A Study of Murphy’s Law Part Three: Letting Go

All summer long I knew that the only closure I would get would have to come from Hermit’s. I needed to see that you were no long down there, waiting. My heart raged for days before we hit that trail, and I prayed and prayed and prayed that if you were still there, that I would find you. And if you weren’t, that I would learn to stop looking.

When we went back down Hermits a week before I left, the Canyon fought back with everything it had. We packed as light as all get out and I felt sick knowing that if you were down there, I wouldn’t have enough to save you. The whole hike down I looked for you in every crevasse, I looked for you between boulders and under trees, I believed that I would be able to see your plaid shirt someplace that everyone else had missed. You were everywhere. I saw you crawling across every rock layer, gaunt and accusing and ready for salvation, and I was so afraid to touch you with these cursed hands of mine. When we reached the place where we met, I stopped breathing. I kept hiking but I stopped breathing until I could no longer maintain that kind of anabolic activity and sat down midtrial and erupted into tears. My hiking group joined me and Jamie’s calm lake aura settled on my shoulder while Joe and Jacob looked skeptically from rocks across the path. It took ten minutes of hyperventilation and telling you not to come back unless you were coming back until we were able to push on. I lost feeling in my hands and face but when we reached Hermit’s creek, I felt at ease.

My friends made me laugh every second of that hike and I slipped into a post-panic attack nap with my head propped up on a rock and the bubbling stream of life slowly rocking my ears to sleep. After eating dinner and drinking some beer we went to sleep with most of us laid out like sardines, open to the Canyon on top of a blanket. I didn’t sleep a wink. I felt bugs crawling all over us and I stared at the clouds rolling past the starry night sky and I figured if you had turned into a Canyon ghost now was the time you would come pull me over the edge the nearest cliff.

We woke up at two AM to start hiking and within half an hour we encountered a rattlesnake that nearly took off Jamie’s foot and set Joe off on a puking spree. Jamie and I continued on a stupid voyage across the Tonto while the boys went back up Hermits. It was so dark and we had never been on that trail before and I felt like I could slide right off of that darkness over the edge of something no one else in the world has ever seen. I wasn’t suicidal, just disconnected. We got lost some three times and ended up at a washed out campsite with no direction, no sunlight, and no hope. We debated our options and realized that Merril’s wife, and “the experienced hiker”, and you were plaguing both of our minds. This was the place where people disappear and are never found. Only after a massive scorpion that I now know is apparently the most poisonous scorpion in N. America almost made it’s way up my pant leg did we spring out of there back in the direction we came from, almost getting lost once again.

We caught up with the boys and took our sweet time getting out of that rebellious ravine, tossing around the idea that maybe Hermit’s is so terrible because it’s rebelling against the gondola that used to be installed there. Its chaos is a form of resistance to the colonization by humankind. When I exited the Canyon that time, I wasn’t crying and I felt lighter, but I still missed you. I still miss you. And I mourn for the future of that place that will only get less wild from here on out if mankind has anything to do with it.

A good friend of mine recently wrote to me saying, “Leave the Canyon behind. There are much greater adventures to be had…” and I know she meant I have to leave you behind too. But I don’t know how. You were the two minutes I let go, the rope I let slip through my fingers, the trigger my shaking finger pulled without knowing it was even attached to a hand that held a gun. I do not know how to leave you behind. Just as every stranger at night is the man that pressed a knife against my chest, every lone traveler I see is you. They’re all you. I still see that place where we met so clearly, as if Michelangelo himself painted that encounter on the backs of my eyelids. Maybe I am still carrying around the weight of your empty gallon jug. I have taken every step necessary to not think about why my shoulders feel so heavy but God, they feel heavy. Everything here feels heavy, especially the oxygen content of the atmosphere.

I liked to refer to the Canyon as the epicenter of chaos, a spinning blackhole that pulls reality apart the closer you get to the edge of it. From day one everything felt dystopian. The tourists felt like visitors to the zoo, completely unknowing of how easy it would be for the tiger in the cage to rip their throats out. Week one, we had the gunman. We lay flattened in our beds giggling out of fear as we watched shadows glint past our window followed by the echo of a cops command. Every week there was something new and unexpected and completely wrong. It was Murphy’s Law, anything that could go wrong, did go wrong, and the closer you got to the edge of the Canyon, the worse it became. There was everything from alarms that went off at random, love triangles, mountain lions, rashes, the girl we found in the woods, landslides, cactus battlewounds, and you. And that’s just the short list. I remember asking my roommate if the national park she had worked at last summer was like this. She said, “no, this is different”.

A few weeks after you went missing, that same roommate speculated that the Canyon wasn’t the black hole of destruction, but that I was. She said that all these things that were happening only happened to her when she was with me. I didn’t want her to be right because that would mean that you would have made it out alive if our paths hadn’t intersected. A week later, she was at the part of the Canyon where that one guy shot himself and I wasn’t there with her and even though I grieved for his life and for that exposure she had to experience, I took it as a sign that maybe, just maybe it wasn’t all my fault. The piece of my heart that lives in England has had made that claim before, the claim that chaos gravitates towards me. He called it The Asfeldt Effect™. I had always just assumed that my life was slightly off kilter, overlapping with a dimension humans are not supposed to be able to perceive. He was the first person to ever make me believe that unpredictability was beautiful.

The whole summer felt like I was just holding my breath waiting for the next piece of chaos to occur, like I was standing frozen in a forest full of dead trees and wind of 40 mph. Who knew when the next log would come toppling down, who knew who would be under it when it landed. After you, I secretly hoped I would be under the next one.

I wonder if I had never met you, if I would be able to let go of Arizona, if coming back to Oklahoma wouldn’t have been/be so hard for me. I still hold my breath every time I see the sun set and I still feel the cardinal pull to the West when I close my eyes. No matter where I was in Arizona, I always knew exactly which direction the Canyon was. It was like a sixth sense that left faint traces of blood along my teeth and no matter how much water I drink, my thirst for desert sand cannot be quenched. I am trying to let you and the Canyon go and I think I am getting there but it still feels an awful lot like I am losing a part of myself in the process, and losing a part of God too. He was so real and relatable and accepting of my neurotic backward hell-bent on running away type of darkness when I sat cross legged at the edge of that void, but here He is starting to feel more and more like expectations I will never meet and answers I will never receive. I know that is not the truth of who He is, but this life is not the truth of who I am and I think the Holy Spirit feels that disconnect.

Now, I don’t know if I’ll ever go back to that land of destructive enchantment, but I do know that it both broke my heart and made me laugh at the same time and I think that means something. It will always be the balance between the nearness of death and the beauty of life. I want to go out into The Beyond with as much bravery as those mountain goats that disobeyed gravity had, but I am still learning to forgive my chattering teeth and eyes that dampen at everything. Please forgive me if one day I walk out into a new daylight and I do not take you with me; I cannot carry you forever. Omar didn’t want me to, and I don’t think the real you would want me to either.

If you’re reading this, and now I’m speaking to all of you, not just Ralph, don’t settle for only telling stories of the past, but lay awake at night next to the hearts that beat for you and write new stories with them in the constellations of every boring nightstand lamp. Hold the hands of those holding your hands and allow your past to stay in your past and allow forgiveness to be a word you recognize in every language. There will be more Canyons and we will find the next fingerprint of God and some people will have enough faith for the rest of us to rest our weary heads and say, “I’m not sure 100% of the time but still I will choose love.” I suppose I will always feel a subconscious pull towards that desolate terrain, but I will choose to keep my eyes fixed on the horizon and I will know that the sun rises just as fiercely on adventures filled with sidewalks and street lamps as it does on adventures filled with rivers and rock layers. May you rest in peace, my Canyon, and may you always bring peace to those that rest in you.

A Study of Murphy’s Law Part One: The Case of the Missing Hiker

 

I tied my permit to my pack, hoisted that weight of survival over my shoulders, and headed out the door into the unknown (with a vending machine Gatorade stop first on the docket). “Good luck in the depths of the Canyon. I believe that you can do this.” A note from my roommate lay folded in my journal – an unnecessary weight I was willing to carry with me if it meant my solitude could be captured to some extent. I was hiking down in to the Canyon to spend my first overnight…on an unmaintained trail…on a side of the Canyon I had never been on…all by myself. I was nervous but I was excited, ready to prove to myself that it wasn’t a bad idea.

Hermit’s Trail starts from Hermit’s Rest on the west end of the South Rim. You take a forty-minute bus ride from the Village out to Hermit’s Rest and head down an 8-mile hike to Hermit’s Creek. I could have gone another 1,000 ft all the way to the river but I decided the creek would be a feat in and of itself for my first solo overnight. I worked that day and arrived to the trailhead late – about 5:30PM. I know myself and figured I could make up the time by running down instead of walking, a thought that turned out to be a serious overestimation of the quality of the trail. I began my way down, eyes affixed to the ground in order to avoid the infinite number of twisted ankles that could have arisen even in the first ten minutes.

I saw an older couple standing next to a tan male that was seated on the ground. As soon as I approached them he begged me, “water! Do you have any water?” I pulled out my liter Nalgene and handed it to him. He took several large gulps before handing it back to me. He told me he had been with two friends who were still down the trail; they had been climbing up without water for over two hours. The couple that stood next to him asked “Do you maybe have water for us as well?” I gave them some. Only after they had all drank their fill did they ask where I was going. When I replied “Hermit’s Creek” they all gasped and asked if I had enough water to get myself to the bottom. I smiled and said, “I’m going downhill,” before continuing on my way. Ten minutes later I found the tan guy’s friends both collapsed in the shade and handed them my Nalgene before they even had to ask. “You are an angel, a water angel,” one of them said, “I wish I could repay you.” You can repay me by never coming down here unprepared again, I thought, but just smiled and let them finish the Gatorade (so much for stocking up on electrolytes). I continued on. Ten minutes later, I came across two more men who, unsurprisingly, asked me for water. By the time they were done I had one liter of water left to get me the 6.5 miles to the creek; it was time to start hauling. I didn’t see another soul for the rest of the trail. Every single one of them asked about me and my needs only after they themselves had drank their fill

The trail could have been a lot shorter had it been steeper, but instead it was a several mile long traverse across open canyon wall. The Bright Angel trail is tucked back into an alcove making the Canyon seem a lot smaller than it actually is. Hermit’s Trail was out on an open face of the Canyon; opening up an expanse of wilderness I had yet to experience. I could see for miles and miles and miles and everything about it felt lifeless.

As I hiked the traverse through the red rock layer I talked to the Canyon (because who else would I talk to down there?!) When I first arrived here, I had taken my time to listen to what he had to say, to listen to what his voice was emphasizing, and for the past four weeks I had been hearing the same thing every time I went down past the rim: “Don’t trust me.” I held my hand out gently and let it pass over the ridges in the rock to my right. I nearly felt him screaming in response to my gentility.

“Why have you come here?” He asked.

“I want to learn how to be alive,” I replied.

He cackled back at me, “You! You know nothing. You are just one little girl and you know nothing.”

“Then teach me,” I whispered, “Teach me so I can know.”

We went on like this for hours, me bending at his feet asking him what it’s like to be so vast that no one can touch you. He told me that all he does is hurt people, that all he knows is the extreme, that people don’t believe the warning signs until it is too late. I told him I know what it feels like to be rocky in every corner.

Around mile 5, I came across a rockslide area, a possibility I was aware of but still unprepared for. I lost the trail. I could see maybe 200 meters ahead of me where the trail picked back up but in between me and that safe haven was a steep, loose, uncharted slide and I had less than one liter of water to get me back to the top should I choose to turn around. I heard the voice of someone both a mentor and tormentor from a past season of my life reminding me as he held my bloody hands that the only way to know how far we can go is to go beyond ourselves, to break our own boundaries and lose the premeditated edge of “this is where I want to stop”. And even though I disagreed with a lot of his philosophies, I still believed him when he told me that pain is the only median of growth that provides real outcomes. It was with those words that I started scrambling.

I was holding onto hands that kept letting go and all I could do was keep my eyes on where I needed to be: the other side. Three ridges lay between me and a sign of civilization but the open face of the Canyon meant wind and the loose rock meant instability and I did what I do best which is to keep moving and moving and moving until the ground beneath me started sliding and I grabbed a plant that was very sharp but I held on and I managed to anchor myself enough to wait out the slide. I had tears in my eyes and I thought about

You can barely see the trail pick back up on the other side

the kid from our ministry at Zion who had fallen and I thought not today, not me, not another one and I turned back. My hand was swelling from anchoring itself to a cactus, and as I stood where the trail ended and my arrogance began I asked this Canyon “is defeat the lesson I am supposed to learn today?” He did not respond. I began walking backwards, calculating how painful it was going to be to hiking 5 miles uphill on less than a liter of water when my insides twisted around inside of me and pulled me back. I looked with a bigger perspective and thought, I am the girl who finishes what she starts. And then I saw a cairn. It was small, almost impossible to see, but it was there and it looked stood on terrain that looked passable. I chased after that direction with great vigor, knowing the last half hour had just cost me the chance of approaching camp in the daylight. I booked it down onto the Tonto layer in the last hour and as the sun set and I put my headlamp on I started running again.


I finally reached Hermit’s Creek around 8:30PM and quickly filled my water bottles and poured in purifying solution. I sat next to the creek slowing my heart beat down and thanking Jesus for the gift of gravity when I heard a voice call out “hello!” and I nearly jumped out of my skin. I turned and saw a skinny, goofy man approaching me. He apologized for scaring me and then asked if I had a purification system. His name was Dewey and he had been camping down here for two days and was about to run out of water even though he still had to go up. I lent him my purification drops and he sat down beside me to fill his jugs.

He looked at me and said, “You are like a lake princess, a river siren.” I wasn’t sure what he meant but I smiled and thanked him anyways. We could both tell his words weren’t working quite right so he kept trying. “As soon as I saw you kneeling down by the creek I knew you were a spiritual creature. You are like a woman rising up out of the Ganges, a baptism in the Jordan River.”

I told him about ACMNP and how I was here to help people understand God by showing them His majesty. Dewey lit up like a candelabra. “If your ultimate goal isn’t to love God, then you are wasting your life,” he told me, “everything else is meaningless.” meaningless, meaningless, meaningless, it echoed, echoed, echoed. He left me to my solitude and returned to his camping, saying he hoped to see me on the way up.

I pitched my tent and ate some dinner before lying down to pursue a relationship with sleep that was never going to work out. I tossed and turned all night long, listening to the sounds of the creek and the bugs that never showed their faces and the wind that imagined itself intertwined with the unforgiving rock walls

Found In Journal at 2 mile shelter house

around me. At one point, I woke up because I thought someone as shining a flashlight into my tent but it turned out to be the brightest full moon I have ever seen. My alarm went off at 3AM (gotta beat the heat) and just as it did, my body said, “no, here is your deep sleep” so I turned it off and set it for 4:30AM.

4:30AM came to me like the dream where you are falling and just as your heart comes out of your mouth you wake up. I woke up and ate some breakfast, filled my water bottles again, sat with my feet in the creek for a good fifteen minutes to calm down an inflamed big toe, broke camp, and started heading up the trail at 5:30 after the sun had already risen. My legs immediately began groaning under the future of this hike and weight of a pack instead of just water. And then not fifteen minutes onto the Tonto layer, I saw him.

 

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This is the part where my story becomes not my own, and with that I am not so sure how much I should share. But I will share what is my own and leave the rest up those who now know grief better than I do.

 

            ……………………………………………………………………………………………………

 

 

I saw him rising up out of the landscape like a ghost from my youth and I thought Nothing about him belongs here. He was an older man, darkened with a life overseas, carrying nothing but a reusable grocery bag. He walked steadily but slowly; barely even stopping to register that I was there.

I said “good morning” and asked where he was going. He told me that he was very mad and wanted to sue the Grand Canyon for not having a place to cross the river. He had a room on the other side and had come down yesterday trying to cross the river. 11 miles, I thought, you are at least 11 miles from the nearest bridge, where did you come from, where did you come from, where did you come from. I thought of the 7 people from yesterday and asked if he had any water. He held up an empty gallon jug and said “no”. I told him that Hermit’s Creek was just fifteen minutes further down the trail and that he could drink the water from there, “God bless you, without that I could be starving, God bless you” he repeated it. Don’t bless me yet. I told him that if he wanted to get out of the Canyon he should turn around and follow the trail upwards, that it was 8 miles to get out. And then we parted ways.

I felt sick, I felt like something was wrong, I felt like the top wouldn’t be the same top I had left. I turned around once more and saw him walking down towards the creek. I inhaled the molten lava hundreds of miles beneath my feet and used that heat to run the engine of my legs uphill. I don’t know what I was thinking other than “I have to reach to the top and tell someone about that man”. I passed Dewey on the way up and asked if he had seen him. He had not. He saw the worry on my face and said “God sent you to be there, God will sent someone else who can help, that’s all we have, you are already blessed” how can you know that, how can you know that, how can you know that.

I continued on, passing three people who had come from the Tonto layer early in the morning. They too had not seen the man. I began to wonder if he was even real. My mind had invented things before that had not been there, but this? A talking human being? That was too much even for me, the girl who was known for being frayed around the edges, the girl who used glue to hold herself together, the girl whose sanity the universe has never respected. I thought about how anyone who would hike down a trail with no water to camp at the bottom of a desolate canyon completely alone has to be somewhat cracked to begin with. Maybe my cracks were letting out a little more light than usual. Either he was real or I was actually crazy. I hoped to God it was the latter.

I made it out of the Canyon in 4.5 hours and headed straight to the desk at Hermit’s Rest.

“Can I speak to a park ranger, please?” I asked.

“If you want to talk to a parkranger, you’ll have to go to the ranger station in the village,” the employee said.

“Then can you call search and rescue for me, please,” I said.

 

I spent about twenty minutes talking to search and rescue on the phone describing in great detail the reasons I was calling and every aspect of the encounter

Two of my friends picked me up from the bus stop in the Village. I hugged them, threw my pack in the back of the car, climbed into the passenger seat, and cried.

Prelude and Arrival

 

PRELUDE

            I left for my next Great Unknown a little over a week ago, last Thursday to be exact. It already feels like years ago. Boxes and backpacks and loose socks flew around my car while I flew down several interstates and highways towards a future I didn’t know how to expect. My first stop was in Rapid City, South Dakota. I passed through the Badlands on the way there and was, as always, struck by how an earthly monument that soft could have lasted all these years. It’s tan and orange humps rose up out of the prairie grass, casting shadows in the sun and dust clouds when stepped on. I stayed with a family friend who hospitality has never once failed me and I decided that if I ever move back home, I’ll choose West over East.

The next day, after becoming overly concerned about dangerous weather, I left at 7AM and passed through Nebraska, a land that appeared to me like something from a Celtic dream. Rolling hills, unrelenting fog, and subtle rain amplified the greenery of those pastures and it took no time for me to hit “play” next to Celtic Woman on Spotify. I stopped in Denver, CO for the next few days. That Friday, I visited the ACMNP office and was given a bit of direction on where to go for good atmosphere and mediocre coffee and then followed those directions to a place whose name I have already forgotten. It was a small house remade into a coffee shop. I couldn’t connect to the WiFi and was thus forced to finish writing a piece I started a month ago, the last time I was in Denver. A friend from OK drove up to see me and the person I was staying with. Even though the time was short, it was a good reminder of things that are to come and it helped me breathe a little easier when I think three months in advance.

I drove though a snowstorm in the Rockies that Sunday and I have never gripped 10 and 2 so hard in my life. My steering wheel still has not forgiven me. I thought about the men in my life who have driven me up and down roads like that before and I immediately appreciated the things they have sacrificed for me so much more (Dad, I’m talking about you). I eventually made it through and was blessed by a beautiful double rainbow of Las Mesas in Colorado. I think that was The Earth’s way of telling me that I can be present in one place without abandoning another.

 

I camped in the dead night of Utah with odd high school memories haunting me, and the pepper spray right by my pillow. When I woke up that morning and stepped outside of my tent, all I could do was smile. There I was, alone, finally experiencing The Desert. I drove the ten minutes to the entrance of Arches National Park and entered the loop with three liters of water, two cliff bars, no agenda, and a subtle feeling of contentment. I spent all day running around a landscape I have never before seen. Huge red stone towers rose up out of the flat earth all around me. It was as if giant beasts had been laid to rest right there and, in their resistance, had reached their claws out of their graves and left horizontal rake marks down the sides of their tombstones. The stone there crumbled easily if you weren’t careful. I took a primitive path and climbed as much as I could, especially the parts where nobody else was. The arches rose like huge bridges above me, bridgesover tunnels of open sky. You could look through them and see for miles. Several older tourists made comments like “where’s your boyfriend, sweetie? You shouldn’t be traveling all alone,” and “Don’t climb that: you’ll get hurt! You better wait for your dad”. I held my tongue but raged internally that one reason it was dangerous for me to travel alone was because people like them permit a system to persist where Female is equivalent to Weak and adventure is reserved for those who don’t have responsibilities like a husband, a house, and kids. I know they meant well, but meaning well isn’t enough anymore.

I continued on the loop to the Delicate Arch trail and hiked up a blazing hot, open desert rock slab. When I got to the top I was underwhelmed by the Arch but was overwhelmed by how far I could see and how beautifully desolate everything looked. I was sitting on top of short rock tower when a Saudi Arabian man about my age approached me and said “Wow! You are such brave girl, the bravest in my life, my friend with me is a scaredy boy and will not climb anything with me. Let us go take pictures! I will take the best picture for you.” I followed him around the area and hopped up on anything he wanted a picture from and he would always remark “Wow you are such brave girl.” It was a nice confidence boost. After I was done there, I went into the backcountry in order to scope out a secluded place to take a back tattoo photo. Taking one’s clothes off in any government owned area is always a risky idea. Eventually I worked my self-timer magic and took off at a run back down. When I got to the bottom of the trail some ladies asked me “Why are you running?”

“I’m already a quarter of the way through my life and if I don’t run everywhere, I will never have enough time to see and do and be everything that I want to see and do and be,” I wanted to say.

“It’s faster,” I said.

Driving out of Arches was almost painful, and I promised that graveyard I would return. I bought a bagel and a beer on the way back to my campsite. I hiked to a ‘watering hole’ to cool down and did some free bouldering over the deeper end. That night, I drank my beer and tried to write a song before laying down to rest in my tent for a very, VERY windy night.

When I awoke, it was my last day of travel.

I crossed Utah into Arizona and was introduced to even more deserty desert than what surrounded Moab. I saw empty cactus and shrubbery filled red land for miles. The occasional house made me think of No Country For Old Men and I wondered what kind of hardship it takes for someone to choose to remain in that desolation forever. I suppose the solitude would be kind of nice. The second I saw the sign for “Grand Canyon South Rim” my heart leaned up into sternum and I clenched my jaw for a while. I felt him coming half an hour before I saw him. It was as if the gravity of this place was pulling me in and in and in and in. I drove through the Kaibab National Forest and I got checked in at my place of employment and I moved into my room and I met up with some of my friends and we got lunch and I told them I hadn’t yet seen the Canyon and they said “follow us” and I did and then suddenly, there it was.

 

ARRIVAL

 

I have a theory about how the Canyon was made. Way back when, before iPhones and cars and electricity and even the wheel existed, the Canyon was not as much The Grand Canyon as it was just a canyon. Don’t get me wrong, it was still striking, just not at the scale it is now. Those who would see it would stand at the edge for the very first time and gasp and find that the view, though subtle, would took their breath away. The canyon, in all it’s stillness and color, would reach up behind every new unsuspecting witness and pluck their breath right from out of their lungs, and use it to fill himself. Over the years, many people that came, when they first saw him, would find it hard to breathe, would find that the functioning of their eyes had taken over every other aspect of their body. The Canyon used that air, all those millions of gasps, to fill himself up deeper and deeper, wider and wider, until he changed from a canyon to The Canyon to The Grand Canyon. All that space you see between the side you stand on and the side 21 miles away is made up of the wonder and awe and respect of generations of humans realizing that they are nothing but a piece of dust, floating on the winds of the earth’s orbit.

When I stood at that edge for the very first time, I found that the view took my breath away. It still does, even as I sit here typing this. Several of my other team members said that they cried when they saw him, but I just stood there and stopped breathing, willing that giant in front of me to never let my lungs inflate again.

I’ve been running in and out of him for the past few days, taking my time to get to know the curvature of his skin and the dryness of his innards. The forests on his edges have wooed me and the elk that wander them make me happy to think that after all these years of abuse, The Earth will still win. I hope there are others out there rooting for her.

After my first real day of work today I am realizing that I don’t have as much time to fall in love with this giant as I thought. I came here to take my time and to write down all the noise inside of my head and to wander down the trail heads of his heart and (hopefully) hear him say that the things I create are good, that my presence is good, but I think I’ll have to speed up my plan. Needing money to live puts a bit of a damper on freedom. Maybe someday it won’t. I’ll take what I can get for now, and that’s a whole lot more than most people. If you haven’t been outside yet today (walking to your car doesn’t count), go outside and close your eyes and forget about mankind. Breathe in the sunshine or the rainclouds or the night sky and know that you deserve wholeness just as much as this earth does. She’s waiting to help you find it, She’s hoping you’ll help her find it too.