4.7~ Back in Sacramento

We made it back from Vegas yesterday and I'm back in my little air force dorm room in Sacramento. I don't really have words to describe my time in Vegas, but the beauty and craziness and excitement of that city will stay with me forever. The memories I created there were some of the best of my life. 

I will miss Fremont street, with its bubbling energy and flickering lights. I will miss the warm sun and the incredibly kind people we met. I will miss the fun-loving spirit the city instilled in us and how we never hesitated to go out and enjoy it. When I think back on my times there, I want to remember our smiling faces glowing in the fluorescent lights, dancing like our lives depended on it. How the Fremont Casino somehow became our refuge, where we would smuggle in cheap beer and tell each other secrets and invent songs and hide from security because they knew us as regular loiterers there. My heart now holds warm memories of late night Evel Pie pizza, live music at Container Park, dancing like crazy at Vanguard, and sunsets behind palm tree silhouettes.

Then there was San Miguel garden, with its welcoming community I'll always remember fondly. I loved the days we spent moving strawberry plants and building the greenhouse. Jasmine and I would sit in that same strawberry patch for hours getting our hands caked in mud and listening to Lorde on repeat. Something about being close to the earth, feeling the dirt between your fingers, caring for and honoring plants that silently rely on you to keep them safe, it's tremendously healing. Working at the Springs Preserve brought me that similar connection to nature's sacredness. The beauty of that place was divine. Derrick, our supervisor, let us explore the Preserve and learn all about its history. He let us go into the butterfly garden and I could have cried it was so gorgeous and peaceful. I'll never forget these experiences, and their drastic juxtaposition to the glitzy, capitalistic attitude Vegas is known for. I got to see both sides of the city and I'm so thankful for that. It had far more to offer me than I could have imagined. 

I got to do a lot of inner work in Vegas as well, and this round turned out to be an excellent opportunity for self-reflection. Perhaps the most important lesson this round has taught me is to remain fluid and to let go. I know I can be rigid, and want things to stay the way they are, but I am slowly learning to stretch this out and experiment with not clinging to situations. We lived with bed bugs and cockroaches. We cleaned up bags of poop in empty lots. We got in fights. We got thrown out of two community centers because nobody seemed to want 12 random people at the last minute. We moved twice in 48 hours. We slept with the lights on for two weeks. I'm realizing, as Grant once said, that the difficulty is not in tolerating less-than-perfect situations. The difficulty is tolerating our own reactions to these situations. I don't like how I can squirm at unpredictability. I don't like that I let other people's bad moods affect me deeply. I don't like that sometimes I get cranky and impatient and don't feel like dealing with change. Recognizing these things has been the biggest revelation for me. When I notice my own reaction or thought of this nature, I just watch it. I tell myself "That's interesting. Now let go. Nothing on this earth is promised and you better get used to that." When I remember this, it brings me back to a place of gratitude, that I get to be here and experience the ever-changing nature of life.  Time is both a terrible thief and a beautiful gift. Eventually, it takes away everything we have, but it's an everything it gave to us in the first place.