The Patterns of Living Awareness.

Do you remember when it was so cold we struggled just to keep up with the herds?

When survival wasn’t a concept, but the only thing that mattered?

It’s strange how something so basic can slowly turn into something else entirely. How survival can become scarcity and scarcity can start pulling us in different directions.

And here we are now.

Still moving. Still adapting. Still carrying pieces of all of it with us.

It’s typically easier to see it out there, while much harder to notice how awareness shifts inside us depending on what we’re trying to survive.

Maybe that same survival awareness followed us onto the trail.

What it felt like during those long days either riding or walking beside the wagons through every kind of weather. To be so hungry, then have to leave food behind just to save weight.

Passing graves in all sizes, while quietly knowing any one of them could have been one of us.

Yesterday we passed Native families again, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that they seemed more rooted in the land than we did.

I found myself wondering what it must feel like to belong to the land in a way we no longer understood.

I kept wondering how that was possible. All these different states of awareness, and somehow each one seems to mirror something moving inside myself too. Different emotional climates. Different ways of relating to the world around us.

Most days I carry a quiet sense of fear without even realizing it. A kind of restless survival awareness that hums beneath the surface.

But when I looked at them, I found myself wondering what it feels like to move through the same land without carrying that same constant tension.

How I’ll never forget that last year of high school.

Excited for summer. Excited for college. Feeling like life was just beginning to open up.

Then suddenly seeing body bags of all shapes and sizes, carrying the same human story as the trail before it… only now it seemed to include every kind of person among us.

Every day passing them. Every day waiting for words from home about home. Anything other than here, now became all that mattered to most.

It makes me wonder how often the human mind searches for escape whenever survival awareness takes over completely.

The methods may change through time, but the pattern itself seems to stretch across the longest of timelines.

It’s unsettling to realize how often systems built around survival eventually drift toward exploitation.
Sometimes slowly. Sometimes so gradually that entire generations adapt to it before they even recognize what’s been lost.
History changes its uniforms, its flags, its technologies, and even its language, yet certain patterns continue repeating beneath the surface.
Power protecting itself.
Fear reshaping awareness.
Human beings learning to disconnect from one another in order to survive systems that no longer feel human.

I don’t know what the answer is yet. But I keep wondering what becomes possible once we stop surviving long enough to remember each other again.