“Behind all seen things lies something vaster; everything is but a path, a portal or a window opening on something other than itself.”

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

A youth spent growing up in rural Alaska, flying groceries to communities beyond the road system. Idly dreaming of a bigger life, whatever that might mean, from the right seat of a small cargo plane, until the untimely death of a loved one rips the roof off the world.

So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise: “Mary,” I said, “I don’t think this book of mine is ever going to be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won’t be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.

“I’ll tell you what,” I said, “I’ll call it ‘The Children’s Crusade.’”

— Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

A small group of young engineers, welders, and technicians work to transform an old launch site on California’s Central Coast for a private space company. In the pursuit, I try to leave behind lost childhood and step into something resembling adulthood. The days are long, the work is impossibly hard, and we begin to realize that we each have some special thing we lack; something we are chasing as we raise the site up out of dirt and lose ourselves in the quest of a first launch.

“Strange, isn’t it? To have dedicated one’s life to a certain venture, neglecting other aspects of one’s life, only to have that venture, in the end, amount to nothing at all, the products of one’s labors utterly forgotten?”

― George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo

The promise of landing the first rockets from the edge of space on a barge at sea kicks off a series of adventures that span from shipyards along the Louisiana bayou, to tense negotiations in Belgium, to possible corporate espionage in the Bahamas. Of course, somewhere in the middle we try to land rockets.

I begin to realize that there is no limit to what the work will ask - or take - from any of us. And I see that our egos and identities are so enmeshed with the stories we tell ourselves about our jobs, that I hardly notice as the last bit of my actual self slips away.

I find myself on the bow of the ship one night, somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, having survived a harrowing swing on a rope between two ships in a storm finally no longer wondering where the work might take me.

“As surely as there is a voyage away, there is a journey home.”

― Jack Kornfield, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry

God, the Universe, our fairy godmother, or the force of Life itself call to us constantly. But only in the silence of a long winter can we learn to hear them, once again. Away from the work, uncomfortable questions of purpose, ego, utility, and worthiness catch up just as a new arrival places a single guiding star into an otherwise empty night sky. Through patience, reconnection with nature, and hard work of a new kind, a camaraderie with life is rekindled.

“Lucky me, lucky mud.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

What does it look like for our lives to expand wider than the narrow lens of career? What is at the top of the mountain other than perspective and, having seen it, is there a need to journey there again? What other ways can we gain these perspectives without being torn apart or losing a decade of life? I go on a new kind of adventure to find the answer to those questions and am eaten up by vines, paralyzed by memory, and chased by rabid dogs down the halls of my own heart.