Bitter scary exhilarating relief sweet ... one moment I am grasping at the straws of purpose that bring me to Afghanistan and the next I'm feeling woefully inadequate at comforting our Afghan officer who's shoulders the program rests on. She is fearfully lying in the dark, crying listening to helicopters as they take care of the latest activity of civil violence ... the familiar story of a holiday ritual in a sacred place of many brought together for celebration. Marred by death fire smoke and confusion. Five minutes before I was reading the speech of one of our athletes who described a young woman's perils in Afghanistan - a crucible is the disbelief Afghan females can be mountaineers. From yesterday's dinner at the family of one of our girls. How her father described the shrine to his children in the corner of the living room - one are the decorations of his sons wedding the other certificates of his daughters athletic and leadership achievements. He bragged after returning to Afghanistan he told his neighbors, critical of his daughter involved in athletics, that they couldn't do anything about it. He's a proud father of a strong daughter with promise and potential. 

Define Feminine

Arc'teryx has a Define Campaign. As an ambassador for them, they've asked me to present during their summer launch event for 10 minutes. Something around the theme of 'define feminine.' Since given this assignment, I've been perusing what it means to define feminine. Let's just get the dictionary.com definition out of the way:

adjective
1. pertaining to a woman or girl: feminine beauty; feminine dress.
2. having qualities traditionally ascribed to women, as sensitivity or gentleness.
3. effeminate; womanish: a man with a feminine walk.
4. belonging to the female sex; female: feminine staff members.

Not helpful at all. So I thought about why Arc'teryx selected me. It has something to do with how like the other regional ambassadors, I maintained a separate non-outdoors worklife, I took a couple or more big trips a year, and I was a frequent weekend warrior. I may have toes in another part-time job that is in the outdoor industry. So could this mean my definition of feminine was, ambitious, leaning-in, passionate? I started thinking about the audience of this talk. I couldn't overthink this, but I already am for a 10 minute presentation. So I turned to my activities, also in line with activities the company manufactures equipment for, I started with 'trekking' in college. Became a climber post-graduate and alpinist in the midst my professional career. Two of the four okay. Then I became a skier, three of four - batting well for a white-collar professional. The last is running - something I've been doing since high school but non-competitively and only in the capacity of cross training. Great! So I'll show slides of me doing all of these things - but do they define feminine? Back to square one.

In Yosemite I stumbled upon it. At the Pines campground my friends and I compared our climbing days. I exclaimed I had a lot of fun on my climb. One of the guys who was projecting a route he started six ago, exclaimed, "Fun?!? Climbing is fun?!?" There, nailed it. 

Fun - women have it when we choose to, it's a feminine quality, it's probably the most important thing I hold dear in my experiences with people and places and why I go outside. Fun is just a subset of happiness - or is a pseudonym for it. 

So there, a couple minutes taken up and have about eight minutes left. Going back to dictionary.com ... sensitivity. How can I play with that one? Sure, while watching the film In the Heart of the Sea, I teared up at the whale hunting scenes. I cannot watch creatures get massacred - unless its for food. And unless its another wild creature for its survival. But for human avarice, I cannot. 

So sensitivity - we women feel connection to others, without it, we wither.  

Next, I'm thinking about my recent trip with the Afghan women. I think about the hashtag campaign #AfghanWomenStrong. Strong is a feminine quality. It's a bit of a dirty joke, but I liked this misquote from Betty White (Golden Girls!) “Why do people say "grow some balls"? Balls are weak and sensitive. If you wanna be tough, grow a vagina. Those things can take a pounding.”

It isn't to say men don't have qualities of fun, strength, and sensitivity, it's just attributes I think of as a feminine qualities. 

I think if I catch up to the years, months, weeks, days I have not written in this blog, I can finally write about what's on my mind. So many things to write about. The month of May found me sleeping on the ground for nine days in three different locations:

Yosemite, CA
Panjshir Province, Afghanistan
New River Gorge, West Virginia

Today I remembered how to cook something ... barely ... the turkey breast is a little tough. I signed up for a yoga class. I wanted to remember one of the many topics that have been swimming through my head that I should blog out. But now that I'm writing, they all escape me. Today I wrote a ten page trip report on Afghan Ascend's expedition to Panjshir Valley. Much of it I won't publish, and maybe a sentence or two in it is for my eyes only. But here's a raw excerpt, unedited, unfiltered:

Prepared for the gate to Kabul (DXB)

Going to Kabul in May, a city still battling with a foe reluctant to acquiesce power, the Taliban - was not something unusual for me. What was unusual was I was going to a city at war, without the accouterments I had when I flew into Baghdad in 2007. There was no military airplane, I was not surrounded by armed soldiers, I had no Kevlar body armor nor did I have a side-arm for personal protection. My security relied solely on my anonymity. I’m not sure how a 5 foot 9 tall woman with two large duffels and an expedition pack arriving into Hamid Karzai International Airport with a U.S. passport could escape attention. The threat to foreigners was first from kidnappers seeking ransom and next the Taliban. Before arriving in Kabul, I was cognizant of not setting any expectations of Afghanistan, I was trying to be aware of what emotional and psychological baggage I might bring. I did not want to affect the Afghan Ascend program by suddenly freezing in place or running for shelter if I heard a car exhaust backfire. Maybe that seems unlikely, but it didn’t take long for anyone who spent enough time with me after I returned from Baghdad that I might have had a slight touch of PTSD. I thought the first thing Kabul would remind me of was being in back in Baghdad. National-level conflict is in my DNA.