Cowboy Confessional

Life changes you.

Sometimes, when the alleged gods are sober, wonderful things occur, from kittens to watching your congress critter have conniptions when suddenly forced to seek unemployment insurance. Other times the universe delivers a swift kick to your spiritual crotch, and you have a choice: crumble to the asphalt of reality, or use disaster to take a new direction, even a slightly crazy one.

Actually, those are the best types.

Marissa Krupa lost a brother to cancer, and it could have wrecked her. As siblings go, they were close. Her brother Mickey was filled with the essence of life, yet cancer clubbed it out of him at age 42. Her mother has the stuff too. Combined, this gave a Marissa, a mid-30s sales and support type in the high-tech industry, a different perspective on life. Namely, that we all get damn little of it. Mickey’s demise was transformative, and Marissa understood with new found clarity that people go through numbing changes and often come away better for it.

Even though those big changes nearly killed a few of them.

Marissa has packed her truck full of gear to survive a year on the road, gathering stories of personal transformation and discovery as she drives from Alaska to Chile, stopping to scale a few mountains and leave memorials to Mickey in places he would have hiked himself. She’s driving forward into a big, long, harsh, unknown void of new experiences, video gear aimed at anyone who has come out the other side of disaster to discover that life is worth living … especially when you have a few scars to show you lived and still live.

Maybe you have a story to share as she passes through. Maybe you have a buck or two to help pay for gas. Perhaps you just want to marvel at someone with a mission and the guts to give it a good try.

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This entry was posted by Guy Smith on Monday, August 1st, 2011 at 5:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.