Sunday June 22nd, 2014- I turn 24 years old.

My life has changed more in these last two weeks of my 23rd year than they have in the past 200 before them. All the familiar comforts of home have been stripped away and replaced with a new bed, a new job, and a part of the country unlike any I have ever experienced. After leaving the Internship Workshop in Chicago, my mind was filled with questions and expectations about my new situation. After a week here, some of those questions have been answered, but most of them still remain. I have found my co-workers to be kind and helpful and my living situation comfortable, but exactly what it is I’m going to be doing here still seems to be up in the air. I have met with a number of my neighbors, but between moving in and starting work I haven’t had much time to really get to know anybody here in town. There is so much going on, it’s hard to keep up with it all.

But all these new experiences seem to pale beside the backdrop against which they take place. I am surrounded, at all times, by such… volume. To my immediate east looms Cedar Mountain and the Hurricane Cliffs, so close they make you crane your neck upward in search of the sky. North, south and west roll on for mile after mile after mile. When talking about the American West, my dad is fond of saying, “There’s a lot of there out there.”  I think I understand what he was talking about now. I can see Cedar Valley- the entire Cedar Valley- unfolding before me for forty miles or more, reaching to the horizon where it explodes upwards into the Wah Wah Mountains. Locals tell me that I’ll get used to the view before long, but for now I have learned to live with the sense of astonishment I feel every time I lift my eyes. Every other place I have lived suddenly seems so much smaller, and I wonder if I will find myself feeling cramped when I return to these places. I have been profoundly touched by this landscape, and the more I learn about it and its inhabitants, the more enchanted I become.

Nothing remains now but to learn as much as I can.