privileged and grateful to see this earth

In celebration of Earth day, I was scrolling through my camera roll and reminiscing on all the joy the earth has brought me this last year. I got to frolic in meadows in Lauterbrunnen with some of my best friends while looking at the Swiss Alps that lie between us and Milan; I drove up to Mt. Rainier with my hometown friends from San Francisco in 14 hours, leaving 7 hours after my internship ended for the summer. We ended up popping two tires and getting towed off the mountain (the Skyline Loop evades me still, but it will happen). I skiied in Banff, AB with my family, I did my first backpacking trip in Yosemite for a night with my dad’s hiking friends, I went to Zion national park, and I also ran a lot outdoors in varying weather. I snowshoed around the Matterhorn. Sat on the windy beaches in San Diego, saw the inverted clouds at Mount Tamalpais. What a privilege and honor it is to be able to experience and love the world and get to become familiar with all its glory. What a joy it is to be healthy and able to move my body and breathe air where it smells of sea or pine or oak or rain and not smoke and haze. A privilege to be born in a period where it’s not too late to fix the climate, and a privilege to see everything it is today because humans are temporal creatures and I fear our lifespans are not enough to solve our self-induced problems.