below it on this afternoon in April, but also means we can find in our past the beautiful moments we experienced in our pain. It means we realize again how rich our joy was when our circumstances looked unhappy, when we were finishing a marathon and no one was there to hand us a bottle of water, but the water we drank came from coconuts and was delicious.

The surprise of joy is that the pain we experience reveals to us the tension in which we finally ask the honest questions that reveal to us our calling. Experiencing anxiety, fear, shame, isolation, uselessness, spiritual oppression, and physical illness are part of our experience of peace, inclusion, and freedom, because our pain provides the contrast necessary to define the way forward, to show us how to become advocates for peace, or how to build thriving communities, or how to surface the passion necessary to create new art. These negative feelings therefore aren’t an end in themselves, but rather our part in the human journey from death to life, revealing to us how surprising joy truly is.

Mount Vernon Trail

The morning light brightened, stretching across the Potomac River just south of Jones Point Park. Seagulls flew aimlessly through the snow-filled sky. A ripple in the water signaled something swimming below the surface. It was the thirteenth of January, 2019, and here I was, camera in-hand, to catch the first snow of the new year. Here, along the water’s edge, mornings are best spent in motion for five miles—longer, of course, if the day allows.

It’s funny how different a place can look when you take the time to pay attention every day. For all of the excitement we find in travel and adventure, sometimes we forget to explore where we live, to see what we can find there, and what it can teach us.

Every morning here, water and light wake up slowly to dance together. It’s a perfect marriage of what Carol Tuttle calls Energy Types. For me, it’s a chance to look in the mirror at the “natural energy that influences how you approach new experiences, relate to people, manage challenges, and move through life in general.” Except, of course, when we look at our reflection in nature, we don’t see ourselves but rather The Divine Dance in which we are invited participants.

Observing how a landscape can change every day reminds us that we change every day, too. It’s as if, in order to move forward, who we become dies when we fall asleep, and in the morning, we begin all over, but with wisdom from the pain or the beauty of the preceding days. Stunning combinations of light and water remind us that somehow all of those prior days belong too, both the absurd and the awesome.

Whiteoak Canyon Trail

On a September afternoon in 2015, the yellow leaf hung by a single silk thread along Virginia’s Whiteoak Canyon Trail. That morning, our car played a game of sorts, curling back and forth to ascend Skyline Drive, the five of us friends inside all gobbled up by the foggy hillsides. But here, the trail opened up to the stream running along with it, and floating in the late-summer-almost-fall breeze was a yellow leaf. It was precisely 12:06:33 PM on the 5th of September, one of those post-August days when summer’s excitement sinks away with the resignation that winter will come, and not even a silk thread can suspend summer’s fall. But summer’s end leads us to desire it even more. The clearer the picture of beauty we have, the more we will want to see it come alive in the world. “This new hunger is the first sign of God’s presence,” Henri Nouwen writes in Making All Things New. “When we remain attentive to this divine presence, we will be led always deeper into the kingdom. There, to our joyful surprise, we will discover that all things are being made new.”

Old Rag

It was the first weekend in May 2017, but spring was slow to creep up the thirty-two hundred feet to the summit of Old Rag. The sides of the Shenandoah hills changed from shades of green to light green to brown as they rose to the sky, fading to blue as they stretched off into the distance. Along the bare open cliffs, the wind ripped through the rocks and trees, chilly through my thin layers. 

The weekend before, my sister and I conquered our first ultra-marathon along the banks of the Potomac just outside Washington, DC. Temperatures rose to 90 degrees, making clothes along the 50 kilometers of trail mostly optional. But today, a week further into spring, we ventured west of the city for a one-day hiking trip and I found myself a little cold, tired, and hungry as we jumped from rock to rock, snuck between crevices, and scrambled up a seeming never-ending ascent of coarse boulders large and small. 

In hindsight, the hike wasn't overly strenuous. Knowing what to expect, the rock scramble makes for an excellent natural obstacle course. When I do it again, I'll be sure to check the weather forecast ahead of time, wake up early enough for coffee and breakfast before setting out, and pack some extra trail food—just like I would when running an ultra—for the ten mile loop to the summit and back, crisscrossing a river through the forest on the way down.

Ocean Beach

Morning, on the West Coast, always comes with the energy of having slept in for hours, at least for those of us who arrive from the Eastern time zone. This week in October 2017 was no exception: every day I woke ready to get going before dawn. I was there for my sister's wedding, and it was an unusually hot week. Afternoon temperatures rose into the 90s, but in the morning—when I wasn't running—as the fog hung over the coast like a blanket clings to a sleepy, late-riser, I walked, cup of coffee in hand, camera slung over my shoulder, down to the pier and the tide pools. In the distance, fog horns called. Above, seagulls cried. Below, surfers soaked in blue-green water. Waves burst open on the rocks and the pier. Slowly, the sun's light crept across the shoreline. These mornings are among my best memories of 2017.