: Dancing on Air :

"It's about exploring the limits of what we can do . . . It just depends on how much you want it."

: Wheels, ReImagined :

"It would be easy for me to just be bummed out on {spina bifida}, but for me I just found the positive . . . It's wheels, stuck to your butt. How is that not a great time?

The wheelchair is a great opportunity"

: 45 Days, 22 Hours, 38 Minutes :

"It's a trail for one who wants to be in fellowship with nature. No matter whether your running it, or walking it, or you're taking ten years to do it. When you're walking that trail you have a vibe, and you feel it."

: Riding the Wall of Death :

"You've got bigger balls then most of the men!"

: Towering Above the Rest :

"You have to keep going because you have a collective responsibility and you don't want to let the team down."

For more on . . .

-N- Stuff : Humanity : Life of Adventure : Great Big Stories

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Mike Monteiro’s wrote "a really moving essay on what turning 50 means to him, and how he’s expanded his personal definition of “us” and “we” along the way, moving from his family, to his immigrant community, to a group of punk art school outcasts, to a wider and wider world full of people who are more similar than different" (via).

When we arrived in the United States in 1970, we settled in Philadelphia because it was the home of a lot of Portuguese immigrants from the small town my parents (and I guess me) came from. And so the we grew from a family unit to a community of immigrants who looked out for each other. We shopped at a Portuguese grocery store because they gave us credit. We rented from a Portuguese landlord because he wasn’t concerned about a rental history. And my parents worked for Portuguese businesses because we didn’t come here to steal jobs, but to create them...
This same community also looked out for each other. When there was trouble, we were there. When someone was laid off a construction job for the winter, we cooked and delivered meals. When someone’s son ended up in jail, wefound bail. And when someone’s relative wanted to immigrate, we lined up jobs and moved money to the right bank accounts to prove solvency...
But as anyone who has ever grown up in an immigrant community knows,wealso demands athem. They were not us. And they didn’t see us as them either. And at the risk of airing immigrant dirty laundry in public, I can attest that immigrant communities can be racist as fuck.Wehated blacks.Wehated Puerto Ricans. (It wasn’t too long ago I had to ask my mom to stop talking about “lazy Puerto Ricans” in front of her half-Puerto Rican grandchildren.)Wehated Jews. In our eagerness to show Americans we belonged,weadopted their racism. (We also brought some of our own with us.)...

I love the honesty of this piece. The brutal, self-effacing, real-as-shit (which is a strange phrase, really) writing because, if we are honest, we can relate - on some level. It doesn't read like a Facebook post, it reads like a heart felt, lessons from the soul post. And it's refreshing, even if it's hard.