It's Happening

We survived. I'm now sitting on the floor of our hostel in Ushuaia reading the sharpied notes on the walls. Hostels are like a 3D pintrist. There are so many different languages... different countries and stories behind the chicken scratches on the walls. From this angle I can see the tasteful "I had sex on the beanbag" strategically scribbled in a conspicuous spot under the communal bookshelf under a Derren Brown book and a thin Chinese one. It's a guessing game as to which of the five beanbags not to sit on. I moved to access a better plug to find myself face-to-face with an outlined Taj Mahal on the wall and a few moments later to have the hostel lady scold me for being a road block in the hallway. 

Directly after our trek in Puerto Williams we crashed on our beds. We were lucky to snag a private room for two, even though the bottom bunk was too low to sit upright and the top had no ladder. After a who-knows-how-many-hour long nap, the hostel owner flung open our door to ask if we wanted Piscos. We drowsily looked up, our hair horrid from the mixture of dirt from the trail and bed head from the first real pillow we've had for a week. Confused as to as why we were sleeping at Pisco hour we assured her that she didn't need to bring us any. We discovered the next morning that she later didn't come tell us the time of the ferry because she didn't want to disturb our slumber. Piscos > Transportation Information. Funny how this corner of the world works.

Dientes de Navarino. The Southernmost Trek in the world. Known as "Alaska on steroids." We were reading a travel blog aloud one night before we started. "If you like... bushwhacking. If you like... 

nature in it's natural state. If you like <insert other dangerous obstacle here>... Then the Dientes de Navarino is for you!" We swallowed. Were we really doing this? After the first day of drop-off cliffs and no trail Angeli looked at me between the wind bursts and mustered out a, "it's happening."

It's happening. I'm where I always dreamed about being. I feel like I'm living out a 180 Degrees South documentary or like I'm starring in a Secret Life of Walter Mitty film. My eyes have been dazzled by some the most beautiful unseen things in the world and my heart rate has pulsed on the edges of unmanned shale mountains. I've camped in snow and been pelted with hail and tread in thigh deep mud mountains and been lost in the rain in a below-freezing forest. I wouldn't trade any of it for the world, and these experiences will stay with me for the rest of my life, but it's taken all of this for me to realize the key of how to live simply with concepts beyond simplicity but too down-to-earth to be complicated but too big for my mind to wrap around.

Whenever I'm backpacking, or even just on a mountain or in nature of any kind, I feel it's the way it should be. It's me, and God, and what I choose to think about. But all that I can think about is the nature around me, which screams back in the direction of God. But I don't think we have to be on the top of a mountain or in the middle of a snowstorm to be in nature. Maybe in the technical sense of the word, but I think it's so much more than that. How was Paul so content in a four wall prison? I think it's because he chose to live in the mindset of nature. To let the things he thought about scream back in the direction of God. Whether you take the Bible literally or not, Genesis is an incredible analogy at its least. I think when He finished creating and stepped back and said, "it is good," He was referring to the creation's state it was in and not necessarily only the objects. If it was only the objects, it would still be good and perfect after sin.

So I've dropped some of that Sunday school vocab in this blog. "Sin" and "creation" and "Genesis" and such. But my point is this. I want to be in a place where I can feel the same freedom I have at the top of a mountain while I'm studying for Statistics. And if these experiences have taught me anything, it's that my throat can tighten and my adreanaline can quiver whenever I chose to let my thoughts scream in the direction of God, which is only replicating that of what I'm feeling when I'm surrounded by trees or drinking from a glacier-melted stream. I can have that same peace whenever and wherever I choose, and that's what I believe the entire purpose of why such beautiful places exist. It's like being in them is teaching me how to live... How life was intended for us for us to live. And then, any anger or hesitance I have stored up, swelling through my veins towards God, trickles out of me and I realize that only someone who loves me more than Himself could possibly create an intended life so beautiful for someone so small and insignificant. And all I have to do is choose it. It doesn't mean that the thigh-deep mud or the hail will suddenly disappear. But it does mean that the struggle turns into something worth fighting for. And when I can open my eyes for that split second against the paralizing wind to see that vista, I know that I know that life is worth fighting for.