A Full Life

Happy Wednesday! I spent the weekend off the grid camping with so many of my best friends and I’m feeling oh-so-lucky. There was an abundance of sunshine, bonfires, nature pees, belly laughs, and cupcakes.

We woke up with the sunrise and watched the sunset every night while nature did its thing and provided the perfect weather: hot enough for shorts and a tank top during the day and cold enough to bundle up in sweatpants and jackets at night. There’s nothing quite like high alpine summer.

Naturally, I spent a lot of time thinking about the last decade, the direction my life has taken, and what a privilege it is to age. This newsletter is my attempt at alchemizing those feelings into words.

PS: I was feeling gluttonous and decided to delay this newsletter by ~9 hours so I could include all the fun film photos from the roll I got developed this afternoon. Enjoy the pictures that are truly hot off the press.

Backcountry Chronicles

As I turn to a new decade, I really just feel lucky to be alive.

If I could boil down every single thing I believe and everything I am into two statements it would be: there’s no such thing as control and aging is a privilege.

A few weeks ago, I spent a Sunday in Leadville and Twin Lakes with a handful of friends. We drove up early to grab brunch at a spot in Leadville and then headed over to Twin Lakes to do a little cold plunging and lounging by the lake.

On the drive home, feeling the perfect kind of tired that only comes from a day spent in the sunshine, I realized that was the last Sunday of my 20’s. And it was absolutely perfect.

Thanks to I-70 traffic (yes, that still happens when it’s not ski season) we detoured over Loveland Pass, and looking out the window at all the changing landscapes, I couldn’t help but think about life. Mud season was finally giving way to summer, as evidenced by the teeny-tiny patches of snow surrounded by blooming wildflowers. I stared a little longer at all the peaks that were once covered with snow, now fully exposing themselves, and felt so grateful for all the changing seasons — and all the seasons of my life.

The ways that I’m different from 20 year old me feel innumerable and immeasurable. I wrote a couple weeks ago about really sitting and thinking about the person you were at 17, 21, 25, and all sorts of different ages; I can think about the person I was, but she feels like an alien to me.

I was distrusting of my own mind, decisions, and my life. I wasn’t comfortable in my own skin and definitely wasn’t sure how to be the person I wanted to be — the person I knew was deep inside somewhere.

All of this to say: aging is such a privilege. I spent plenty of last week reading through basically every reflection on turning 30 I could find on Substack, and while I can’t find the original article I pulled this from and link the article, I saved this quote that sums it up perfectly:

I’ve had so many moments throughout my life where I thought “If it all ends tomorrow, it was worth it for me to be able to experience this”. I feel it most acutely when I look at my parent’s dogs, when I laugh with my best friends, when I cry with my mom, when I hug my brother, or even when I just look at the mountains.

More than anything else, my capacity for love has expanded exponentially in the last decade. I feel such deep profound love for my friends, for their partners who they love deeply and love them deeply in return, for strangers I talk to on hiking trails.

I remember being 20 and going to Montana with my family and every single person I saw on the hiking trail seemed so happy to be there. Sun-cracked skin and smiles that ran ear-to-ear. I always make an effort to stop on the trail and talk to people, and I realize I’ve become the person I admired over the last decade. What more could you ask for from life?

There’s so many fun ways to measure a life: days lived, days on the skin track, the pairs of hiking shoes run through, total colored pencils used, journals filled.

I can’t wait for all the people I’ll meet and love in this new decade. All the books I’ll fall in love with, all the journals I’ll fill, all the hikes I’ll do, peaks I’ll ski; how much deeper my smile lines will get, all the sunscreen I’ll go through (and still somehow get scorched by the Colorado sun). and the really, really down-on-your-knees difficult days I’ll have that I know I’ll look back on and be thankful for.

Artiste Break

I don’t have any updated art to share (I’m being a lazy artist this summer, sorry) so here’s another film photo I took this weekend. Snow cats look so naked without snow. I’m adding World’s Most Amateur Photographer to my resume.

To Go Snacks

⛰️ ASMR alert. Check out these sounds from the no fall zone from professional skier, Jim Ryan.

💦 I have to give a big shoutout to my friend Alexandra here, because she recommended The River’s Daughter to me and I officially have a new favorite memoir. I read this book in less than 24 hours — a fact that says less about my reading speed and more about how impossible this book is to put down.

💄 I know the Jeff-Bezos-Lauren-Sanchez wedding was controversial for a number of reasons, but damn, this profile piece from The Cut on Lauren Sanchez kinda made me wanna drink martinis with her.

💗 I’ll tease this Substack piece, To Be Loved Is To Be Known, with a quote: “In my loneliest moments, I like to imagine myself as a patchwork quilt of everyone I have ever loved, and everyone who has loved me. My room is a museum, or graveyard depending on how you look at it, of miscellaneous trinkets I have collected because the people I love once liked them.”

🎧 The girls over at Diabolical Lies have been COOKING and the last episode, Sabrina Carpenter & the Politics of Pop Star Sexuality, was no exception.

I’ll leave you with this quote that I just really, really, really loved.

- McCall 🌻

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