True Life

By far my favorite show on MTV (and from the golden age when reality tv wasn't a complete cesspool of humanity), and yet I'm consistently disappointed with the disproportionate number of episodes about the "Jersey Shore." Is it really the preeminent place to find love during the summer? Is it really that magical? Not that I have much room to talk. Galveston beach is about as disgusting as it comes short of well, beaches near sewage plants, perhaps. I have no desire to be on the beach. No desire to be near the ocean. I'm really not a girl that likes the water too much. There are bugs and fishes that bite your toes and dirt and mud and animals drink out of it, ick, not my ideal place for relaxation. I also don't get that "small" feeling when I'm near water.

I'm a girl that should be living in Colorado. In the concreteness that the mountains offer I feel small. Something about they're physicality speaks to my soul. And out in the mountains civilization is dotted enough to see the stars. Oh the stars! Growing up literally 7 minutes from NASA, I would have expected to have had an early appreciation for them. An idea of how much we can't see with our eyes, the hiddenness of the infinite. Senior year of high school is when I first remember becoming cognizant of the vastness of the universe. I was at Mo Ranch in Hunt, Texas (a small, basically non-existent town in the Texas Hill Country) in February and on the first clear night of our leadership conference we held a bonfire beneath the stars.

In Houston, there are maybe 100 visible stars on a good night. In Galveston, maybe 300. In Hunt, there were more visible stars and more faint echoes of starlight than my mind can process. I think that was the first moment where I really understood how big the universe is, how small our existence is, and how miraculous it is that a God that infinite could possibly love and care for something that small. This past September I went to a wedding in Aspen and in the clear beauty of the mountain night the stars rendered me breathless again. I have no doubt that it is somehow Divine Providence that I met and fell in love with a boy that has the ability to take me to the two places that can reawaken my light-polluted soul.

So I sit in the overcast, rainy Waco basking in the artificial light of my apartment and watching a documentary on people my age looking for love in the artificial nature of the Jersey Shore, thinking about my next chance to run under the stars.