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| Specifically, this beach. |
I've been feeling increasingly yucky over the last few weeks, more anxious and mired in pettiness. I miss the calm humble feeling that being in Montana gave me. Granted, I basically had one primary goal during my time there, and here in my regular life things are much more diffuse. I have a lot more to make me feel insecure and off-track and incapable.
Lately I've been having vivid dreams. Some of them have been downright cold-sweat nightmares, even if the monsters in them are usually me and not external toothy beasts. Most of them have felt uneasy, dubious, as if I'm making fatal mistakes but won't find out the consequences for months or years. One of these involved a good friend who splits his time between England and Minnesota who's asked me in the past to come and visit him during the times of year he's in the U.S. I've never met him in person and am very eager to. When I woke up from the dream about him, I had the craziest itch to get to Minnesota, like, that week, to sit in his quiet house and stare out at the land he owns.
It occurred to me that maybe the big reason I'd been feeling yucky was that I was mostly looking at a screen of some kind all day every day, or potentially taking a break from such screens to look at the building across the courtyard from my own building. There's a decent amount of nature in my daily view, trees and hummingbirds and whatnot, but 90% of my day-to-day is human-made. My Montana trip reinforced to me more strongly than ever that nature matters to me, that I need to be around the earth and sky - both bigger than me - to be ultimately happy.
Well, the ocean is bigger than me. And it's a lot closer than Minnesota. And I haven't seen the Pacific since...God, 2001? Has it been that long? So I put on some sunscreen and drove down to Malibu, which is the closest piece of coastline to where I live in L.A.
