Just before the world changed in the face of coronavirus, I had given myself permission to explore more freely, without consideration of income potential. During that time, I found myself on Rev.com, where (to my absolute and overwhelming delight) I was transcribing an episode of Minnesota Bound’s Made for the Outdoors.
Be still, heart, I’m trying to think words.
If you grew up in Minnesota, with no cable but a big love for the great outdoors – you know Ron Schara and Raven. That man’s cadence makes my entire soul swell with emotion. There’s never just one thing for me – and that’s true here, as well. My mom put books in my chubby toddler hands, she brought me to college and the clinics, and gave me music, and all of Video Update’s best middle section indie crap. I am well honed.
There’s no single thing, certainly. Still, there at the top of the pile is Ron, in waders, and sun-baked. He made me love a story – about anything, which truly is at the root of my everything. Have you ever cried over a non-fiction account of a species of fish? Do you not weep at the lifecycle of a mayfly? If not, you have no idea what you’re missing. To be so moved by the painfully beautiful, in the most – so so most – mundane parts of the world. Or so they seem. This is what the voice can do – it can bring the world into sharp focus, in ways we never thought to look. My heart beats to this tempo, it is precisely this that made me a wanderer, a romantic, a storyteller, an artist.
While I was giddly transcribing the episode, I was entertaining daydreams of someday working for Ron Schara Productions – not as a faceless, nameless transcriptionist behind the (perfect, ok, perfect) captions of S5E5, but as a real life somethin’ or other.
But that’s a silly dream – I don’t need to work with the man himself to be inspired by him and to act on that inspiration. I can’t sleep tonight – that happens after sleeping off the sick for days on end. I’m bursting with excitement for the coming spring, and for all of the many projects that I’m excited to pick up again, now that the sun will start inching back into my life again. I can’t wait to lose myself somewhere, in waders, smiling, sun-baked – and telling stories.
