We have just returned from our road trip across the southwestern US! I feel called to share about that experience, partly because it might be helpful to folks reading this, and also because I’m leaning into my capacity for storytelling and what it does for me. It’s all connected.
We rented a sprinter van (from Outdoorsy FYI), loaded up some pre-made yummy food that Sarah diligently prepared and vacuum sealed most of, our dog Estrella, and hit the road for ~11 days of unplugging from our routine of familiar things, while plugging in to the wind, the road, the sun, the dark sky, and the expansiveness of our corner of the natural world.
We drove from our home in Richmond up through Reno, then across Nevada, van camping our first night at the Hickison Petroglyphs. It was a relatively remote and no-frills campground, just a place to park, a pit style toilet within walking distance, and petroglyphs aka rock carvings dating back to 10,000 BC. We saw these on a short walk the next morning, and an impromptu group of donkeys down below in the canyon from the vista point. We didn’t linger long, another long day on the road awaited us!
We made our way southeast towards St. George, Utah, during which the check engine light went on and we had a minor freak out while trying to message the van owner in the middle of Nevada with very poor cell reception. Fun times! We eventually discovered it wasn’t anything major, and made it to Sand Hollow State Park, which had warm showers and a lake.
For the next several days we steadily traced our way diagonally northeast across Utah towards Moab, then down to Albuquerque, stopping at a few chosen campgrounds along the way to experience the unique landscapes and features each had to offer. Some highlights were the campgrounds at Kodachrome, Dead Horse, and Ghost Ranch — they had a cafeteria with all 3 meals each day, which if you have ever camped for multiple days, is a much needed break from the daily labor of it all. It was so much to take in in a relatively short time.
Before setting out on this journey, I thought about what I would look forward to the most. One of the things that came up for me was the night sky, which of course is much more vivid in remote areas unaffected by light pollution. Each night, after the dozens of different to-do things that comprise #vanlife wind down, I took our dog Esti outside to pee before bedtime, and took it all in. There’s the “W” that forms the constellation Cassiopeia. Ohh there’s the Big Dipper! Orion’s belt and larger constellation are also familiar and easy enough to see, and according to myth his club swings towards Taurus, the bull.
I used an app called SkyGuide to browse around and help me find some less visible things like the international space station and Andromeda galaxy. Maybe I’m getting older and more sentimental, because it’s still the same old night sky I’ve seen many other times, and it still fills me with wonder. Maybe we don’t ever really grow up inside, if we allow ourselves to stay with our inner child. As I orient myself towards the sky with my feet on the ground, I notice within my body a certain kind of relaxation during this experience. This is grounding, this is what the dark night sky does for my nervous system.
I grew up with dreams of becoming an astronaut. The spirit of adventure into the great unknowns has always fascinated me. For many good reasons I never did pursue that astronaut career, but I did learn a lot in aerospace engineering that helps me appreciate the natural world in many unique ways, some of them even helping me ground myself in the present moment in ways I’m becoming aware of more recently.
For example, did you know that on a very clear night in the desert, 20/20 vision human eyes can see less than 1% of all the stars in our galaxy? Interstellar space is huge and filled with enough interstellar gas to reduce the visible light from all but the brightest stars in our neighborhood. I imagine you may know that our Milky Way galaxy is one among billions of other galaxies in the universe. Did you know that the way the famous constellations appear are unique to our location in our galaxy, and would look very different when viewed from another part of the galaxy?
When I talk about things like this (and space in general) with most people, it often elicits a sentiment of feeling very small, and sometimes that our actions do not matter much in the great scheme of things. For many reasons, this might be an important assumption to check out in this present day moment. Do our actions matter? The universe’s size is awe-inspiring, difficult to comprehend, and seemingly disconnected from our everyday human experience. An understandable sentiment.
For a long time I found a sort of comfort in Carl Sagan’s perspective on this in his book, Pale Blue Dot. The main excerpt in which he reflects on a famous photograph of Earth taken by the Voyager 1 probe in 1990 from some 3.7 billion miles away from earth, where earth was barely visible as a pale blue dot, says:
“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
“A lonely speck…” You see, even Carl Sagan found this photo depressing! Though he does connect to kindness and compassion in closing, most of the words in the fuller passage are about our apparent smallness.
I have to admit, this feeling of smallness was a powerful cultural and personal subtext that I adopted through much of my young adult life, and was particularly reinforced through science education. It is a common theme in many popular movies and literature.
Macbeth: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more…” (Act 5, Scene 5)
I have also seen it mirrored in many others’ experiences of the sciences and other fields, and their seemingly limited roles within them, and even the day to day human experience. This apparent insignificance is readily felt under the stars, in a job you dislike, and driving for hours through the desert and various canyon lands, particularly very remote areas like Bryce Canyon or Goblin Valley, which could rightfully be mistaken for another planet.
When I talked about this road trip before we went, I said a few times “I look forward to feeling really small,” which felt mostly true and was also immediately understood by whomever I was talking with. It has some merit to it, I am literally small compared to the canyons. But it doesn’t capture my whole feeling about the experience. It was a shorthand way of saying “I look forward to feeling my deep interconnection to all things, big and small.” I probably just didn’t want to get into what I meant by that at the time, because it can be work to explain, and as I get older I often prefer feeling it without explanation. But here I go!
The world and universe are so vast, and our capitalist education system so geared towards producing unquestioning workers that we each tend to niche down and down and down, humbly accepting the smallness of our lives in so many ways (space, time, meaning, impact, etc.). The ceramic or mechanical model of the universe, which is foundational to many religions, puts humans apart from the natural world in this way. The universe is made up of mostly inert, unintelligent matter, many unintelligent life forms here on earth, humans ranking above them, and some sort of divine at the top, empowered to shape it all to its will, or for us to do so in its image. How does seeing yourself in relationship to the natural world like this make you feel? What kind of choices do you make if you hold this to be true?
There are other ideas of how to see human beings’ relationship to the natural world, such as ecological or organismic models, in which every person, flower, cell, and atom is part of an intricately interconnected open system, exchanging energy in ways so vast and complex that it is difficult to describe. Where hierarchy is a choice, no action is too small to have meaning, and all of our actions ripple across our lives, the generations, life and spacetime itself. It can take your breath away. How does seeing yourself in relationship to the natural world like this make you feel? What kind of choices do you make if you hold this to be true?
I don’t know about you, but the feelings I have and choices I make are different between these ideas. In the former, mechanical model, I feel depressed, unmotivated to strive for or do much, alienated from the world and a baseline defensiveness against its many potential ways of harming me (cactus! snake!), alienated from other people, and from myself, because what’s the point anyway?
In the latter, ecological model, I feel some curious energy, a playful energy, and that what I do has meaning because it is intricately connected to everything and everyone else. A relational, interdependent, unbreakable harmony. There is so much to do and explore, and to heal. Partly because that is what’s already going on. Flip over that rock, what’s underneath? Wonders await.
This is the basis for what is sometimes called zen, and part of what this project of radical healing we call Zen Strength & Conditioning is all about. And it is that we are all connected, and you are only as small as you imagine your experience to be. This expansiveness is yours whenever you feel ready to feel it, like when gazing at the darkest sky in the eerily quiet desert night, or standing at the edge of a huge canyon, the formation of which took millions or years, or wherever you happen to be right now. And it can be put away when the system calls for you to wear one of your designated masks.
This is some of what I felt in the desert, under the stars.
Mauricio