This weekend I took a spur of the moment trip to see a few friends in Nashville Tennessee and to go sport climbing for the first time. I ended up bouldering at the Obed and climbing the first V6 I've ever climbed, and then we went to King's Bluff where I got to climb lead for the first time. I ended up banging my foot really bad and had to be carried out, but I had such a fun time. I couldn't ask for better friends and I don't know what my life would be like without weekend trips and endless amounts of sunflower seeds.

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.”

We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes, and dollars, but it all comes to the same thing: peace in our time. A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau's dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.

"In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice… which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones."

Florida State University and rock climbing.