The Climb

For one second imagine that you are standing on the edge of a cliff, are you terrified, or do you feel like if you were to jump you could fly? Your answer to that question is what will determine the way you live your life. What is life? Your'e breathing and your heart is beating, but do you live life like you are alive - or do you live it like you are dying? Here I am standing on the peak of a mountain, looking out into the distance, the way this makes me feel has got me asking myself, why do I live inside of a house? Why do I live my life within a crowd? The climb - I followed the trail up switchbacks, crossed through boulder fields, snowfields and ice; walked across glaciers, wandered through heaven, then reached the top of the sky. I climbed to come to find, there is no point where Earth starts and heaven stops. Right now, I'm holding serenity in the palm of my hand, with a sense of accomplishment in the other; here I stand. Atop the peaks of the Rocky Mountains, as high as the Continental Divide. If one were to fly past me right now, it feels like I could grab airplanes out of the sky.

This is a photograph of myself - when a viewer looks at this picture, they can see me and the landscapes that are behind me; but they can only take a blind shot in the dark about what I am thinking. Honestly, I actually try to turn my thinking off at times like these, but I never can, my brain keeps racing, it rushes, it's running - but never do I run out of things to think. Wide eyed, I refuse to blink. Being alive is to be seeing, searching for, and believing in a meaning. Every step that I take further into the wilderness, I feel my soul being released, I feel like I am being welcomed home. I'm homesick when I'm not hiking. With every single breath I take, the fresh mountain air fills my lungs; this is an addiction that I can not control. At this elevation, the oxygen is more like a drug, it's a medication, it's like a feeling of meditation; please fill up my mug with this clean air and I'll chug. In my brain, my pen is writing a story about the beauty as I am wandering through it. I'm walking inside of a painting and the paint is sticking to my shoes.

I step into a crystal clear stream of water to rinse them off, but it turns out that the steam is just a painting too; I guess this is just how I imagine life inside of my mind. Out here, I feel happy, I feel homely, I never feel lonely because I know that there are so many forms of life circling around me. Trees hang on to the edges of steep mountains, afraid of heights they grip on to whatever they can grab. Wildlife is surrounding me, I walk quietly trying to get a glimpse, to snap a photograph, maybe just capture a memory, that I can hold onto within. Bones are the structure of our bodies, while memories are like a foundation of our brains. It is moments like this that we cherish, these moments we want to be buried with, these moments are what keep us sane. What color is dirt - do you see brown or do you see a mix of every color that blooms from the ground. Sheer cliffs drop thousands of feet below my... shoes. From where I stand these mountains remind me of flowers individually blooming. I've also come to realize that I am blooming too!