The other day, I figured out how to put the way I go about life into a single sentence. It then occurred to me that life was far too expansive. One couldn’t possibly do such a thing! However, it felt like an important sentence, so I thought to share it with you:

I strive to be cheap, sensitive, and naked to the world.

As language is subjective, those words probably mean something different to you than me. Let’s break it into parts and elaborate on each.

I love podcasts—not quite as much as books—but they accompany daily tasks from driving, to cooking, to working out in the most engaging, fruitful of ways.

As but one human, I’ve only listened to a tiny fraction of all the podcasts ever recorded. However, I’ve scoured the web for quality conversation for half a decade now, and for perspective alone, consider each episode below well worth the time investment.

I could write about how valuable podcasts are for expanding awareness, allowing one to choose their influences, and how this list is just as much as a study of my own choices, but these things are easily inferred.

Let’s dive right in.

A mile outside the northeast entrance of Yellowstone National Park, at the bottom of a glacially carved valley 7,389ft in elevation, sits Silver Gate, Montana — an island of humanity among a sea of mountainous wilderness. At the height of summer, the population can swell to perhaps two hundred. However, only eight residents call Silver Gate home year-round and the town’s unanimously elected mayor is a dog named Rommel. Besides a handful of privately owned cabins, the town consists of two small general stores, two lodging businesses, and a restaurant.

Bigger towns surrounding Yellowstone, with large advertising budgets and shorter drives to world-famous “Old Faithful,” attract a vast majority of the park’s visitors. To this day, Silver Gate and Cooke City (its neighboring town three miles up the road), remain less trodden outposts of the little-known Yellowstone High Country. Rather than geysers, Silver Gate is about wilderness, wildlife, and mountains.

Last week, I was talking on the phone with my brother. Discussing my personal selling points for a book proposal I’m working on, he told me that whenever he describes me to someone whom I’ve never met he tells them:

“He does what he wants with his life and somehow seems to not feel the pressure that everyone else does to do certain things.”

Self-awareness is difficult. I never really thought of myself in such a way. My ego held onto the compliment like a pretty pebble from a stream, taking it from my figurative pocket and turning it over and over in my hand for it’s smooth, pleasant feel.

I do feel a lot less pressure to do “certain things” than I used to and suspect most people do. In reflecting upon it, I began to recall other instances of this curiosity.

This afternoon, I’m getting paid to sit under an umbrella next to a pool, read books, and write these words in Flagstaff, Arizona. 

It’s a spectacular summer day. Upper seventies. A slight breeze. Overplayed but otherwise decent music sounds from the speakers that surround. A couple of kids are shooting each other with squirt-guns in the pool while their moms chat at a table under an umbrella. A man that looks like a walrus is turning red with sun in a lounge chair. Thunderheads grow off on the western horizon, but the sky above is a pale blue canvas.

As I plan to go to flight school this fall, I’m particularly aware of commercial airliners silently drawing white streaks across that pale blue canvas and the smaller planes that buzz by in approach to the Flagstaff airport. I’ve been projecting myself into the cockpit of every plane that passes by.

I don’t believe that I’ll live to grow old. 

It’s not that I think I’m going to die young or burn out before thirty because I’m living so hard or something. I just know all too well that life could end at anytime.

When I was sixteen years old, a mosquito bite nearly killed me. A few weeks after this unbeknownst bite, I went to bed with a piercing headache. If it wasn’t for my mom’s investigation of “strange noises,” I would have been dead the next morning.

This mosquito, it transferred a virus to me. A virus that infected the fluid surrounding my brain, causing it to swell and squeeze. The result: many grand mal seizures, four days in a coma, a stroke, and a damaged brain.

For the past five years, I've been doing my damnedest to avoid paying rent. Given, I'm quite nomadic and largely avoid leases for the purpose of geographical freedom, but you might be surprised just how much time rent can cost you in a year.

I don't particularly love articles full of numbers and perhaps you don’t either, but these are eye-opening numbers. Bear with me as we begin with a little math.

For the purposes of this article, let's say your rent, utilities, and other housing expenses total $800 a month. This is a pretty frugal figure, as the average cost of rent alone for one bedroom apartment in the United States these days is over $1,000. So, at $800 a month, you're well under that mark, and you managed to work your utilities into that number too. Well done.

Nepal and its Himalayas are a place I have long wanted to experience. A poor country rich in culture, the birthplace of Buddha, site of Peter Matthiessen’s excursion in The Snow Leopard, and home to the world's highest mountains, many an aspect might draw one there. Not unlike my aforementioned author/hero, both a cultural pull and a curiosity for the Himalayas themselves drew me in. I wondered what might I find in the Himalayas, in my experience of the mountains and the people who live in the foot of the grandeur.

I also had some questions which required space. Space I knew I would find out there. I’ve struggled with this clash of eastern and western values lately, especially since a ten-day Vipassana meditation course last October.

A nomad for the better part of the past five years, I sought to answer the question of "Why I travel?" in a notebook from the window seat of a Boeing 737 last December.

Late one night, I recorded that answer.

While I am no videographer and the majority of my moments go intentionally uncaptured, I did have enough footage from five years of travel to span four minutes. Backed by M83's Outro, this is the "why" behind my last five years of venturing out.

In the United States, road trips are almost a rite of passage — our ultimate symbol of escape, freedom, and adventure. From the written works of Kerouac and Steinbeck to a laundry list of films that take place on the open road (from Little Miss Sunshine to Into the Wild to Rain Man), we’ve culturally come to recognize the road trip as the antidote to too much city, sameness, and domestic life.

After personally crisscrossing the American west more than half a dozen times by car, driving the entire west coast, and spending more than five months of 2018 living out of a Honda Element converted into a home on wheels, a sharing of my take on the art of the 21st century road trip has felt long overdue.

However, it wasn't until I conducted a bit of “road trip” keyword research, that I found the fire to pen this piece.

Why?

I discovered that the most searched keyword associated with “road trip” is “planner.”

Today I’m releasing Man Bites Dog! a downloadable PDF guide to raising a ridiculous amount of money for charity through creative endeavor.

Over the summers of 2013 and 2014, I raised over $100,000 for charity with two attention-demanding, audacious undertakings. First, my brother and I pedaled bicycles 4,450 miles across the USA for the children's hospital that saved my life. The following summer, I backpacked 200+ miles through the Sierra Nevada mountains to “summit” both type-1-diabetes and the highest mountain in the contiguous United States with my younger sister.

Mostly thanks to an article on Bicycle Touring Pro, I've been privately advising others on the process since. Two years ago, I thought it worthwhile to write down my formula to distribute on a larger scale. After picking up and putting down the project a couple of times, reworking the structure, and putting more time into these fifty-six pages than I’d like to admit, and it’s finally finished!

“To travel or not to travel?” is the most common question I receive as a writer of wanderings and thrifty travels.

Whether the aim is a specific place (especially Hawaii and New Zealand), a specific way (by bicycle or in a Honda Element home on wheels), a specific job (deckhand for American Cruise Lines, season work through CoolWorks), or a general inquiry about whether to travel or not, I answer this question in one form or another dozens of times each year.

A couple months ago, I received a general ask of the “to travel or not to travel?” question and figured I’d publish my response, highlighting my approach to the question and offering a bit of insight into why I venture out.

This year was a year of discovery and evolution for me.

From life lived from a Honda Element to five months in the mountains just outside Yellowstone National Park to discovering the inner half of the human experience in a ten-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat, the lens through which I view the world was reshaped more in the past year than any year since a stroke quaked the core of my being at sixteen.

Perhaps the most important lesson from all this change was that we will continue to be shaped and reshaped as long as we remain open to the world. An unchanging worldview is not a sign that we've got it all right, but that we lack exposure to new experiences or are blind to what those experiences teach.

A highlight reel of WONDER WANDER 2018, by Christopher Bellizzi.

From September 21st to 25th I hosted WONDER WANDER 2018, a gathering of adventurous and creative souls at The Range Rider's Lodge—the stunning, old log-cabin lodge I run in the summertime a mile outside Yellowstone National Park.

Ten hours a day for ten days straight, I sat meditating (or attempting to at least). Not to short-change past endeavors, like recovering from a brain-damaging stroke or pedaling a bicycle across the United States, but it might have been the most intense, challenging experience of my life to date. It was also one of the best.

What follows is part story, part review: why I signed up, my experience, and why I believe that—if one can handle it—a ten-day Vipassana meditation course is one of the best experiences a human can have.

From September 21st to 25th I hosted WONDER WANDER 2018, a gathering of adventurous and creative humans at The Range Rider's Lodge—the stunning, old log-cabin lodge I run in the summertime a mile outside Yellowstone National Park.

Never have I hosted such an event before, I had no notions of how it would turn out or who would turn up. What transpired was different, and better, than I ever imagined.

Perhaps because I'd been working so much, I stumbled upon a personally new form of wonder this summer. It first happened with Henry, the owner of the lodge I manage seasonally, while troubleshooting the satellite internet dish at his place over the phone.

Amid a twelve-hour workday tasked with one of many items on the day's to-do-list, my focus on the details relevant to fixing the satellite dish suddenly broke and just fell away.

It was like I'd spent the last two months in a sunny field with a microscope, moving from blade of grass to blade of grass, agonizing over the smallest fragments of the whole field when I suddenly went, “You know what, I'm gonna lift my head up and look around for a moment.”

The phrase, “To see the sights!” is one of the most common Airbnb booking messages I receive as manager of a lodge a mile outside the northeast gate of Yellowstone National Park.

It’s a limiting, yet apt phrase, as many who visit our national parks get caught up in “seeing” a national park—reducing one of life's most immersive, transcendent experiences to simple observation.

The point is not to merely observe Yosemite's monolithic walls, the striated eons of the Petrified Forest, or Yellowstone's swirling of geologic, plant, and animal life, but to feel connected to Earth’s eternal procession. To recognize we are a part, not apart from, these fantastical displays of nature, evokes profound awe and mysticism within us that has been all but extinguished from our day-to-day lives.

I wasn't sure if this was the exact spot until, climbing down the black rocks of the seawall, I suddenly remembered their placement. This was it. I had hopped down this exact path to the beach nearly five years ago.

Reid and I were overwhelmed with waves of emotion. Pride, that we pedaled bicycles across the United States. Relief, that we survived. Despair, that it was over. Fear, that life might never be so good again. Frustration too, as we waited for Rob to pick out this spot, a five-minute eternity in a motel parking lot. That motel being the last obstacle between us and the Pacific.

Amid the emotional storm, this was the big payoff scene. The moment the Arizona Republic and NBC had paid to send Rob, the same photographer they send to the Olympics, on a drive from Phoenix to Oregon to capture. Much hinged on this footage, not just for us, but for Rob, who had surely stuck his neck out a bit to dub his neighbor's cross-country bike ride for the local children's hospital worthy of the financial investment.

Sometimes, people ask if that illness still affects me.

“Not that I notice," I usually reply, "except that I live more for now, as I don't know if I'll have later.”

Most people respond in defense of later.

“You can't just ignore the future! If you do, you might end up in a situation you don't like.”

Does it have to be one way or the other, though? Can we not divvy our focus between the two? Perhaps what I should say is, “Before the illness, I was focused primarily on the future, with an eye on the present. Today, I focus primarily on the present, with an eye on the future.”