I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life...Emerson

Last week consisted of me running all over Moscow, and hence, constantly riding the metro. The Moscow metro is a terrible place to spend one's days - the grime of millions of zombie-people has been building up for decades. The instant you step into the tunnels you stop being human. All of your senses are overwhelmed, so you simply turn them off. Too much motion is confusing, so you stop looking in people's eyes, and when you accidentally catch someone's passing glance, a strange sense of shame fills both parties. The beasts of the underbelly of this enormous city roar through their tunnels, screeching as they go. To drown the creaking and screaming of the wagons, you listen to music, podcasts, or just wear the headphones to block out sound.

Anyway, to survive travelling on the metro, I have to do something that takes my attention away from it. For the past two months I've been reading War and Peace, and on Thursday night, while an oh-so-Moscow rainstorm drenched the above world, I was hurtling through the underground as I finished the novel. There was more than one time in my reading of the book that I just wanted to turn to the person next to me and say something like, 'I can't believe it, ____ is dead!' 

I especially loved the reoccurring theme of finding regeneration, or re-finding meaning in life. Here's one of my favorite parts of the book:

...он ничего не видал. Над ним не было ничего уже, кроме неба, — высокого неба, не ясного, но все-таки неизмеримо высокого, с тихо ползущими по нем серыми облаками. «Как тихо, спокойно и торжественно, совсем не так, как я бежал, — подумал князь Андрей, — не так, как мы бежали, кричали и дрались; совсем не так, как с озлобленными и испуганными лицами тащили друг у друга банник француз и артиллерист, — совсем не так ползут облака по этому высокому бесконечному небу. Как же я не видал прежде этого высокого неба? И как я счастлив, что узнал его наконец. Да! все пустое, все обман, кроме этого бесконечного неба. Ничего, ничего нет, кроме его. Но и того даже нет, ничего нет, кроме тишины, успокоения. И слава Богу!..» (if you don't speak Russian, this is from book 1, part 3, chapter 16, the last few paragraphs).

Isn't that just so incredibly beautiful? I couldn't stop thinking of this theme on my latest trip to the countryside of Russia. Last year I made this same trip with my rock-climbing friends to Dernovo, a tiny town a few hundred km south of Moscow. Picture rolling fields of soft grass blowing in the warm spring wind backed by a bubbling brook, and of course, cliffs! Got the image? Great, now let's see how accurate your imagination is compared with the real thing.

 The running here was absolutely fantastic. Kilometers and kilometers of soft green grass covering rolling hills is just amazing to run on. I've never found another place where I can run so far barefoot.

 The trip was meant to be a rock climbing trip, so I got some of that in as well. I'm really in terrible shape for climbing right now, but the only other two guys on the trip are rock climbing instructors, and they really pushed me to do better than I have in a long time. They kept telling me to take a step into the unknown, and just trust that there will be something to grab once I get there. These two photos are at the top of a climb that I was sure I wouldn't be able to do at all, but ended up climbing it on-site (on-site is climbing it the first time without having seen it done before, and without falling).

The trip to Dernovo acted as sort of a reset button for me last year, and this year didn't upset. The camping, running, and climbing were all just so great to get me excited about life again. I know this sounds super corny, but I really can't get over how many beautiful things there are in life. So many wonderful books to read, hills to run, cliffs to climb, and unknowns to be stepped into.