Get Outside!

The best life experiences don't change you, they just bring you closer to yourself.

Mt. Hood, Trillium Lake, two men, and a dog. Taken by me on medium format film

This past spring, an oracle card reader in Washington Square Park was offering $5 card pulls. I’m a sucker for divine intervention, so I said

“Sure, why not.”

My card stated:

“Get outside.” 

Every fiber of my being sunk. I wanted something profound. I wanted to be told success is coming, or the wait is over, or change is right on the horizon, but instead, I got 

“Get outside.” 

The reader softened the blow with “Maybe you don’t have to leave New York, but you should spend some more time in nature.” 

I scoffed and shrugged it off. 

I thought I had it all figured out. I had the job, the friends, the life, the gym membership. At the ripe age of 24, I lived with a roommate I barely spoke to, woke up alone, and worked. I was slowly climbing that ladder of opportunity that had been glorified to me for as long as I can remember. Hustle, grind, find joy in work, let work consume you, let it become your identity, let it take over your entire life if you want to win. Success is a creature that only emerges from the forest after years of labor, and you are never running fast enough to catch its tail.

Do you ever realize how far you’ve strayed in order to find yourself back where you started?

If I’m being completely transparent, my soul LEPT when this oracle reader told me to get outside. Being out in the world is all my heart has ever desired. However, the fear of leaving New York; leaving the life I’ve built, the life that I’m attached to, was too real. So I did the next best thing. I moved close to a park, and microdosed the freedom that comes with walking alone in the woods.

And I convinced myself that was enough… 

Until it wasn’t. 

New York has taught me a lot about being quiet. I never spoke or sang too loud so as to not disturb my neighbors. I squeezed onto crowded subway cars, diminishing my 5’8” green bean body as much as I could, doing my best Flat Stanley impression as I was whisked from point A to point B, probably in pursuit of some job or opportunity. I settled into this smallness, this comfort of being unknown, of hiding in plain sight. 

Over the summer my dear friend Liv told me about this thing called Basecamp, a weeklong trip with 40 creators, where you get dropped in the woods of Oregon to do just that, create. Immediately after my call with her, I was offered a position photographing for a non-profit on a work trip to the Philippines. I exclaimed, out loud,

“God is testing me.”

Suddenly, two paths appeared in front of me. I could get on an all-expenses-paid flight to the Philippines to continue glorifying my job, or I could spend a week living in the woods with 40 strangers. You know in the Barbie movie when she can choose whether to go back to her old life, or know the truth about the universe, and she gets offered a high heel or a Birkenstock? This was that moment for me. This was my red pill/blue pill.

I asked Liv what she thought I should do, and she responded quite plainly, 

“Lexi, you will go to the Philippines eventually. There will be more jobs. You may never get the opportunity to meet these 40 people again.” 

I chose the red pill. I chose the people, and those people changed my life. 

My experience in Oregon was an introspective one. I’ve never learned so much about myself. I discovered how much New York has kept me in my shell by standing under the big Pacific Northwest sky, and finally feeling like I found a place vast enough to hold me. There is no freedom like what I experienced there. 

Setting yourself free is a daunting task. Freedom takes guts. Freedom takes courage. True freedom, that moment when you give yourself a permission slip to just be, is a feeling I have found in the past but could not put my finger on at the time.

There is a poem by Sarah Kay called “Here and Now.” It states: 

“This is the widest I can stretch my arms without dropping things. 

This is the first time I don’t care if I drop things. 

This is what happens when flowers wake up one morning and decide to smell human.” 

Breathing in fresh air, dipping my toes in blue rivers, hiking to waterfalls, allowing myself to be drenched in sunlight and starlight combined; I woke up one morning in the woods of Oregon and the flowers smelled human and the humans saw me for myself, and I recoiled.

How am I supposed to let these people know me? Why do they want to? I am just a speck in this sea of humans. I am not providing anything for them, I am not giving them anything tangible. I dropped my mask when I stretched my arms out the first time, and lost the facade I thought I could hide behind. 

It all got ripped away. Every ounce of it. I wanted to scream but didn’t want to let these people know I was anything but pleasant. 

So, I cried. I cried alone, and eventually, I cried with others.

My friend Sky hosted this workshop with the group. It was called a “Soul Creator Workshop.” There was a deeper meaning to it, but here’s what really happened: 

We hiked out to the river and danced, shook the energy out of our bodies, and I screamed.

Loudly.

I let out that scream that was trapped inside my chest all week. All of that energy moved through my body like a power grid in a lightning storm. 

I let these strangers see me by seeing myself. I finally sounded that “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world” that Walt Whitman wrote and Robin Williams talked about in Dead Poet’s Society. I spent so much of my life being quiet because I felt like no one wanted to hear me, but that is just denying this massive part of myself that is begging to speak. 

To speak loudly, speak to others, speak impeccably; I learned that my barbaric yawp has power. That my voice is resonant. 

It matters. 

Finally, I let myself exist.  

I existed in my fullness and brightness and loudness, in the middle of the woods, with 40 strangers transformed into friends. 

The one thing I will never again be in this life, is alone. 

Alone is overrated. Alone is silly! 8 billion people on this big beautiful earth and you truly believe none of them are good? You believe no one will drink your presence like sunlight, and dance with you in wildflower fields that sway along with your feet? That you must feel the winds of winter, and bear that icy cold cross until you reach the top of the hill? Who will crucify you when you get there, you patron saint, all alone? You storm that refuses to diminish its destruction enough to see its own beauty, your own symphonies in the thunder? 

I made a promise to myself to never glorify that again. To glorify the work more than the people that support you making it. Individualism is rugged, community is soft.

This is what my outside time has taught me; how to let people walk with me through the world, and love my steps as much as their own. 

We have an unspoken agreement to keep pace with each other, because god damn it, running a lifelong marathon by yourself is EXHAUSTING!  

I will still have my success and find my opportunities, make my impact, and leave the legacy I want to in this world, but in order to do any of the above, I have to allow myself to LIVE. The best part of life is the people in it. To allow that community to hold you, to let them hear the echo of your barbaric yawp, and think it’s as beautiful as a solo violin in an empty church. 

Now I live under that big expansive sky. I live in that freedom and let it lay my foundation.

We’re all just chasing a life that feels like home.

And now, I have 40 new friends to come over to this newfound home for dinner on Sunday nights, or any night that we can all be together, 

Because we just know together is better than apart.

All my love,

Lexi