What floating has taught me about pausing.

I couldn't catch my breath.

I rolled onto my back in the lake and felt the line of water along my sides, my clothes feeling like tissue paper jellyfish around me and little gasps of air escaping my lungs.  I voluntarily jumped in here but I couldn't calm myself down enough to float; I can't seem to remember how to relax enough to forget the idea of sinking.

The fog was starting to set in on top of the water, and patterned rings were drifting out from where I lay in the milky blue vastness. The setting sun was starting to cast everything a dull pink and I continued to try to remember how to sit still.

Isn't it funny how we are so used to rushing around and running through life and we forget how to pause? It was almost uncomfortable to take a moment, to float in the water and listen to the crickets and cicadas hum in the trees. I don't think I realized how caught up I was in the pace of which things were going until they slowed down.

I laid in the water, counting my deep inhales and thought back to when I first started travelling 8 weeks ago. I drove from Jackson to Denver to Taos to Lander to Salt Lake City to Yosemite to San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Ventura, Los Angeles, took a plane to Washington D.C., to Charleston to Chapel Hill to take a plane all the way back to the opposite side of the country again and start a full work week.

And as I lay, I thought the culmination of those places and memories of babies being born and graduates, dusty bars of people with hands that have seen long days and hard work, steep granite walls, sagebrush plains, and barefoot bluegrass bands. I've had some of the most cinematic moments of golden light while paddling over waves, birds flying in their V's overhead, and heat rising off of long stretches of highways in the Southwest. I thought about happiness and loss and fear; the sum of experiences that make up a person and all of the moments over the course of a lifetime that shape a soul. It's incredible how much life can change you in a matter of months. The time flew by.

My rushing is a different kind of rushing than most people's. I jump from city to countryside, all beautiful places, but it's still rushing. Being a freelance artist, it's a constant fight to make sure I have an upcoming job or project to work on. This line of work encourages you to live in the future, but no plans are ever set. Because of this, I forget to take moments to float and pause. I don't want to reach the end of my life always having been constantly living falling forward.

It's something to work on.

The Necessity of Wild Places

I sat on a porch just outside Yosemite the other morning, hands curled around a cup of coffee and barefoot toes tapping to this song. The night prior, I had slept in a meadow, watching the Milky Way arch it's back across the sky and listened to the coyotes sing their song in such a loud and somber note, I thought I was dreaming it.

And yesterday night, I sat atop a ridge looking across the ocean, with a wind that blew a damp cold into my bones that only sea air knows how to do. I watched the ocean heave in swells and I thought a lot about the necessity of wildness.

"Just now I can hardly conceive of any bodily condition dependent on food and breath any more than the ground or sky." (John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra)

In between these places, I've been shuffled down overcrowded highways to cities and this culture shock has been hard on my system. And I've thought about this quote from Muir as I've looked around at those whose foreheads lean on their hands in traffic, and those who are constantly staring at their phones while walking, and those who have a general tiredness about them from the rushing and waiting. So many are suffering from nature deficit and don't even know. I wished for all of them that they could smell the coastal sage in the evenings and wrap their arms around a redwood, and listen to the Merced before they slept.

After 12,000 miles on the road at 8 weeks of travel, I can say that I've come to realize how much I need wildness in my life; to see the moon sit on the horizon and the stars grow brighter and to listen to how the wind in the pines sounds like the ocean. I'm so lucky that I get to experience this all the time and I've been able to carve a life for myself that allows me to be in those places so frequently. I feed off of it, and get so depleted from the city life.

And in the past day, when I've sat in the cab and stared out the window at the skyscraper scene that has replaced my mountain scene, I've thought that there is a wildness about the city that I don't completely understand. It works for some but oh, I miss the internal West.

El Capitan and the Fear

This morning I woke up staring at thousands of feet of rock, towering above my head. Above me is the Salathe, a route that my Uncle had made the first free ascent on, almost exactly 25 years prior. I fell asleep underneath it last night, after a frustrating jug haul up the fixed lines, handing over my pride and halfway jugging in the dark due to my slowness, to reach the bottom of the Heart on El Capitan in Yosemite Valley.

I watched the sunrise turn the cliffs pink and the shadow of El Cap project onto the trees below, the big giant, waking up from sleep. The shadow worked clockwise as we stretched our tired muscles and I thought a lot about fear that has prevented me from being up on a wall sooner. In fact, I had dreams of falling for weeks before I got here.

Fear is a funny thing, and it can decide how you live your life. I feel like mine has been holding me tightly to it's hip and I've let it sit, thinking that there's nothing I could do about it.

Before we started hiking to the base, I was so full of nervous energy, I could have run for miles. And though that energy was mostly spent in my desperate attempt to get my rhythm set jugging, most of the fear had converted into amazement that I was actually on my way up, that the fear wasn't quite as paralyzing as I had thought.

And though it's no big stride, it's progress and it was a life changing experience for me.

The moon, in it's crescent, was light enough to see and it cast moon flares through my lens. I can't tell you how very, very alive I felt up there, looking down on the 200 ft trees, and drinking coffee high above the Valley floor. I can tell you that today I have lived life to the fullest and I'm not the same person I was yesterday.

I wish you could see the beauty that I've been witnessing and the exponential growth that I've felt. I try my best to capture it all, but there are certain things that shouldn't be bridled, just experienced. And the sum of all my experiences here, are that exactly. 

I hope I never stop feeling life so fully as I do right now and I'm incredibly grateful for the people I had with me on this step. 

Life changing moments

I've had a lot of life changing moments.

Getting off of the plane for the first time on the other side of the world; stepping onto the naked, foreign tarmac, the humidity enveloping me.
The first return to Yosemite since the accident. Dogwoods had bloomed and I couldn't, for the life of me, be angry when I was standing in the meadows, gazing at the giant walls.
The first time I had a conversation in a language other than my own.
The uplifting feeling of my career just beginning.
My first solo road trip, 20,000 miles logged on the road with the freedom to go wherever I chose.

And then there was the birth of August.





There are no feelings to describe having been present when someone enters the world. There are no words I can write that could explain the first inhales of those little butterfly lungs. Or the first time Heidi held him. And every word I can think of sounds too harsh to tell you about the first time he laid on my chest, head tucked under my chin and the certainty of knowing I had never held something so delicate and fragile.

We come so innocently into the world. Born to parents and places and environments. We grow and learn and hope. And to see that all begin for someone will be something that I will remember for the rest of my life.

I can't wait to get to know August again and again. I can't wait for him to learn the sagebrush plains and what each peak is called and explore the world and learn his name. I hope he sees things with new eyes, and keeps his heart open and knows that he is so loved and cared for. I hope he never doubts that for a minute.

As I left town, I felt full to the brim with love. The blood orange sun pushed me down the highway and I thanked my lucky stars to feel so alive and happy.

I can't wait for what's to come.