A loud, cold beginning to a marriage

This day 11 years ago I was waking up a married man, a beautiful wife beside me, and (gulp) a blaring ALARM clock at 7am. None of the blissful slow awakenings of these days to the sound of birds outside the window and kids singing Annie down the hall. No sleepy-eyed memories of the night of dancing & singing, no philosophical musings on the new path together.

While the sound of our first morning together was atypical of the ensuing 11 years, the theme sure set the tone. We had to get up and GO. Interact and lead our community on an adventure. Make some more memories. Laugh. Create. All the things that still bind us 11 years later.

On this first morning the "task" was simply to convince as many wedding guests as possible to plunge into the glacier-fed river. The reward - a turn at cutting my shaggy shaggy locks. One by one, screaming loved ones from around the continent took the plunge, then celebrated the Big Plunge sarah and i had taken by hacking off 4 years of blond African growth. Malcolm finished the job with a razor, and I started my new life with a new, clean look.

A typically busy morning-after followed with a community breakfast, clean-up, present-opening, and bidding goodbye to guests. Later that afternoon we finally put on our brand new backpacks and headed into the woods of Mt. Ranier for a honeymoon camping adventure. The leftover wedding cake (chocolate-raspberry truffle) sustained us for a week of no alarms, no Doing, no nothing except being together and looking ahead to a future we could never have guessed at.

This fine summer morning 11 years later I woke up with the same even-more-beautiful woman, the same longer blond hair that aint goin' nowhere, and a deeper (and quieter) Peace than we could ever have imagined on that first clear, fresh-start morning. And rippling over that same deep body of Peaceful water is a day full of purpose and adventure, and even a packing of those same backpacks for another backcountry camping trip.

And the same open wonder and appreciation of each other and the universe, the same passion and purpose and daring that threw us into a glacier-fed river that first morning and into each other's lives the day before, propels us to a busy day of planting over-winter crops, finishing 3 work proposals, 4 loads of laundry to hang dry, a pancake brunch with our tenants, and the all the busy-ness that goes with leaving for a trip tomorrow.

Who needs an alarm when you've got Life to wake you up and a beautiful Wife to meet it with?