FROZEN IN THE DARKNESS
the 6 months that it took for me to turn my life around were fairly mundane and boring. i picked up a bar tending job at a brewery south of Denver that is now defunct. i had a very small circle of friends and family that i surrounded myself with, and by and large, i never told anyone how bad everything truly was in my life. i focused on the day in, day out of working out, going to work, focusing on my self improvement, and in my free days, going into the wilderness to find myself again. ironically, this was in the heart of winter, somewhere that i had always loved, but this was the hardest winter of my life and it pushed me into the frozen darkness more than it ever had in my life.
i started doing the longest and hardest hikes of my life that winter. i pushed myself towards 20 mile winter hikes, snowshoes through treacherous terrain, and pushed through 70 mile per hour winds over ice and snow for some of my outdoor adventures. i found ice formations in the winter to shoot for the first time and i really found a way to embrace the darkness during those times. there is a funny thing about pushing yourself to your limits, you always find so much more within yourself than you ever imagined. hiking in the woods, disconnected from the world and people, stuck in a place where all you can do is think, is where you can find your white space to completely process your thoughts, emotions, and feelings. if you are willing to look inside, face your demons, fears, and insecurities, you can process a lot of emotional pain and trauma you never wanted to face. carl jung had a famous quote in reference to this, “what you most want to find will be where you least want to look”.
i had an enormous amount of emotional pain and trauma that started coming to the surface during this time. in particular, a ton over the past few years, but the deeper i dug into that, the more i realized a lot stemmed back to my childhood as well. i knew that if i truly wanted to help others then i needed to address my own issues that i had first. i had the joy of finally seeing jordan peterson speak a couple of months ago and he said something that has stuck with me ever since and goes back to looking inside of yourself. he said “if you have a truth to say, and you don’t say it, you are making the world a worse place”. this is remarkably true in the sense that as we get older, more and more starts happening to us, and instead of addressing the issue, we just layer more shit on top of it to mask it. we have tons of dis empowering ways of distracting ourself whether thats food, sex, drinking, social media, relationships, the list goes on and on. but to live in blissful ignorance, or willful blindness, will only lead us to conscious delusion, and that is a hell you can find yourself in that you don’t want to be in. we try to hide so many things from ourselves in the shadows, but it is only when we bring our light to those dark corners that we can truly heal to become the best versions of ourselves and let our souls shine as bright as day for the world around us.
i took the photo of this section of the rock frozen under the ice during a time when i was right in the thick of all the shit and during my phoenix transformation. my buddy Matt, a fellow nature photographer, came out from Florida to shoot with me after he saw some of my ice photos. i shot this as we were walking over a frozen lake on the way through our snowshoe adventure. this photo would become symbolic of my life and it helped me develop a saying within myself that propelled me to a whole different level. i started a saying to myself, “do you want to see where monsters are made, bury me in hell (or frozen in ice), and watch me dig my way out”. there’s a side of me that no one ever gets to see and it’s where the hard headed, stubborn, angry monster lives inside of me. it burns dark matter to create light and it is an endless source of energy for me. i decided years ago that no matter what i go through, i will never stop living with a soft heart and a gentle soul. but you also always have to have the ability to be stern and protect yourself from the people that are willingly wanting to take advantage of you. there is a biblical saying “blessed are those who have swords and know how to use them, but keep them sheathed; for they shall inherit the earth”. i loved the process of going through hell while not letting most people or the world around me know any of it, it’s what helped propel me back to the top in record fashion.