I had relished a vision of life in my travels that has continued to thrive inside of me, years after all of the other things I contracted on those trips have gone. It may lay dormant for a time, but a fever begins if too many of the following preconditions are present at any given moment: mundane work routines, traffic jams, gradual wealth accumulation that has no clear purpose, planning more than one year in advance, mainstream news, two weeks of vacation a year and holidays that involve excessive materialism. For years I had used this vision to guide me. I lived a wild and carefree existence.
During these years I roamed far and wide, floating rivers, roaming in the mountains and sleeping outside under the stars. These were years of cheap beer, whisky out of plastic jugs, occasional dumpster diving, mushrooms as a regular part of my diet, naked parties, and free love despite the fact that many of us smelled terrible (me) as we (me) primarily bathed in the river. I would work half the year almost every day and then spend half of the year as free as a bird. Six months hitchhiking through Mexico and Central America. Five months riding my bike to Guatemala. I met a girl on that trip – Lauren – who I happily let throw a wrench in my spokes, which led to me staying in Guatemala seven more months. Then we moved to New York City for seven months. Then we moved to Mauritius for seven months. The time blurred by.
After living in Mauritius, my relationship with Lauren was frayed and I felt mentally exhausted. The past few years had reinforced my belief that the instability and lack of direction in my life was going to make it difficult for me to have many experiences or things that are considered a natural part of one’s life progression like a wife, sharp kitchen knives, a house, a garden, a dog, or kids. I thought I might want those things later on, so I figured it would be wise to plot a course in that direction as I had just turned 30. I decided that my years of rambling were coming to an end, that it was time for me to start a career and move on the next phase of my life.
I decided to move to the Western slope of Colorado to do a work-trade program at a solar trade school that permitted me to study renewable energy system design and construction. At the end of the work-trade program, I was offered a job based out of Salt Lake City, Utah managing renewable energy projects. This move was sadly also the end of my relationship with Lauren. I settled into my position in Utah making far more money than I had ever made beforehand and found myself as a cog in the humming American economy. I worked diligently, slaving away at the ‘ol sun mine. I slept on a mattress on the floor of a shared house, paid minimal rent, drove my beat-up old car and cooked nearly all of my own meals.
After a year and a half, I felt uncomfortable, like I didn’t fit in, like something was missing. I had no urge to do any of the things that I had imagined I might want to do with my new found wealth and stability like have a wife, kids, a dog or a house. I spent quite a few months depressed, earnestly struggling to understand or at least suppress my feelings. Where could I go from here? I couldn’t go back to traveling, in my mind those times had come to an end. In any case, I was reluctant to make any significant changes as I had invested so much into this life change and it had cost me my relationship with Lauren. I saw my previous existence as simply escapism and hedonism; I was framing my life in a series of binaries: stability or instability, rootedness or nomadism, growth or escapism, deep relationships or ephemeral relationships. I thought that stability inherently translated to personal growth. After a year and a half it was clear that there was something inside me though – let’s call it an idea – that was firmly lodged between the lobes of my brain that was telling me to leave, that was telling me that this life wasn’t right for me. Why am I constantly yearning to move? Why do other ideas or visions of life have no staying power or impact with me? Why don’t I have a nesting impulse or find sufficient joy in material goods to keep me working to buy them? Just like a parasite, ideas probably need a suitable host to flourish and some formidable ones had taken colonized me. I reached a breaking point and decided to take a trip with the hope that it would give me space and time to reflect.
I started my journey just after a blizzard had swept through the west and a cold, high pressure system had settled in. I left headed for the wilderness in Death Valley, California; this journey would be as much a physical journey as a mental journey. I drove for several days, camping at hotsprings amidst the white landscape with a few other strange individuals. The nights were long and cold. I would stay in the hotsprings until just before I intended to go to sleep, haul my naked body out of the pot, dry myself with a towel as quickly as possible, put on a pair of underwear and my boots before running across the crunchy snow to my sleeping bag with my core still warm.
My last night before arriving in Death Valley I sat in my tent late at night and examined a map of the area. I marked out a route to a desolate part of the national park where I could assuredly find solitude. Upon reaching this place I couldn’t sleep the first night. I got up and went outside my tent; I stood alone staring up at an infinite black ceiling scintillating with mystery, a sliver of a waxing moon lingering. I felt to the fullest degree separate, alienated. As I lay down in my tent, I found myself wandering through strange landscapes and unlived lives; I wondered how people lived before civilization and all of its distractions. Silence rang out around me apart from the sporadic chatter of two small rodents on either side of me. I felt swallowed by cold blackness. Sleeping outside by one’s lonesome can rive the façade of whatever convenient narrative we adopt to walk about this world. It can be hard to shut your eyes.
But the reward, of feeling at home, of facing this fear and letting yourself be swallowed by the blackness of night only to wake upon yet another dawn is vitally important – this has been the true human experience since the dawn of consciousness.
The following morning, I packed enough food and water for the entire day before setting out walking along a spine of rocks cradling an expansive plain peopled by Joshua Trees. Distances and scale seem naturally distorted in Death Valley, out of proportion. I didn’t see much wildlife, but I frequently stooped to examine the tracks of coyotes and bighorn sheep in the sand.
I quickly crested the head of a canyon that fed out to the Racetrack Playa shimmering in the distance. The Race Track is home to a strange phenomenon in which rocks with time and the elements migrate across the surface of a perfectly flat sandy expanse. Nearly all of these rocks have been taken by visitors. I continued descending until I found a nice sloping rock on a windswept outcropping where I could sit and revel at the expressive Seussian forms of the Joshua Trees wildly gesticulating. I pulled my knees up to my chest and tried to feel the place. The vast, inhospitable landscape was a mirror in which I glimpsed my small pitiful self: an ego trying to give expression to itself in a world devoid of meaning. I saw each of us valiantly struggling, indistinguishable from the other lifeforms that peopled the landscape. Each Joshua Tree, each shrub, each lichen, has a story to tell that has been defined by its aspect, the dominant wind direction, rainfall patterns, the shadows from other plants… So it goes for whatever is inside of each of us. Slowly we are twisted, gnarled, sometimes into beautiful forms, other times into grotesque haunting shapes, but in any case we will be desiccated and swept away.
I took a long gaze from my vantage on the peak at human existence and how adrift modern civilization had become. Looking out across the lanscape and reflection on my the previous night, it was easy to understand mankind’s impulse or the original impetus to address human needs. We are fragile creatures – ill-suited to many different environments. Human existence is defined by the existence of a self and a feeling of dislocation from all that surrounds us. Separateness is a complex matter as it is intuitively false, but rationally true. The other, whether the physical earth or human inhabitants, is a source of both anxiety, fear, excitement, and joy. We have constructed a society and erected edifices to try to ameliorate the external threats to our being posed by the natural environment, but this has only seemed to widen the gap for many people… to create a vast distance between us and our natural origins.
Human civilization long ago surpassed the point of having the resources and ability to meet all of humanities basic needs and now we have entered a surreal age untethered from need or purpose in much of the world. We now rise each day under the illusion of scarcity and we – the majority – let the system continue because it gives each of us a small allotment of commodity food pellets and a semblance of purpose. Instead of the anxiety that is natural to human existence, we have created a different form of anxiety as we run on society’s treadmill, constantly outrunning a fate of rejection from our artificial existence back into the harsh natural abyss from whence we crawled. This system has no clear goals or limits and any system without these two things is destined to destroy itself.
Notwithstanding this lack of purpose, onward we march, classifying, simplifying, substituting false definitions and narratives for nearly everything, including other humans. Inherent to this type of thinking is the ability to commit acts of violence, to take, to ignore the independent rights of other beings to one’s own benefit. A tree becomes board-feet. A human becomes a unit of labor. A section of the ocean or a strip mine is measured in yield. Cattle, pigs, chicks, the majority of life on earth is scientifically managed and industrially slaughtered, but arrives perfectly for the commodified American dream devoid of history, in neat bloodless packages. We thunder onward in a race full of pomp and circumstance, but that is only really definable as an unrelenting pressure to name, possess, and exploit all that exists in the most efficient manner possible.
I felt my mind going into a downward spiral without an end. My breathing was shallow and rapid, my brow furrowed and I wasn’t even paying attention to where I sat. I took a deep breath and recentered myself. Despite existing within this ugly system, I felt an undercurrent of mystery flowing through everything, something ethereal that cannot be subsumed by logic or rationality. There is rhythm in silence, patterns in darkness – a thread weaving everything together. Suddenly my thoughts and reality connected. I saw a turkey vulture riding the air rising off of another mountain, rolling and yawing in the invisible forces that buffeted it. I glimpsed an alternative to this logic, to this machine. It lies in finding a deeper meaning to existence that is rooted in something that I am certain resides in every living thing. The turkey vulture was giving expression to its essential birdness. A lizard scampered to a rock beside my head and tilted its head curiously as I made eye contact. An explosion of recognition and understanding passed through me, tears were suddenly streaming down my face. I closed my eyes. I thought about the light or the spirit that animates me, that has been with me since I entered this world; it is curious, radiant with joy and hope, constantly in search of love and a feeling of connection, but also fragile. I thought about my parents, their faces as I first remember them as a child appeared but then faded into their current aged faces. I let out a sob and felt the wind sweeping the tears off my jawbone as I realized that inside of each one of them resided this same spirit, this same light, this same ineffable energy. That they are fragile, that they don’t have all of the answers, that they seek love, that they have dreams, that they are just trying to do the best that they can, that they are vulnerable. I had never thought about myself, my parents or any of the billions of beings on this planet in quite this way before.
I slowed my breathing again. I saw my life passing from the perspective of my spirit as it endured defeat and rejection within this inhumane system, how it had been nearly completely suppressed to reduce my suffering. Why? The vociferous demands and pressures of society had forced me to attenuate its quiet voice; it had caused me great suffering to constantly run contrary to the direction of the systems that I lived within from seemingly the moment that I was born.
In the months preceeding this trip I had found myself at a critical fork in my life path. I had spent years trying to find my spirit and to listen to it, but I had stopped in recent years because that part of me seemed directionless, unproductive and reckless. I felt like I needed to change myself to avoid ending up unhappy later on in life, but this line of thinkingresulted in me finding myself depressed and frustrated almost immediately. Thus, there were two paths forward: listen to my spirit and let it guide me in life or to ignore it and risk irreparably losing my direction. The second option involves less exertion and affords a certain amount of stability and comfort for some people, but it had become apparent for me that this was not a tenable option. What I had been seeking all along was not escapism nor hedonism; I had merely been seeking a way to give voice to my spirit through action. A vulture that doesn’t fly, that doesn’t give expression to its birdness, is merely food for other vultures.
A profound realization like this, a deepening of your empathy and understanding, is difficult to come by. It is a rare gift that we have to cherish, but figuring out how to integrate a realization like this is even more difficult. I knew that I needed to make a drastic change in my life. The most immediate barrier that I could see to my growth was the job and lifestyle that I was leading – I carefully began plotting my departure and quit six months later. I began looking for volunteer opportunities with development organizations in Latin America where I could put my skills to work for the benefit of others. I was offered a position with an organization in Peru. Once again, I found myself storing the few things that I had that I couldn’t bring with me in other people’s basements and packed a backpack and duffle bag with the essentials before heading out into the unknown.