Big Water

Big Water is not big, and there’s no water. Well, technically about 25 minutes away there is, but I always found it an amusing name for this tiny place. This is the town I would call home after my California chapter ended.

Gradually, and not on purpose, since my 20s, I seemed to have moved to smaller and smaller and smaller areas…until this place. A town of some 622 people. 621 now.

Time seemed to barely move in that static landscape, yet still, no two days were alike. No two trails or views showed the same conditions, sometimes minutes apart. No two nights showed the same shooting star trails. (I used to see them from my bed, more frequently than I imagined I would, framed by the large windows that surrounded me.) Imagine that… what a show, to ease you into sleep almost every night. As shooting stars inspire one, to make a wish, I’d fall asleep thinking about what I want to experience, throughout what I can easily call the loneliest time of my life.

I know loneliness can be felt in fast moving, people packed places, where distractions are available at every corner, and the void can be filled so much quicker. But here, it was almost louder. So much space, revealing over and over, it’s just you.

Yes, there was plenty to explore. Don’t get me wrong.

Without knowing, I had moved close to a place I had saved pictures of, and it happened to be about half an hour away.

Antelope Canyon turned out to be just one of the many winding channels, some in which you could barely fit an average sized adult, on any given day. Though a good rainstorm could change that in minutes, forever altering the waving sandstone pathways.

Everything seemed otherworldly here - the textures, rock formations, critters, the colors and tones, the chance of experiencing four seasons in one day…

By circumstance, gratefully, I got to see a lot of these places. For the months following my move, I explored the North Coyote Buttes, Toadstools, slot canyons like Rattlesnake and Owl, Alstrom point’s epic drive and view of Lake Powell, both rims of the Grand Canyon, Bryce and Zion National parks and Monument Valley by air. I got to land on top of the majestic Tower Butte, and experience one of the most dramatic helicopter drops, at take off, from this platform. I have chills thinking about that moment still.

The landscape had so much more to offer than what I listed. For some, these places are found on their bucket list, eagerly looking forward to visit and capture them to share with those back home.

For me, these places took shape as part, the quietest memories of my life so far, and part, the most brutal. This place being the one that took away all the noise of the world, so I can hear myself, my wishes, my truths, my desires, and allowed me to close, without a fight, my chapter far away from my roots, and finally, like Santiago, return to the oak tree that had been waiting all along, to point me to my true treasure. Myself.

Until next time,

xx