Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming.

 Yellowstone and Grand Teton

     To quote Jim Harrison when speaking of the snow-capped mountains of Montana, “Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such  people become crazy… or they become legend”. When you’re deep down a dirt road in the mountains of southern Montana, camping with people you just met a day ago, when the glacier river water is your bath, when the dirt is your bed and when the fire is your heat, you change, you learn something about yourself. I felt clean and pure even though smoke filled my lungs and dirt coated me and stiffened my hair. This feeling made me think a little “different” about home, the thought of heading back to California made me ache, I feel like I lost something, like something tragic happened back home or maybe I just realized that I'd been living in some illusion. All my life has been California based, either believing so passionately that it's the most beautiful state, or the most open and accepting one, but the inner voice told me otherwise. It's not. Thinking back on it I realized that our classes, races, and communities are socially segregated, we stick to the people we know and shun the ones we don't, we gatekeep our niches, we turn a blind eye towards our differences, and even worse, we pretend to care with fake sympathy. It's kind of like how the rest of the world views California as one big state of Los Angeles and that's it, and that's how it feels, stale and phony. A Plastic state. It doesn't seem right to be writing this about California, but it's all I can see now. And others can say this about their own state or town I'm sure. Maybe I feel stuck here, poisoned with consumerism and surrounded by people who lack altruism and who claim to be “humble”. Get out and listen to someone you thought you hated, Let your phone die, check in on yourself, run to what you've been running from, Find a new family and love them, listen to yourself, and live by it.