I'm sitting here tonight eating an enormous pile of sugar snap peas from my CSA share and feeling rather happy about my new alpine rock garden, which is entering its final stages of completeness:

If you click on that image, you'll spy down on the right-hand side a little example of artemesia absinthium.  That's right, the hallucinogenic plant that was used to make Absinthe, which is now banned in the USA.  I'm rather proud of that, because I grew it from seed.  Neighborhood covenants are stupid things, and so although I am forced to comply with them, I'll do it my own way.  Like, by planting psychoactive plants in my garden, for example.

At any rate, this rock garden is kind of cracking me up.  Time was a few years ago that I was constantly driving myself to climb harder, and bigger, and more often.  If I didn't get on a 6000m+ peak twice a year with numerous smaller training climbs added in, I considered the year to be a loss, and I still have many friends who think that way.  One of them wrote to me recently to see what was up, and asked if I would be interested in a pedestrian climb, like maybe Mt. Adams.  I laughed and told him that I wasn't sure that I remembered which end of the rope is the sharp end, anymore.  And now my token bit of alpinism in this home are a few pictures of former-me in some daredevil situation, and a pretty alpine rock garden.

I've been systematically getting rid of arbitrary goals in my life, like those aforementioned climbing goals.  So what if I don't climb a lot anymore?  I like my rock garden.  I like playing guitar in the evening.  So that's what I do now.  Some of my friends are beating themselves to pieces, thinking that they MUST be pushing new routes, climbing harder, being more whatever, and I think: would you feel this way if you were all alone, cast away on an island?  Because so much of that stuff is ego, and just fuel for conversation.  I mean, don't get me wrong, I sure do love that exhilaration of thousands of feet of exposure, of sunrise high up on a truly high peak, of doing something that is right off the pages of national geographic.  But I don't like the inevitable sickness in the camps; nor the machismo of people (men and women both) who are driven to one-up each other, daily; nor the overall senselessness of a life in which one is always looking for the next thing.  There are a lot of good things to be said for sitting in one's garden, planted and tended with one's own labor, as the sun sets.

Which is not to say that I won't climb and adventure again.  Just that the focus on arbitrary isn't something that I think I'll care much about, anymore.