Last year, overwhelmed and in a fit of exhaustion we elected to suspend events.

We simply did not have the resources to create and facilitate outdoor adventures for our community while continuing to manage our new homestead. It was a hard decision to make, but it was the only sensible option we had at the time.

Today is a new day, and, by the grace and permission of God Most High, we have new options.

Those new options come in the form of wonderful people stepping forward to offload the responsibility of hosting a regular adventure calendar. We haven’t gotten past conversations with most of these folks, but the meetings are rejuvenating and inspiring, and, in at least one case, we actually got something off the ground!

Introductions

This past weekend we hosted ten incredible men and women for D&T Goat, a novice backpacking experience with our youngest French Alpine goats. This would not have been possible without the facilitation of our now-veteran Adventure Leads, Luke and Andrea. Although both have participated in and even assisted with a number of previous events, this was their first time planning, prepping, and executing an adventure of their own creation and we could not be more pleased.

If you’re curious about how they manage things on the trail, they will be facilitating our longest and most rigorous winter backpacking challenge ever this coming January, insha Allah. It’s coed so sign up to impress your friends and make new ones.

We’re building on that momentum, God willing, in a February rock-climbing adventure with our newest Adventure Lead, Todd. He’s climbed with us many, many times over the years and is exceptionally skilled at easing newcomers up big walls. He’s got a curious passion for mining history and is one of the best people to have out in the desert. He also knows his way around a Dutch oven and he has satisfied many a stomach with his campfire goat al pastor and blackberry cobbler.

Growth

In our last post about the evils of American capitalism we talked about our aversion to “growth.” We hope it was clear that we were referring to corporate expansionism, the yearning many companies have to command greater and greater percentages of marketshare. Appealing to the masses often requires dumbing down your offers. With a larger audience, we become more risk averse. The purity and intensity of what we are doing is diluted as we seek to be “inclusive,” a buzzword that softens what is ultimately a tokenized cash grab.

That’s not the kind of growth we’re interested in.

We are interested in qualitative growth. We want to get better at what we do. We want to level up our professionalism across the board, insha Allah. We want to inspire you with our service and be inspired by you to create better experiences.

Dust and Tribe was a one-man show for more than a decade. That’s no fun for anybody. That’s a recipe for stagnation, burnout, and the ugliness of founder’s syndrome. That’s what’s really exciting about Luke and Andrea and Todd. They bring new perspectives, new personalities, and new experiences to the table that we can all learn from and incorporate into a more evolved version of what we do.

Opportunities

Everybody on our growing team is better for having prioritized time with creation. The wilderness teaches, yes, but we need to be there to learn. And all of us at Dust and Tribe know this because we’ve made the choice to get outside as often as we can.

We are the proof of concept.

We’re not better than anybody else. Our lives are just as tumultuous as others, if not more so. We don’t have any mystical advantages. By “proof of concept,” we mean only that we’ve operationalized the reality that time outside is a powerful antidote and a reliable counterbalance to the challenges we all daily face.

It’s cheaper than therapy. It’s more efficient than medication. And it is far more wide-ranging in its benefit than virtually any other wellness intervention.

We recognize that the Muslim community has historically struggled to set this priority. We see this in the absence of wilderness literacy among Muslims and in the lack of Islamically-based institutions organized to address this. And we believe that we are all suffering needlessly because of this negligence.

We can write about this all day. You can read and listen and watch people with a passion for the outdoors communicate the same thing. You can even appreciate what God has to say about it:

Surely in the alternation of the day and the night, and in all that God has created in the heavens and the earth, there are truly signs for those mindful of Him.

Q10:6

But unless you give yourself permission to get outside, you’ll never really understand what any of these sources are getting at. That’s why hosting events is so important to us. That’s why we were so heartbroken a year ago, knowing that we could not deliver on this critical responsibility of empowering others to get outside.

And that’s why we are so grateful to Luke, Andrea, and Todd who we believe will take good care of you out there.

We’re looking forward to making more introductions real soon, insha Allah.

Stay tuned!

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