THE FUNNY THING about spending your whole life somewhere is that you don’t know what’s special about it until you’ve spent time away from it. It’s like how the viewpoint character in Lois Lowry’s The Giver doesn’t know he’s living in a black-and-white world until he sees color for the first time. Or, in the ancient wisdom of Passenger, “Only know you love her when you let her go.”
If I were an alien who was surveying my home state of Utah for the first time from my UFO, my impression at first glance would be “desert mountain letters”. The flat monuments paved into the Wasatch at regular intervals–M for Morgan, G for Pleasant Grove, B for Bountiful, U for the University of Utah–were invisible to my accustomed childhood eyes, yet seem completely out of place now that I have a fresh perspective. So do the mountains themselves–they seem like artificial cutouts pasted onto the horizon.
Yet it’s the @desert@ part of the description that has been most immediate to the senses. In Denmark, the rain was my worst enemy; if a genie had granted me a reasonable, B-list wish, I would have asked for cloudless winters. But until today, not a single drop of rain had fallen since I got here. The irony is sorrowing; the dry air itself seems bitter. I’d forgotten about how your lips stick together if you leave them closed for too long, and it feels like I’ve never had so much water come in and out of my system in my life. The heat has been sweltering at 43°C (110°F). The desert does have its charms, though. Seeing the sky tops the list.
A lot has happened in my life in the just over two weeks since I returned from Denmark. I’m now attending school at BYU; I spent about a week in my hometown with my family and then moved in with a relative closer to school. This term, I’m studying biology and the humanities, which I’m excited about. I’ve missed being fully immersed in a learning environment. I’ve also started a new/old job back at the BYU library, under the same supervisor but in a different department (book shelving). In my free time, I’m practicing music, trying to write music, and reading literature again, including nonfiction by choice for the first time in my life. I’m trying to soak in as much understanding as I can to help me make decisions in life. I’ve also been catching up with people I haven’t seen in a while, and I spent a day in Salt Lake and a weekend in Boise with friends (which I might write more about next time)!
That about sums up my life right now. I’m grateful for the desert and for the rain, and I miss my old home and the people there, too. Adjusting hasn’t been easy. Mostly for the drivers behind me who wait in vain for me to turn right on red. (I’m still not used to that being legal!) It’s easy to feel detached from everything when class is online and your old home isn’t the same as how you left it, but I’m grateful for good days with good friends, and I’m optimistic that work will also be a place where I can be useful and build a community of love. There are a few things that I’m becoming increasingly convinced of, and one of them is that a central purpose of life is to build communities of love. It’s not complicated, but sometimes hard. I hope people will continue to choose peace.
Respectfully yours,
Eric