It's always too late.

New print up at Etsy. Click through to check it out.

New print up at Etsy.  Deming, New Mexico.  Colors are much more vibrant in actual photo.  Click through to check it out.

You can now buy this print at my Etsy store.  Click to view the store.  One of many to come.

Segments of a battered American landscape.  Niland, California - Mr. Leonard Knight.

And there he was.  Sprawled out on a table, 79 years old, alone. A sleeping bag he was lying on top of, a huge plastic jug of water on the table next to him, a thin yellow rope attached to a drinking cup.  He was snoring.  I had no idea what to do and went back outside to my car.  I sat there for a half an hour in the stifling heat.  No idea where to go, I decided to sit there, hoping he would wake up.  He did wake up.  He hobbled out of his hand-built, clay tribute to God and wandered over to my car.  I’ve never seen anyone light up the way he did at the sight of a stranger.

myvintageheart:

i’m not saying we should go as far as Christopher McCandless (the book/movie “into the Wild” was based on his life)…but dang he sure did know how to follow his heart, despite the pressures from mainstream society…this picture was taken shortly before his death and he looks like he was really happy with his decisions to live an alternate lifestyle

I think we -should- all go that far.  Doing so doesn’t require dying in the middle of Alaskan wilderness.  Guy simply made a huge err of judgement, let his pride take over, made big mistakes that cost him his life.  I went on a long road trip.  I quit my job and drove around the US for a month and a half by myself.  I’ve never felt more beautiful and alive.  I’m responding to this blog post because  of Chris and the book/film about him, I learned about Leonard Knight.  If you’ve seen the movie. Leonard is the guy who Chris and the girl go off and talk to, who speaks about “love” and how important it is in the grand scheme of things.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about - great - go watch the movie again.  It’s worth it anyway.

I met that man.  While I was somewhere in Southern California, multiple people told me that Leonard’s “Salvation Mountain” (watch the movie or google, it, you’ll see) was in Sedona, Arizona.  So there I was, driving many, many hours until I was - I believe - somewhere in Arizona.  I’d have to check my notes, which I don’t feel like doing right now.  I drove around awhile and stopped to check my fancy iphone to confirm he was there.  Wrong!  Salvation Mountain is in Niland, California.  Oops.  I had a decision to make.  Here I was on this grand road trip, a maybe once in a lifetime journey, and felt I had to decide whether or not I’d drive those many, many hours back to California to see it.  I did.  I drove back, without skipping a beat after those thoughts, and eventually got there.

It was about 106 degrees.  The heat was stifling and windless.  I drove through the small town to find Leonard and eventually pulled up to Salvation Mountain.  I was floored.  This man constructed a massive clay “installation piece” (if you want to call it that) out of his dedication to God and Love, and there I was, staring at it, while sitting on the hood of my car, and I was shocked.  I got out and walked around, investigated, found no Leonard.  I walked back to my car, got my camera out.  Shot some pictures.  There were countless paint buckets, signs, broken machinery, dirt.  I had to find him.  I wandered into the construct around back and poked around.

And there he was.  Sprawled out on a table, 79 years old, alone.  He had a sleeping bag he was lying on top of, a huge plastic jug of water next to him - the kind you see spilling Gatorade on top of coaches.  And he was snoring.  I had no idea what to do and went back outside to my car.  I sat there for a half an hour.  No idea where to go, I decided to sit there, hoping he would wake up.  He did wake up.  He hobbled out of his abode and wandered over to my car.  I’ve never seen someone light up like he did.  This man, whose only connection I had to was this fucking 20-something kid who, 20 or so years before, maybe only met Leonard for a moment.

I learned something.  There was so much more to this experience but that’s for another story.  While talking with him briefly, and after his tour of Salvation Mountain and where he LIVES (in the DESERT!) I learned something so important.  His heart was so chiefly involved in spreading the word of Love and God that he took it upon himself to build this mountain with his own hands for others to see.  ”I’ve become something of a famous man!” he told me, wheezing and sweating in the heat.  I looked at him and realized the important thing.

He was alive.  And not only was he alive, but he was there, in the heat, at 79 years old and living harder than most people ever do.  It didn’t require a hang-glider or a steep climb up Mt. Everest.  It didn’t require 150 thousand dollars a year or a yacht, or a wife, or a retirement fund.  While I was on top of Salvation Mountain, looking down at Leonard, a man drove up in a white station wagon to drop off paint.  I could just barely make out their conversation.  The man was giving Leonard more paint to work on Salvation Mountain.  He wanted nothing in return.  He simply wanted to give.  This man saw a beautiful heart and wanted to help it (Leonard) by providing him with the tools he needed.  People surely dropped off food and water for Leonard, also.  It was just that sort of community.

Leonard’s been living a bold life.  He’s taken it to the end and set up shop.  And so did Chris.  Chris decided to live and he took off.  He disregarded his then existing life, his family, and did it.  And yes, it is sad, and maybe selfish that he left loved ones hanging with the possibility of never talking to them ever again, leaving them sad and confused.  But I think they know now what he meant to set out and do.  I know this because of this -

Before I went on my road trip, before I quit my job, there was barely anyone who heard my plans and said “oh, great!  do it!”  No.  Everyone mocked me, told me I was crazy, asked what I would do after it was all over.  I had no answers.  I simply had a mission, and one I was set to complete.  The way people talked, I was doomed, lost, fucked.

But here I am.  I’m back, I’m alive.  And I had a host of experiences most people never get to have.  And what do those naysayers say now?  ”You did WHAT? That’s AMAZING.  I wish I could just DO that.  I’m so jealous.”

You realize the perspective people take.  The way they bolster themselves and hole themselves up in an environment, a career, a family, that never lets them live.  The old crab-in-the-bucket philosophy.  People, like crabs, don’t want anyone doing anything different or attempting to be saved.  You try to pull a single crab out of a bucket of them and the rest hold on, seemingly trying to keep the escapee within their grasp.  People think you are doomed if you dare to live differently.  They’re conditioned that way.  Which isn’t to say a family, career, or otherwise is completely empty.  I just mean that the way most people do it IS empty.  There is no self-realization.

So what am I saying?  Be as bold as Chris.  If it requires the threat of death, just recognize that what you’re doing may well be worth a lifetime of not living.  The most unfortunate and self-affirming fact is that we ALL die.  Like someone said, I forget who, “Don’t take life too seriously - no one makes it out alive.”

Or Bukowski, who said,

“There’s nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don’t live up until their death. They don’t honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can’t hear it. Most people’s deaths are a sham. There’s nothing left to die.”

The only thing you’re not missing out by being as bold as Chris is the risk of actually living.  There’s no threat in that.  You take life by the reigns and you lead her into the horizon.  It’s the only choice, the only thing.  Live like you are dying tonight.  And love like you’re already dead.

Segments of a battered American landscape.  Oregon.

Driving along the serpentine and seemingly treacherous Route 101 in the dark.  A light up ahead illuminates a solitary figure.  It’s a roadside worker, holding a stop sign at her side, gesturing with her free hand for me to slow down.  I oblige.  I bring my car to a halt behind a minivan, slip it into park, then turn off the engine and sit idly.  The light, a lone lamp bolted atop a wooden pole driven into the ground, shines weakly around the vehicles and onto the woman road worker’s reflective safe-jacket.  The glint of my leg hair within a beam of the lamp’s light shifts as I shake my leg.  There are no words between the road worker and the car ahead, simply silence.  I bring my camera up to take a photograph of her.  The Pacific ocean crashes to the right of us.  The wind blows quietly across the soft gray road.  I press and release the shutter.