Atop Cerro Pedernal

Everything in the world is broken, shattered, and imperfect, either by design, or through experience, and, like most people,sometimes both. Every person has faults and defects. Nothing that ever was or ever will be can ever be perfect. And yet, here we are, being, striving to become more than we are.

Everyone has what is called neshamah in Judaism, a spark or breath of divinity imbued in them, like the brightest stars that manage to break through all the light pollution, whether the user of this holiness calls it the soul, rūḥ, qi, or simply the synapses in our brains firing to give us consciousness. We exist on this earth in imperfect and insignificant forms, yet we continue to exist. To bring meaning into our own lives, we create our own meaning in other meaningless, fragmented things. 

When I was younger, I used to fear this insignificance. I remember a specific incident that kicked it off. I was around twelve, and my family and I had just gone to see the Oscar-nominated Short Films, one of which was about a man grappling with the death of his mother. This really freaked me out, because it was the first time I truly realized that everything and everyone I had ever known and loved would one day perish in some capacity.

I became afraid of the end for all people and how my life was destined to pass in the blink of an eye. But I can also pinpoint the exact moment that fear left me and I changed. Last summer, on the top of Cerro Pedernal, almost 10,000 feet up above the earth, after a grueling hike up and facing the same on the return trip, looking out over the New Mexican desert below, I finally came to peace with the fact that existence, on a grand scale, is ultimately futile but as lovely as it is ephemeral. Existing in defiance of the truth of mortality brings nothing but fear. However, on a smaller scale, our pointless existence can mean everything to another pointless existence. Everything on the earth, including the earth itself, is composed of the bodies of stars, reincarnated into new meaning, after the crucial step of destruction. So, we too come together after our destructions and we shine, to make up a collection of broken, beautiful stories.