Being Humbled By Nature and Ancient Civilizations

A lot of people that live in the city eventually wind up going the opposite. They wind up going to like a fucking house in the country. I'm dying to get out. It's funny, I feel like when I grew up in Whitman's small town and I was obsessed with Springsteen like, get out of this town, born to run, and I did it and now I still listen to Springsteen and still get moved, but now it's like, I got to get a home with grass and see the stars. It's like the same motivation, but before it was to go to the city, but now I want to be in the country. My friend Jeff has always been like this diehard New York City guy. I love the energy of the city. He's lived there his whole life and then he got a place on Fire Island and he's like, I couldn't live in the city if I didn't have this place now. No, it keeps you able to, I can stay in the city because I have my place up here. You get that decompression. That's what I found. I moved to Colorado for a brief amount of time. In 2009, I lived in Gold Hill, which is like 3,000 feet above Boulder. I went full out, 148 acres, like, log house, the whole deal, but my wife got pregnant and you can't, like, if you're a person who lives at sea level and you go to 8,000 feet and you're pregnant, it's like you have the flu every day. It was horrible. She was wrecked and then we went back to LA for a few days and she was normal and then I realized, ah, fuck. So we had a bail. Can't do it. Yeah, it was rough. But man living up there was fucking magical. It was like everything just went. Well, human animals are part of the earth. Yeah. Our home and cities are not natural. You don't see, it's manmade lighting. As soon as it gets dark, it's manmade lighting everywhere and you have to turn off the lights to find darkness. You don't have this natural, this thing of like, you know, there's certain parts of the day where the breeze comes. Like, if you live anywhere on a coast, there's a sea breeze and then there's the hot part of the day and there's, you know, and it's, and you're watching the grass go green and then gray, you're watching the trees die. It's part of, it tells you, your brain, how life works. I think it makes you less afraid of dying, that you watch everything die and renew every year and you touch, you get a sense of what speed you're actually supposed to be running at because the city life and also the online life and the phone life is overworking everybody's brains and their systems. People are texting right before bedtime and there's just, but being out there in nature where it's like, no, it's getting dark, cool off. It's getting dark. There's no sense of getting dark in the city. It's, you know, you're watching the world go to sleep and then the different sounds, you're hearing the birds go to bed and then insects come out. All those things are like, are reminding you how your system actually, what's going on in your chemistry is connected to all that. Yeah. There's also a thing about going into the woods and being around nature where it's like, it's like a nourishment that your body is not normally getting. It's like you feel like you're getting like a little something like, oh yeah, I need this. Like there's something in this that like your body is supposed to interface with. Yeah. It's good for your physical health. There's all these studies, not just your mental health. Well, if people don't see the sun for a certain amount of time, they go insane. So if you think about the original people, they saw that six sky of stars, like that really full sky of stars was normal for every human being to see that every night. Yeah. And a lot of people never see it. Never see one star. If you live in a city, you don't see the night sky. Unless it's Los Angeles, you see stars everywhere there. Blah, blah, blah. Killing their wives and the guy. I went to Hawaii once, went to the Keck Observatory. It's on the Big Island and it's way up there. You have to drive literally through the clouds. As we were driving, I was like, fuck, it's cloudy. This is going to suck. We're not going to see anything. And then you literally drive through the clouds and the image that you get, because the Big Island uses all diffused lighting because of the Keck Observatory. So when you get up there, the view, well, you're at like 13,000 feet or something like that, the view of space is insane. You really feel like you're in a spaceship. You don't feel like you're on earth anymore. You feel like you're in a ship with a glass ceiling and you're just passing through the Milky Way. I mean, it's fucking wonderful. Yeah, because we're used to this perspective that you're standing on earth and that's up, but we're really looking across at other people and you're looking down at the earth that you're tacked down to. But in reality, you're hanging upside down and you're really hanging out into everything, everything in the whole universe. It's not above your head. If you look like this, that's the really correct perspective. Yeah. Well, that's why all these ancient cultures were obsessed with constellations and we don't give a fuck about them for us. That's why they built shit like that to get up there. Yes. And also built things that mimicked the constellations like the Mayans and the Egyptians. The way they formulated their structures at all, like aligned with certain constellations and it was very important to them. Well think about back when people were, before there was skyscrapers, airplanes, that you couldn't go up. You could only go like six feet high. Right, right. And you could maybe build something that was like, I don't know, a castle. That's kind of high, but those pyramids, I know I sound like an idiot. That's something you guys fucking dropped acid while I was watching OJ. I just got wacky in here. That was hills, it's mountains, right? Mountains are high. Yeah, but they're high and you don't have like a drop or you're not really seeing. And also, unless you lived in the mountains, then that became normal. But the ability to go, let's go the way the fuck up there and see from up there and feel like, where is the sky stone? It's also very humbling to people to encounter undeniable majesty, like the insane majesty of the universe. That's how people are around mountains, around the ocean, things that are so epic that it's like it calms people down in a way. That's why people are so chill around beaches, beach communities, they're always kind of relaxed. Yeah, this thing is telling you over and over again. You ain't shit. There's a force that you ain't, it doesn't give a fuck. You're a speck and there's this force, this incredible force. When waves get high, you're just watching them crash and it's just telling you without you even thinking about it intellectually, fuck, okay, I get it. Put it in perspective, if you think you are very, very important and then you're on a mountain, you're like, oh, I'm not important at all. This means nothing. And nature is brutal. Nature is brutal.