Remembering Why I Create

Shadows of the sagebrush creep along the desert floor as our headlights slice through the night. We pull off pavement and onto a dirt road that leads to a stretch of public land a few hours from Los Angeles.

This lawless terrain has called Raleigh and I back many times since first discovering it. Cradled in the arms of granite rock mounds tall and sturdy enough for climbing, it’s the closest place to the city we can “escape” and feel stillness. The daunting and seemingly boundless freneticism doesn’t touch us here. 

I get out of the car and my bare feet reach for the cold earth. It feels good. It feels like I’m home. Although light pollution drowns out the stars, I can still see a few splattered across the night sky. And suddenly, life becomes simple.

This trip was more than just a climbing getaway. We came with cameras in tow to shoot a small passion project with one of our good friends Brie. On arrival, we were buzzing with energy and excitement to create the shots we had dreamt up. To tell a story about the cosmic power of solitude in nature. 

Over the next few days, we woke before sun-up and worked into the darkness. My stiff body rose each morning, stirred by the sun crowning on the mountainous horizon. I became obsessed with the process, concerned with little else, spreading myself thin to make it happen. It was exhausting. But it fulfilled parts of myself I cannot explain in words. 

But one afternoon, the sun was too harsh and we were unable to shoot until it dropped lower in the sky. So rest came. We went up to climb for a few hours. We touched our hands and feet to the warm wall. We laid in the dirt and felt the sun on our eyelids. And in the stillness, my thoughts started to meander back to everyday existence, unanswered questions, points of pain and suffering. And then my life imitated art. I found myself in the narrative we had set out to tell. There is my aloneness, I arrived at answers I’d been asking for. I remembered that we choose the reality we live in everyday. That many have come and gone before us. That molten magma churns beneath the lithosphere of the earth’s crust. That these rolling dunes have been shaped by wind and rain. And that I am small. 

I remembered why I create. To make remembering a little easier. And when our tires hit pavement once more as we journeyed back to the city, I felt whole. I felt in momentary harmony with the part of me that wants to build and the part of me that wants to be. 

-Mara