If you happen to have been following this blog for a while, you might have noticed that I've been gone for a month. I've been on a pen-and-paper journaling hiatus as well. Sometimes you just need to live life and not write about it.
August has been eventful, but slow and relaxed. I moved back home at the beginning of the month, and spent the last two weeks out in Colorado, which was quite an adventure.
I've never really taken a big road trip. I've also never been further West than Tenessee, so I've always felt like big puzzle pieces have been missing in my mental picture of America. Three friends and I crammed a car full of luggage and drove almost 2,000 miles across the country to Colorado. Including our return journey, we passed through Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky. I must confess that I hold a bit of a grudge against Arkansas and Kansas, as these are the states that we drove through entirely in the night hours, as I was either struggling to sleep in the backseat or fighting to stay awake at the wheel. I thought the drive itself might be miserable, but when you're with good friends, anything can be fun.
The trip might have been worth it even if we had never made it to Colorado. I say this because driving through New Mexico was one of the most breathtaking experiences of my life. I've never seen the desert, and parts of it were so majestic that I simply had to cry tears of joy as I drove through it. I have a newfound awe for the sheer diversity of landscapes that can be found in our enormous nation.
We arrived at our cabin in Silverton, Colorado late at night, so waking up the next morning was an incredible thrill. I looked out my bedroom window to see huge, towering mountains on every side. I ran outside into the freezing air and slowly looked around at the sunny view around me (I'm sure my jaw was hanging open). Our little cabin (built by one of my friend's parents) was in the middle of a valley, surrounded on every side by enormous rocky mountains, tall spruce trees, flowing creeks, and tall marsh grasses still covered in sparkling frost from the night before.
While I still have an enormous amount of pride in my homestate of North Carolina, I have to say that our small town in Colorado was the most beautiful place I've ever seen. I told a local man that opinion during our stay and he asked incredulously, "Well have you ever been to Europe?" I told him that I had, yet I had still not seen anything to rival this landscape.
Every day of our trip was mostly the same.....Waking up early to drink coffee and read books or bundling up to take individual walks around the cabin land, then setting out to drive alon
g the narrow, rocky mountain roads and go on long, beautiful hikes. The trip was a rather humbling experience....I considered myself a pretty tough hiker before attempting these mountains, which are entirely different than anything I've climbed in North Carolina. I kept remembering the advice a well-weathered older Silvertonian man gave us at the beginning of the week: "Pain is temporary, but suffering is always voluntary."
We took increasingly difficult hikes leading up to our last big day, an eight hour on Mt. Sneffles, one of Colorado's massive peaks above 14,000 ft. It was physically exhuasting, incredibly challenging (and a bit dangerous) , but finally making it to the summit was incredibly rewarding in so many ways. We could see for over 150 miles in every direction across the San Juan Mountain Range. It was almost hard to stand still because I kept wanting to turn my head in every direction so I could somehow drink it all in at once. Every day, every hike, every moment out on the land felt like we were somehow living in a scene from a movie.....I've never seen such majestic landscapes with my own eyes. Even the mountain air felt crisp and clean, the water tasted pure and delicious. I keep going back to look at pictures and real
izing that they can't begin to capture the experience of feasting on those mountains.
I found myself uncontrollably drawn to the Psalms whenever I would pick up a Bible, understanding the psalmist's enthusiastic, passionate praise of God as Creator in a new way. I felt immense gratitude and a sense of my own mortality and frailty in the face of the overwhelming splendor. One cannot help feeling extraordinarily small, yet so magnificently loved to be in the midst of such a landscape.
As I soaked in the delightful sounds of one of our mountain music jams with some of the town's hospitible residents, I kept thinking how much I wished I could move out to a place like Silverton, but a conversation with one of the grizzled, seasoned locals kept coming back to mind. When we gushed about the magnificence of the place, he cautioned us that too many people move out there thinking they'll find themselves or that they'll find contentment. "You'd better already know yourself before you come out here. People need to be content inside their own soul before they move out to a place like this hoping to find it."
For now, I'm just thankful I got a taste of the beauty, and I sincerly hope to experience it again someday....
And I'm slightly in shock that I'll be leaving again in a little over a week! Wow.
