against the grain.

I have a addiction. It's with a blog. The life of a stranger. And though you can be anyone or anything through the internet, and deception can be done as smoothly as pulling your laces into a bow, this one has me captivated.

Today I began to cry. The perfect life of someone who has so many things that I yearn for. As if having their life would cure all my woes and I would feel the freedom and the oneness with life and this planet that I am seeking. Being jealous is not only a waste of time, but it is completely and utterly unattractive... but today I feel it.

I think people must have been happier before these advances in technology. You weren't able to waste an afternoon searching and wandering pages of photos and stories and chapters of lives that you have no connection with. You couldn't see the silent gloats of a stranger so easily posted among pages of coding. You found it yourself. You were unhappy because you had a deep rooted feeling, a need, something pulling you from your heart to your fingertips.. not because you could see various examples of what you're ultimately missing. I don't know that this is true, but it is for me today. It has made me feel a feeling that I haven't in a while. It has made me feel lost. The beauty of the earth and activity singing in these pictures was shattering, bruising, almost hopeless. The desert makes me feel so incredibly limited sometimes, so lost.. a extreme pain for the coast, for activity, for weather, for water and streams and sport. After a paddle boarding trip a few weeks ago, in the Colorado river, I found a new hole in my heart.. one I didn't realize could be so large.

I grew up on the water. On beaches. In canoes. Finshing, tubing, boating, water skiing.... I guess I never realized how connected I really was to it all. How it made me feel. How much I've truly missed it. It's funny how a connection with a sport can trigger such immense emotions, but then again, there has to be a reason why people commit their lives to the ones they love... Why they find it necessary to push the limits. Why they scar their bodies for that feeling. It's another addiction.

It's become a ritual of mine, after I get home from the gym in the morning, to get clean, make a cup of green tea with fresh raspberries, and sip away as I lose myself in the voices of the blogs that I cherish most. (I never realized I was such a reader, but I only ever think books when somebody asks). I love how reading takes you away, it keeps your mind safe from thinking of the stresses you live with on a daily basis, and gives you a solid amount of time to live as another... To escape into the words and the photos, to dance in cognizant dreams built by the simplest string of words.

I sit there on my couch and day dream that I'm in a cabin, on a lake, with only the sounds of the forest and the crackle of a fire to keep me company. Day dreaming relaxes me before work, it gets me through the daily routine at what I'm growing tired of calling, "my real job."