Peace

I've finally made peace with myself about some things.

Between the revelations I had working with the farrier (much of which I haven't blogged about), and a subsequent heart to heart with an old friend, I seem to have quieted my mind about a great many issues. So much so that I really don't even feel the need to expound upon the subject. I just want to tie up a few loose ends.

First, grad school. A far cry from my first day of class, I've actually come to enjoy my classes. I've got A's in both. Some things have occurred recently, or perhaps they've just been visible to me now that my eyes aren't clouded by a single-minded obsession, that have softened me - even drawn me back in - to the good things in life that aren't necessarily only to be found high in the mountains or on a remote ranch.

No, nothing has been resolved. No mysteries of the Universe have been revealed. My desires, hopes and dreams, concerns and wishes haven't changed. I've just decided to take off the war paint for the time being and drift with the current. Maybe I'm just a sell-out. Maybe I'm just tired. But I know that there is little if anything in this world that doesn't have an up side and a down side, a light side and a dark side. My problem is that I'm always trying to figure out the one "right" answer (though it's highly unlikely that even exists), and sometimes I can't see the yang for the yin.

Last weekend's trip to the museum left me feeling good - excited even - and a bit sad, longing for the hopeful dreams and abundant optimism I had in my younger days. Last night I went to the Fisk Planetarium in Boulder, and then today I went to the Earth Sciences Library for the first time to check out some books I needed for one of my classes. These places just compounded the effect of the museum experience last weekend. The Earth Sciences Library was the most amazing and beautiful library I've ever been in. It was almost as much museum as library, and you should see their collection of geography materials and maps. By the checkout desk, there is a full size replica of a massive adult Stegosaurus skeleton that was found recently in Colorado - the most complete Stegosaur skeleton ever found. The college I got my undergrad from had nothing - nothing at all - that remotely compared to this.

I also did some cool stuff at work this week. I finished a new geothermal resource map of the US. I didn't just map it. I did all of the analysis behind it, and after months of work this has become our lab's newest official geothermal resource map of the US. It'll be on Obama's desk soon. I also created a volumetric rendering of the temperatures below the surface of the lower 48 states that the boss and our geothermal team was quite impressed with. It felt good.

Life is full of good things. Maybe I'm not a rancher or a mountain man or a farrier, and maybe I will or won't be any of those things in the due course of time. But today, right now, I'm a GIS analyst and a cartographer, and I'm flirting with an old love of mine - earth science. So as I figure it, until the time comes that I'm a farrier or a mountain man or something else entirely, I might as well be the best damned analyst, map maker and scientist I can possibly be. There's plenty of joy to be found in it, just so long as I don't let the yin block my view of the yang.