Existence in Perspective
The World Is an Existence Among Existences.
I spent years driving alone across the American West, moving through mountains, deserts, forests, open plains, and stretches of public land whose names I sometimes never knew.
I did not begin those journeys with a philosophy about adventurous spirits.
At the time, leaving simply felt easier than staying.
But somewhere along those roads, I began to notice: wherever I arrived, the land allowed me to be there without asking anything.
A mountain did not need to know why I had come.
A desert did not ask what I was trying to become.
An unnamed stretch of land did not require an explanation before making room for me.
There was nothing I needed to say in return. That absence of demand became important.
My own presence: I could just be there.
And from that place, I began to look outward.
Not searching but paying attention.
The mountain had been forming.
The stone had been weathering.
The plant had been finding its way to live.
The animal had somewhere to go.
Everything I encountered seemed to have an existence that did not begin with my arrival.
Each carried its own conditions, its own history, its own relationships, its own way of continuing.
I was not at the center of any of it.
And strangely, being removed from the center did not make me feel smaller.
It gave me room to observe.
To wonder how something came to take the form it has. To notice what it lives beside, what acts upon it, what it resists, what it yields to, what changes it. To understand that survival does not always look like strength, that formation can happen through pressure and erosion, that two existences can alter one another simply by remaining in contact.
Those observations returned me to my own life.
Not as lessons delivered by nature, and not because the landscape existed to offer answers.
The connection was quieter than that.
In trying to understand another way of existing, I sometimes found another way of understanding my own.
Existence in Perspective: one existence observing another, as our stories unfold, intertwine, transform, and reveal.
The world had made room for me without asking me to become anything first.
In that, I coexist.
Observing alongside their own stories.
