Burr,Not bad 😏 hahahaobviously (more than) love this!!!Thanks for all the wonderful responses to my note. I feel so grateful to have made the decision to give my time to these beautiful people. When I quit my “job” back in January I hired a life coach and she encouraged me to write my life’s purpose.Here’s what I wrote.My life’s mantra is to live fully with purpose. This means I will wake each day with enthusiasm and curiosity for living life and I’ll rest each night with the satisfaction of having made the absolute most out-of-my-precious-time.
Why? Because, I want to live. I want to really, really, live. I want to love. I want to feel love. I want to be in love. I want to make love. I want to share love.
I want to enrich my soul and the souls of others.
I want to live on my edges for it is here that I-am-most-fully-alive.
I want to live with less, for the less I have, the more I will have shared, (money, knowledge, time). And, from having shared the more I will learn about myself and the more I will really know what it means to be human.
Then, when this dance finally comes to an end, I-will-own-no-regrets. I will be “rung dry,” having left everything out on the field of life. And as I lay down in a soft meadow, one final time under the summer sun, I will look up to the blue sky and know that I will have lived the life I choose to live.
These words have been my guide since the day I wrote them. Perhaps they are what brought me and my family to Lesvos.Love,BurrOn Thu, Oct 11, 2018 at 8:01 PM Pam Mycoskie <fatfree@sbcglobal.net> wrote:Burr, I am truly BLOWN AWAY by your post. I haven't really been in contact with our flock the past year, but saw your post and was intrigued by your incredible trip with your family so I read every word with tears in my eyes! I so admire your heart and compassion for others. What a life-changing adventure this has been for your entire family. Thank you for sharing and I will definitely start following you on Instagram! I am truly blown away!! Love you! Pam MycoskieOn Wednesday, October 10, 2018 4:36 PM, Michelle MURDOCCA (via 1015caa list) <1015caa@hoffmangroups.org> wrote:
Whoa Burr, amazing, amazing journey that you and your family are on. What a beautiful experience for you and all of those you meet and the lives you touch.Please do keep the stories coming they are so filled with hope, inquiry and magic.Love to you and your family,MichelleIt's been a long time since I connected with many of you so I wanted to send an update on what my family and I have been up to since I left Marin on, cough cough, July 6th. Sorry for the group email but it's the fastest way for me to connect with each of you.As I mentioned above, on July 6th Jane, Ellie, Gwen, and I started a four week road trip and drove across the country. It was my second time driving across the continent as I did a "cannon-ball-run" style trip in a 26' moving truck with my Dad in late June with all of our possessions. The second trip was at a much more leisurely pace as we stopped at a handful of National Parks, camped, swam and ate amazing food along our route. If you've never been to the Hell's Backbone Grill off of route 12 in Boulder, UT you MUST go.After the transcontinental excursion we spent the month of August at my Mom's house on Buzzards Bay in Massachuttes. Her house looks out towards Martha's Vineyard so if you know where that is you know it's a sea of shingled houses with white trim for as far as the eye can see. All in all, the month was easy. I barely saw the kids as they were out playing with their cousins and east coast friends and Jane and I prepared for 9-month trip abroad.We left for "stop one" of our adventure, Greece, on Sept 1st where we spent the first five days in Athens and noodled around the Peloponnese. This was followed by twelve days on the island of Naxos and another 12 on the island of Crete. Naxos was my favorite as we were able to connect with some locals and really get the flavor of what one's life would be like living on a Greek island. The kids got to go to a local school and make a presentation about their lives in California. The Greeks students ate it up and my girls did too.As I sit here and write you all this note, we're in the sixth week of our adventure and are now on the island of Lesvos. Lesvos is the island where Jane's grandparents were married. Opa! It's also the epicenter for the refugee crisis on the planet. No opa! "Moria Camp", is known as hell on earth and it's just a few short miles north of where we're staying here on the island. Google it. Be appalled. The camp was built to hold two thousand people and there are presently nine thousand men, women and children living there. Flockers, this situation is cruel and barbaric.I'm the running coach and self-appointed fundraiser for a French NGO named Yoga and Sport for Refugees. I train 15 to 20 boys from Afghanistan, Iran, and Syria three time a week. We meet up at the local track at 7 pm to stretch, run, and work on core fitness until about 9 pm. Many of these boys walk over three miles just to get to the track and another three miles to return to Moria Camp where they sleep in stone cold containers and makeshift tents. Jane is recruiting women to take exercise classes in a safe place away from the men as sweating is considered "sexy" and not allowed in many of these cultures. One day she corralled nine women to the class. They laughed. They smiled. They loved the feeling of moving their bodies after months of hiding. In the short time we've been here Jane has reported that the women have said that the yoga really helps them with the stress of the over crowded camps, as well as with their sleep. Ellie and Gwen have been training with me and the guys for the last couple of days and today they will play with of a handful of children at an NGO called Showers For Sisters. Showers For Sisters offers transportation and showers for women and children 6-days a week. The women that signup can get ONE warm shower week for themselves and each of their children. Yes, one.On Sunday, we took 7 of the guys on my team to a race on the Northern side of the island. (This is where most of the people were smuggled across from Turkey in small rubber rafts.) It was a super fun race. One of my guys won the thing outright and another came in third! All in all, I think we had six of the top ten spots. We then had lunch and went to the beach for a swim. After the beach, we drove to the boat and life-jacket graveyard with these young men. (See video attached) The graveyard is quite literally a mountain of rubber rafts and lifejackets. The emotions that I felt there is not something I can put into words. It's just too horrific.These young men from Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Iran and Liberia are our new friends. They are smart, warm and thoughtful. After spending the whole day with them on Sunday, Ellie became just to overwhelmed with emotion. She couldn't believe that we had to drop these boys off at Moria Camp, after a great day of running and playing on the beach together. It horrified her that her new friends had to go into this smelly, wretched place with no family and no one to care for them. Ellie has yet to grasp the politics and continues to be perplexed at why the world isn't stepping up to save these people.After dropping off the runners we drove away from Moria Camp that evening and proceeded to pass hundreds of young, I mean really young kids, probably ages 1 to 5, walking along a dark road with their families. We think that they must have been leaving gathering of some sort. Ellie was once again over come with emotion as she sat silently in the car staring out the window at these beautiful children in such need. With tears streaming down her face she said, "Dad, how is it possible for all these children to only know of this hell on earth camp. Why them, why not me." Ellie was feeling the suffering of the world and how truly unjust life can be. The tears continued after our silent 20-minute drive home as she commented that she wanted us to give as much money as we could to the refugees. "Why is it that we have so much and they have nothing, (scream) nothing at all! Dad, everything that Magid owns was in that small plastic bag he carried with around with him today." No doubt there were lots of smiles and joy this past Sunday, but there were also far too many dark shadows lurking all around us.For the next three weeks we will continue our much needed work here on Lesvos. In between our volunteering commitments, Jane and I help the girls with their independent study work, which is going well. Ellie is doing a research paper on the crisis and is able to ask her new friends many questions about their experience over the last few years. Why they fled the homeland? How many days did it take them to flee? Who exactly were they threatened by in their home country? What did it feel like to be in the rubber raft? As you can probably imagine the list of questions is long.On November 1st we fly to Nepal. We'll be there for a month and it includes a 5-day trek in the Annapurna mountain range followed by ten days of teaching English to young Buddhist Monks ages 8-10 in a remote monastery which is about two days hike from civilization. Jane's a bit nervous about our visit to Nepal. It's so remote, and way out of her comfort zone for sure. For me, the more the remote the better. ;-) After Nepal, we plan to go to Thailand, Bali, Indonesia and perhaps Costa Rica to continue our service on this lonely planet we all inhabit.If you guys do Instagram you can follow us at @ourallgoodadventure. There hasn't been a lot of posting since we arrived in Lesvos but we'll be adding more images and captions soon.Love and light to you all!- BurrPS: Sorry for any typos or egregious grammatical errors.To unsubscribe from this list please go to http://archives.simplelists.com<Video.MOV>To unsubscribe from this list please go to http://archives.simplelists.comTo unsubscribe from this list please go to http://archives.simplelists.com
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