by Emily Orton

Have you ever heard of a death cafe? I read about them a few years ago in a free airplane magazine. Death cafes are like regular cafes except they feature an open coffin and an invitation to try it out.

The premise behind a death cafe is that pondering the inevitability of death over a cup of hot chocolate will stimulate deeper thoughts and conversations about how we spend our lives. 

Personally, I’ve found this to be true. I jumped at the chance to try out a coffin in Phoenix last weekend. 

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Do you know The North Face logo? That’s Half Dome. The “north face” is the sheer cliff side of Half Dome. That’s what the company is named after.

Our trip to Yosemite was scheduled for late September. We would be there for two weeks. A messaged popped on one of the rock climbing Facebook pages I’m on. “Anyone want to climb RNWF in late September?” RNWF stands for Regular Northwest Face. It’s the first rock climbing routes ever established up the cliff face of Half Dome. I raised my hand. After...

Already Delayed 

The captain said, “My powers of salesmanship were not successful.” Our flight had already been delayed forty minutes. On a commercial flight, a simple mechanical concern can often be resolved quickly but then there is paperwork. The paperwork can take the most time. 

Trying to make up for the delay the Captain appealed to carry less “contingency fuel.” He argued that we had more than enough to make it to our destination. He said, “We have plenty of fuel.” He knew adding 100...

I’m sitting in the room I wrote about last time. Einstein said, “Imagination is greater than knowledge.” This room used to be covered in layers of grungy, old carpet. The walls were covered in dark, rough wood panels, surrounded by built in shelves and the window covered with light blocking red velvet curtains. Imagination is a kind of faith to create in our mind before something exists in reality. We let our imagination go to work on this room.

It’s now got a Scandinavian blond wood floor, the walls are painted a clean...

I’m learning to re-love the word faith. The word faith is fraught in modern society. It often connotes a denial of facts, skepticism of science, a woohoo approach to life. I’m experiencing it differently right now. I’m experiencing faith as the ability to discover the unseen, the finer things hidden from undiscerning eyes. Albert Einstein famously said, “Imagination is greater than knowledge.” I used to think he was talking about imagination in the childish sense: imaginary friends, being playful, willing to be...

After a week in Bolivia, I needed some rest. Several months ago, I was asked to produce a series of mini documentaries about a non-profit, Charity Vision, healing blindness around the world. They help patients, whether they can pay or not. Our first trip was last week. I’m almost recovered.

With a producing partner and two cinematographers, we boarded flights. Two back-to-back redeyes took us to Lima, Peru and then on to La Paz, Bolivia. A lost passport on our team led to another (third) late night for me. The altitude...

1983

We rode in a sleeper train from West Germany to West Berlin, passing through the Soviet controlled portion of East Germany. It was 1983. I was nine. The train stopped in a switchyard. My father woke me up and pulled back the curtain slightly so I could look out the window. Before departure, they’d told us to keep the windows and curtains shut, but my dad told me, “I want you to see this.” He wanted me to see communism in person. He wanted it to make an impression. As my bleary eyes looked out the window, I saw a guard...

Effortless

In his book Effortless, Greg McKeown explains our cultural aversion to easy. It feels like cheating. It’s less noble. It yields a cheap result. But is that actually true? Or is it something we impose on ease?

In my previous post, I wrote about how easy it was to go paragliding. I'd been making it hard in my head, unnecessarily hard.

“I can do hard things” is the pep-talk of our day. Yes, I can do hard things. So can you. But do we make things unnecessarily hard when they can be easy? So much of this has to do with our...

It was shockingly easy. I’ve wanted to try paragliding for years. You know those parachutes drifting back and forth along some ridgeline, suspended in air like the birds riding the updrafts? Yeah, that. Surely there must be some kind of training course or certification. You probably have to go to a class or some orientation sessions before you jump off a cliff with a parachute. Nope. Turns out you don’t.

Doing something new together

For our wedding anniversary, Emily and I like to do something neither of us have done before....

I remember laying in the back of our van on a road trip as a kid. My dad had put bench seats in a horseshoe shape around a table. This was before seatbelt laws. I laid down on the long, padded seat with my shirt off, listening to my walk-man, working on my tan as the warm sun poured in through the big, long side window. At some point my dad, looking in the rearview mirror, realized what I was up to and said, “You’re not going to get tan. The window stops the UV light.” I hadn’t learned about ultraviolet light yet, so I...

The Bomb Cyclone totally exceeded what I expected in terms of weather. Josh stayed dry. I got wet. I was sleeping on the outside half of the portaledge, with a small leak just below the window. Pour enough water on that and it adds up to getting soaked. I was never really cold, but wet was pretty bad.

I wanted to stay up on the cliff and keep climbing. I was worried about time and momentum. It was Monday and I had until Saturday, then I had to head back to San Diego. Josh talked me into coming down for a day. We rappelled down the 250’,...

We were rolling into Baltimore, headed to our hotel. We’d woken up at 5am and traveled all day. It was almost 8pm now. Traffic got bad two blocks from the hotel as we drove past a stadium. “Hey Siri, is there a baseball game going in Baltimore?”

            “Nope. There is not a baseball game in Baltimore.”

            “Hey Siri, what’s happening at M&T Bank Stadium tonight?”

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