Tag: Love

Turning 44 – How The Hell Did I Make It This Far?

On By Karl GessleinIn Depression, Lifestyle and Health, Love, Self-ImprovementLeave a comment

As I laid in bed meditating this morning in the arms of my beautiful partner staring out into the surreal snow covered landscape I was left with this incredible feeling of gratitude.

How did I get here, how could my life possibly be so good?

Was it luck, hard work, did the universe finally reward me for decades of suffering? It’s really hard to tell.

karl
I’ve decided to take a different path than my father before me. I’ve decided to do what I love to do and nothing else. It has paid off big time in quality of life.

I consider myself a depression survivor. In many ways it’s kind of like being a survivor of something more like cancer, but for people who struggle with depression most of American’s attitude is ‘just get over it’. Not only is this incredibly unfair, it’s also unrealistic to judge others harshly for a condition that they really have little or no control over. I read a statistic online that said 50% of Americans will struggle with mental illness at some point during their life. If so many people suffer from it then why is there so little support and compassion for it?

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Kiting With Dolphins And Stand Up Paddleboarding With Manatees – 2 Weeks On Florida’s NE Coast

On By Karl GessleinIn Kiting, Lifestyle and Health, TravelLeave a comment

Thilde and I were ready for vacation in early October until her car got hit in Syracuse. After months of hell fighting with the insurance company, we finally got a settlement and got her RAV4 fixed and hit the road. By the time we were able to leave it was December so we decided to drive down to Florida since Thilde had never been there and we knew it would be warm. We ended up having one of my best trips yet and found lots of great spots to SUP, hike, bike and kite at. It was a trip to remember and gave me a new appreciation for our southern flat land state.

We were able to drive the sprinter for miles on the beach which made the kiting really nice.
We were able to drive the Sprinter for miles on the beach which made the kiting really nice. The sand control was a nightmare.

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Denmark’s Super Secret Kiteboarding & Cycling Utopia

On By Karl GessleinIn Kiting, Lifestyle and Health, TravelLeave a comment

Love has taken me a lot of places in this world. You could add Denmark as another country that I’ve visited for love, and then afterwards fell in love with. So often in the US I feel that my life is so good and that I am so blessed that I find it hard to imagine that things could be even better. The two weeks I spent in Denmark with Thilde made me feel even better than that, which I didn’t really think was actually possible.

Thilde and her father Lars
Thilde and her father Lars on a typical Danish street

A year ago Thilde and I committed to each other in a beautiful ceremony in the middle of Cayuga Lake with 150 other kayakers and standup paddle boarders in attendance. It was an amazing ceremony which was attended by no less than 6 Danes who crossed the pond simply to support Thilde. They were great company and seemed to laugh and smile a lot more than your standard American. I was more than a little curious to find out if Denmark really was as great as people kept making it out to be. Free universal healthcare for all, 50% of the urban population bike commutes, you get paid $1000/mth to go to college and new mothers can get 3 years of paid vacation time to take care of their babies. It sounded like a fantastic fantasyland that was too good to be true. Although I was skeptical, after spending 2 weeks there I can confirm that it is a real place and the Danes really do live that way. No wonder they are consistently polled as the happiest people on the planet although they were recently surpassed by Costa Rica probably because they have unmolested rain-forests and Denmark doesn’t. Not liking to be 2nd in anything I’m sure the Danes will buckle down and redouble their happiness efforts to beat the Costa Ricans again.

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Lost In The Net

On By Karl GessleinIn Cars, Fiction, Green, Love1 Comment

net

I slowly approached the door feeling a strange combination of fear, shame and excitement. The house was a small one lost back in a bundle of old growth hemlocks far from the road. It was made from natural edged wood hand planed and lovingly put together. None of the angles were straight and none of the boards were square but it held a strange kind of appeal that most square houses did not. The door started to open and my heart skipped two beats.

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How Transcendental Meditation Can Ease A Troubled Mind (aka How I Kept $2500 In My Pockets)

On By Karl GessleinIn Depression, Lifestyle and Health, Love, Self-Improvement7 Comments

When I first met Thilde Jensen she encouraged me to try TM to help with my obsession and depressive nature. We have been together for 2 years now and committed to each other last summer. Meditation has become a daily habit for both of us, one that I hope we will carry with us to the end of our days. This is not a sales pitch for TM, honestly I feel like it’s a total scam, I am promoting the medical benefits of any meditation not just a single ‘brand’. Although Thilde and I have settled quite comfortably into doing TM, there are a lot of different styles of meditation each with their benefits and drawbacks. This is a story of my personal path.

enlighhtenment-maharishi

The TM style of meditation has been around since 1955 and seems to have changed very little throughout the years. The biggest change to the movement has been the price of the training. It has gone from being free to several thousand dollars for private instruction. So then the question becomes, why should I pay $2,500 for something that I can teach myself for free?

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How Suicide Leaves A Deep Rift Where Once There Was Love

On By Karl GessleinIn Depression, Lifestyle and Health, Love, Poetry, Self-Improvement1 Comment

Dez, Matt, Jops. It’s hard for me to even type those names without starting to cry. Three people I has so much love for made the same choice, to end their own lives. This article is not about their choices, but about the rift that it leaves in its wake.

dez2
Dez

 

Matt
Matt
Jops
Jops

 

What do I say about those that are gone? Why did you leave? Why didn’t you ask for help? What more could I have done. The questions haunt me year after year. As someone who has struggled with severe depression for most of my life, I know what it’s like to feel overwhelmed and lost in the world. Somehow I never gave up. Somehow I just put my head down and kept pushing on. For those that chose to give up, it is the emptiness in the ones they love behind that is so moving to me.

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Can a piece of art really change your life?

On By Karl GessleinIn Depression, Lifestyle and Health, Love, Self-Improvement1 Comment

I was asked by my good friend Dr Pamela Moss to submit my vision board that I created under her supervision  to a transformational art show. Two long years ago myself and a dozen other people spread out a bunch of old magazines on a table and after a deep soulful meditation we looked through them and ripped out any pictures that called to us. We then spent another hour cutting out the pictures and gluing them on a posterboard. That ‘vision board’ has hung in my kitchen and I’ve looked at it every day for the the last two years. I mounted color changing LED lights around it and I setup a LED spotlight above it so it could have the brightest light in the room. This simple collection of pictures pasted together from magazines that people threw in the trash has completely transformed my life.

The center of my vision board
The center of my vision board

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The Most Unreasonable Commitment Ceremony Ever Held In The Middle Of Cayuga Lake

On By Karl GessleinIn Dance, Lifestyle and Health, Love, Poetry3 Comments

It’s so rare in life that everything goes your way. So often we spend our days battling with entropy as our world seems to stay in a perpetual state of near disasters. It’s rare that everything goes right, and even rarer that this happens on the day that you commit yourself to another. Nature has always been my religion, the place I go to find peace and solace. It seemed fitting that Thilde and I would say our vows to each other in the middle of the body of water I had grown to love the most, Cayuga Lake.

The sound of over a hundred kayaks, canoes and standup paddleboards bumping together as the waves rolled by. We hadn’t rehearsed the words we were going to say, but that was fine because life wasn’t meant to be rehearsed. I was lucky enough to choose to be with a woman who cared little for words anyway. Thilde was a woman who cherished actions and affection over words. We had made it this far, and convinced 150 people to gather themselves together in the middle of Cayuga Lake for a most unconventional ceremony to celebrate our love.

The Beautiful Bride to be - Photo by Frank Muller
The Beautiful Bride to be – Photo by Frank Muller

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Kite Through 3 Feet Of Powder, Launch 15 Feet In The Air, Do A Trick, Repeat

On By Karl GessleinIn Kiting, Lifestyle and Health, Love, Travel, Uncategorized1 Comment

Tug Hill Kite Festival 2014 was the best day of snow kiting in my entire life. I had made plans to spend the weekend at The Flurry Festival, a 3 day dance festival in Saratoga Springs, but I decided to cancel at the last-minute because of an impending snowstorm. Instead I packed the van with 6 kites, 2 Snowboards, 3 pairs of Micro skis, XC skis, Ski, XC and snowboard boots, some food, my portable heater and camping gear and a couple sleeping bags and started on my personal Mecca to Tug Hill, the promised land for snowkiting.

Zebulon Crabnebula doing what he does best
The Lean Green Snowkite Machine – Zebulon Crabnebula doing what he does best

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