wordsmithlind

This is a story from the summer of 2002

Undated—Summer ’02

            I played God.  We all have played God.  When we were little, we would torture ants.  We played God.  We’ve all done it.

            Most recently I played God in the backcountry of Needles National Park [Canyonlands NP, Needles Section] just outside of Moab, Utah.  After a few days in the backcountry, not having seen a car, heard a radio, or watched TV  (well, I hadn’t watched TV for the past two and a half months anyway) in three days, mind started working again.  My brain was finally working.  Free from the banality of everyday life.  Free from the advertisments.  Free from the corporations.  Free from everything.  I was free.  I had thought I was free when I had stopped watching television (actually we stopped paying our cable bill, and it was shut off).  That was only the beginning to what would become actual freedom.  Liberated.  My mind was working at its fullest.

            During my time in the backcountry, I felt the need to create.  In order to create, I had to destroy.  I had to destroy one thing in order to make another, just like everything in the world.  In my case, rocks.  I would scrape two rocks together.  I don’t know what I was creating.  Sometimes I thought I was making arrowheads.  Sometimes just a sharp edge.  I don’t really know what I was making.

            I know what I was destroying, though.  Rocks.  I was changing the way the rocks were shaped, textured.  The way they felt.  The way that mother nature had intended.  The way they had naturally formed through erosion over the past thousands of years, and I changed it in a matter of minutes.  Wow, what a thought?  In just minutes I changed something that took thousands of years to create.  Me.  I did this.  I didn’t do this for the sheer thrill.  In fact, I did it without thinking.  I just needed something to do.  My brain was working again.  It needed some action.