After a long day of travel and high-altitude view seeking in the Rockies, we set up camp Thursday night at a basic campground nestled in a mountain valley. After making a fire and enjoying our own version of a campfire dinner feast (mostly beans and burnt veggie sausages) we decided to meditate around the dimming fire in order to keep up with our practice.

Just a few minutes into the session under the night sky, off in the distance a pack of coyotes began to howl. I’ve heard coyotes howl before, but there was something crazy about these ones – they kept at it for several minutes, in hyena-like fashion.. howling but seeming to scream with wild laughter at the same time. Everything inside of me wanted to shout out “HOLY CRAP YOU GUYS LET’S GO GET IN THE CAR!!!” but I didn’t respond to my urge, and to my surprise, not one of my fellow travelers moved a muscle or stirred from their position. We as Gen Y’s have a reputation for taking almost nothing seriously, and I was awestruck by the seriousness that we were taking in position to our practice – we had made a commitment not to move and we stuck to it, coyotes or no coyotes! The smoke from the campfire traveled around a bit and a couple of us bit the smoke pretty badly, but even so, there was no response.. we were silent and still the whole time. It’s one thing to meditate in a silent meditation hall, but it’s a whole other thing to do it staring straight into the elements. It was definitely soul strengthening.

I noticed the next day while driving in the car, that over the course of several days together we began to feel very comfortable in a way that we hadn’t before, simply due to the relationship building that was happening during our trip. As most of us know, when Gen Ys feel comfortable around each other we tend to turn into total clowns and spend a lot of our time goofing off, which I found us doing a lot of. The interesting thing I started to notice though, is as soon as someone presented an interesting observation or presented a topic of depth, there was no hesitation – we’d immediately dive right in and take whatever we were speaking about as far as we could, without leaving anyone behind. There was something amazing about seeing our flexibility as a group.. to be able to truly be our goofy Gen Y selves but then to be able to at any given moment flip the switch and head in the other direction. It was clear that the depth was what brought us together, and the fun that we shared beyond that was just that, simply fun and a merely a complement (and a great one at that) to our real reason for coming together.

Here’s to evolving Gen Y consciousness.