What did you do/see/experience?

First, we went to the Mountainfilm festival at the Saugatuck Center for the Arts. There, we watched 8 films. Some of the movies were about cultural things. Most of them were about the outdoors, though. My favorites were the one in Jackson Hole, where there were skiers and bikers going down mountains and jumps together. It was awesome. I also liked the very first one, Brothers of Climbing. It was about how some black people didn’t like how everything in climbing was shown through white people. So they decided to form their own kind of climbing group, and they called themselves Brothers of Climbing. They took trips together and everything. The other one I liked was called surf the line. It was about this thing where you attach a surfboard to a string stretched between two cliffs, and you would surf down the rope then jump off with a parachute. After we went to the Mountainfilm festival, we went hiking. We were mostly hiking, and it was raining and pretty cold. At one point, we stopped and sat, and spent seven minutes in silence.

How did that impact you? What did you learn?

to me, the films felt inspiring. You felt like you could go and do anything, and the films were all super cool, and a lot of the things they did looked super fun, and I felt like I wanted to try them. Mostly though, I was impacted by the hike. It felt amazing to just be out in creation, instead of in a quiet classroom, sitting around, but you could be out in creation and you could look at the beautiful views, and experience creation. It was really, really hard to sit quietly. I’m more of a go out and do it kind of person, so to have to sit there quietly and not really do anything, not even talk, was really hard. Eventually, though, you look around and you see the beautiful creation and find yourself admiring how beautiful everything was.

How will you think/act/live differently?

Mostly, it was just a reminder of how much everything is fun and beautiful, and how much I enjoy it. I think it’s important that you don’t let yourself be taken over by life, that you get too busy to be out in it. I personally think I have to enjoy it more. Let myself experience it, and just take time to be in it, instead of always rushing from one thing to the next, hardly having time to enjoy it. I think that the films were a reminder that you can do whatever you want, in a way. You can go and start a new tradition, or do something new, or try something new.