On top of trying to be still, one of my intentions with this trip is to do more things outside of my comfort zone. I’ve been dubbing this the Summer of Shirley where I do things differently, and also try new things.

Having left Los Angeles during rush hour, the last leg of my trip was no longer going to be 6-7 hours. It was going to take me 12. I love road trips, but there’s no way I was going to be able to tank a 12 hour drive on top of the 3 I had already driven. And after 2022, I vowed that I was never going to stay the night in Vegas ever again. But after listening to some wise council, I decided to set pride aside and booked a room somewhere in Vegas for the night.

Normally, I would stay in a cushy hotel, but it was suggested to me that I try doing something different and so I booked a night at a rather unique-to-me AirBnB:
A cute li’l airstream way out on a dude ranch an hour outside of Las Vegas.

Even with the promise of being near horses and coyotes, I was still really nervous and totally out of my comfort zone being out there. Arriving when it was dark didn’t really help calm my nerves, nor did the ginormous spider that was chilling on a window curtain mere inches from the bed where I was meant to sleep. But the next morning I found some sense of stability and reassurance from seeing the beautiful, strong, solid mountains in front of me bathed in the pinks of the morning sun.

My first instinct upon arriving was to make jokes about how this was the beginning of a found footage horror movie like The Outwaters or Horror in the High Desert.

But something in me felt that—joke or not—it didn’t feel right to think that way. Even though I was nervous and out of my comfort zone, I didn’t want to crack jokes to help lighten up the awkwardness and discomfort I was feeling in that situation. I wanted to sit in it and let myself feel all of the feelings—including the uncomfortable ones.

At the start of the year, I had been possessed by a question that came from a tarot reading I had received at the tail-end of 2024:

How do I open up a window?
How do I create growth and vitality into the areas of my life that feel dead?

Being out there in the wide open desert, in a place I normally never would’ve thought to venture to, I started to get this feeling of fresh air finally being let into my sealed terrarium. I think that by leaning into feelings of discomfort instead of shying away from them, it can serve as a compass to help me let in new energy and growth into my life.