Megamorphosis

by Drew Martin
This past week I was in San Diego and Los Angeles. I drove up Pacific Highway 1 at sunrise; the waves were bobbing with surfers. At sunset, I drove east into the desert and passed through valleys of dry, contorted earth and fields of tall, white windmills, which were spinning wildly. The next morning, I woke up surrounded by the arid mountains of Palm Springs. I flew east and switched planes in a blizzard in Denver, Colorado where people wore shirts with images of wolves and were dressed like outdoorsmen. By the evening I landed in a fair, damp Queens, New York. In the morning, I went for a run through the woods in New Jersey and felt enveloped in layers of life, compared to the fragile spattering of scrub brush in the desert. Yesterday, I returned to SoHo and got my haircut underground in Chinatown while listening to a Chinese opera. Usually it feels like everything is the same and that we change at an alarming rate, but the past few days I feel like I have been the constant and a million things have changed around me; the air, the temperature, the sights and sounds. While our minds are always open for new experiences, it feels like our psyche tries to anchor us in a sense of one-self, otherwise we could never navigate this vast sea of transformation.