This past week gave me, among many other gifts, the unencumbered occasion to think. I was planning on using the time for thought, and I did, which is great, but I also figured that at the end of said time that I'd have it all figured out...but I don't. If anything, right now, I feel like it's okay that I don't have it figured out. No one has it figured out. No one has to figure it out. Thirty hours isn't enough to figure it all out.
I've spent so much of my life waiting around until I had everything figured out, and as a result, I haven't taken a ton of risks. I mean, I guess I'm fine with my choices up to this point, I've obviously dipped my toes into risk, and I have a hard time philosophically regretting things if it leads a person to where they're eventually meant to be--but I'm ready to make different choices, and I feel empowered to make them.
I am Aladdin, and this is my lamp. I wished for you, and here you are.
I can't rewind and do anything over, but I can take one intentional step after the other in the direction I want to head and feel confident in those steps...one at a time. I can choose to trust my gut, choose to trust love, choose to trust God and the universe, choose to trust a person who holds my heart in their hands--or not. The trust is a choice, and beyond the feels, the love is a choice, too.
There's so much power in that realization of choice. We're only stuck if we allow ourselves to be stuck. Stuck is an illusion.
What do you do when your foundation falls apart? I don't know. They don't teach you that in school.
Since its release in 1998, SLC Punk resonated with me in a hugely impactful way. My friends from home (we're a ragtag buncha hillbilly punks over there) and I all really related to it, and I think being as that we were from areas of strong religious influence and societal oppression, the ideas rang true and always hit home.
So when I found myself only a couple of hours from the Bonneville Salt Flats, where some really amazing scenes in SLC Punk were filmed (and discussed heavily in the movie), I had to take a quick spin off the path to check them out for myself.
This was my first trip out west...I'd not been any further west than Dallas/Wichita/Oklahoma City before last week, and I decided to take the trip by car, which was an epic opportunity to really see America...and I really feel like I saw my country--in many ways, for the very first time. More than I've ever felt before. More on that in upcoming days, but good grief. My life is changed, y'all. I'm categorically different than I was a week ago.
"It's a crazy, fucked up world, and we're all just barely floating along--waiting for someone who can walk on water."
Some fun facts about the salt flats!
According to The United States Bureau of Land Management:
"The Bonneville Salt Flats are a 30,000 acre expanse of hard, white salt crust on the western edge of the Great Salt Lake basin in Utah. The salt flats are about 12 miles long and 5 miles wide with total area coverage of just over 46 square miles."
The mountains of Utah are heavy in minerals and salt, and its terminal/endorheic lakes end up amassing large amounts of salt in them over years of rainfall and evaporation. These lakes, created in wet years, through evaporation processes, develop a thick crust of mostly salt (about 90% of the crust at Bonneville is literally common table salt), and after thousands of years of this rinse/repeat--and when the lake dries up totally--the salt flats are left.
The Bonneville Salt Flats are the remnants of the Pleistocene-era Lake Bonneville, so for these particular flats, they've been building and crusting since the Ice Age...and even conceptualizing that statement is hard for me.
It was overcast when I passed through, but incredibly hot, and very windy. From the road, the flats look remarkably like snow, so the weather disconnect with the view was a trip. I was also surprised that the public access to the flats was actually just an unassuming rest stop, and it was super easy to jet in and check it out. It wasn't busy, in fact, there were probably only ten people out on the expanse the entire time I was there.
"It's like Jesus Christ took a shit and it landed right here."
For the past month (or 5 months, or 10 months), things have been pretty heavy, and I'm fucking tired. I'm tired of everything being so heavy all the time. I'm exhausted from everything being so heavy all the time.
And, of course, I've done this to myself. The heaviness. I do this shit. I make everything so heavy, and then my historic tendency is to run away when it gets to be too much. But for the first time in my life, I feel like I'm ready to just kick the heavy and just try out being happy. Because what I have in my life right now is only cause for pure fucking joy...and that's what I felt when I looked out into the nothing: abundance.
I felt what I have rather than relating to the nothing. I looked out to the peaks and the miles of desolation spread before me, and my eyes filled with tears as I saw the individual faces and felt the love of my entire world. There's so much passion and creativity and art in my life right now. It's a living dream in a thousand ways. I am more inspired now than I've been in years.
Parts of this have also felt like a living nightmare, too, but I've realized that even that can be drilled down to my own bullshit, and I have let this dream feel like a nightmare. I did this, and I can undo it. Mind over matter.
Like an acid trip, life is so much about perception and the demons we carry around with us. I'm done with giving my demons a voice, and I'm done with living like I don't have choices. I'm done leading with my ego, and I'm done being scared. A switch has flipped inside me, and there's no turning back now. Look out, because I am fucking determined, and I am a force to be reckoned with.
Sources:
SLC Punk Script
US Department of Interior Bureau of Land Management - Bonneville Salt Flats Special Recreation Management Area (SRMA)
Wikipedia - Bonneville Salt Flats
YourHikeGuide.com - Bonneville Salt Flats
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