Life Lessons from the Great Sand Dunes

Yesterday, we stopped by the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Reserve on our way to Amarillo, Texas on the first leg of our trip back home.

The dunes are massive. They are a living geometry of wind, gravity and time. I felt like I was standing in a sine wave, watching the slowed down effects of how we experience our lives in a purely physical way.

With any sine wave, you have peaks and valleys, and the experiences we have in our lives if you were to look at it like a sine wave mirror what I saw out there in the desert.

The valleys we have to walk through hold the seed for the next peak.

But sometimes, when you are in the valley, the view is so limited you feel as if you’ll never be able to ascend again.

There is a certain comfort in realizing that this is not how life works.

When the wave touches the floor of the movement, there is only one place to go next, and that is the slow ascension back to the top where the view is more expansive, and the lesson from the seed planted in the valley is realized.

It takes time for all of this to take form. Walking among the dunes, it felt like the exclamation point to my experience over the last 10 days walking through such varied and dynamic landscapes.

So my final thought is this–don’t worry so much about your life.

We have our lows so that they can support our next high. And the cycle repeats over and over again over the course of time it takes for us to live this life.

Have faith in the geometry of life…I don’t think it lies. In fact, I know that it doesn’t.

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Random fact about me: My first concert ever was with my mother. We went to see Roy Clark and Buck Owens from the show “Hee Haw”.