🇩🇰 Originally published in Danish — automatically translated to English
It is hard not to begin this story with a reference to the Bible. ""Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?" — Jesus says to his disciples. In the long run, you get very sick if you don't get salt. In the short term, everything is just tasteless, pointless, bland. Dare one say, British? Salt makes everything better, and salt is essential to life. Salt is thus like truth, not just in its first two letters (in Danish, salt and sandhed), but in its nature. Bringing forth truth makes everything better—and it is necessary for life.
Discussing how Jesus is the truth would be too long of a detour. I have traveled enough to know how hard it is to even try to speak the same language around this topic. Let us at least agree that the Bible is a cultural cornerstone and lifeline for the global culture we all share, what we call our common cultural sphere—the so-called "Western World"—and that these stories, whatever else they are, carry something for all of us. So the Bible references here aren't necessarily meant to be understood as institutionalized religion, but as a common language that calls on the spiritual—what we share as human beings. A calling to stand truthfull and strong, owning who we are. And what is.
Such a call rang out loudly on the Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah, USA. From there, this text flowed, both a story about how we experience, what it can feel like to be in this life, and a story about our road trip from Vegas to Vancouver.
Being the salt of the earth is about daring to be who you are. Standing by your truth. I am writing this story while driving through the enormous and enormously strange US, where billboards advertising law firms, medicine and Jesus disturb the view, and where the distances are absolutely wild, the cars colossal, and the roads long and straight.
And I have to let go of the biblical reference, without letting go of the Jesus from my Scandinavian 1970s upbringing, who is about exactly this: life is carried by daring to live it, knowing yourself and your mission, standing by who you are, and being present.
The other beginning I had in my head was the question of mental health. I called my food journal notes from the previous three weeks in Las Vegas "Staying Sane in Sin City," so the threads weave together nicely.
Can you stay mentally healthy, and what does that even mean? Can you stay mentally healthy while challenging yourself to be the best version of yourself, cleaning up bad habits, moving life forward, optimizing, and focusing? And what does it even mean? To be mentally healthy?
Maybe it is exactly the same as being the salt of the earth. Being someone who stands by their truth and fearlessly walks the path that shines. Do we dare to wake up in the morning and really tune in? Do we dare to stand sharp and look sharply at ourselves: confront the demons, look into the future we dream of, and actually create it, while being loving and trying to understand, ready to have been wrong, ready to grow?
If we dare and do it, can do it, can withstand it, we become the salt of the earth. I am in the US and don't need to play down how grand what we can be for each other is. But as a true Dane, I have to take the Law of Jante into account and remember to say that I don't think I'm better than others, that of course I'm not "something" or "someone" — which I actually don’t think either. Everyone can do this. Everyone is this. And if we do it, we can also be each other's anchor for mental health, which is sometimes needed when life gets wild. Which it does, when we stand sharp.
First day of Road trip Vegas to Nevada, we drove through the Nevada desert, hundreds of kilometers without gas stations, desert desert desert in the form of bushes and mountains and stones and dry earth, Joshua trees, sunshine, long straight roads. We were close to Area 51 and the Extraterrestrial Highway: aliens and atomic bombs shaped conversations and experiences. The town of Ely, our lunch stop, was a crazy contrast to the Las Vegas we came from: from money-and-entertainment crazy America to the backwoods and poverty, men in cowboy boots with long hair and backward caps, women with pretty ugly tattoos, a café that looks like a warehouse, syrup in gallon sizes for sale in the supermarket, a few murals, and a drop in temperature of fifteen degrees: FINALLY you could put your sweater back on and feel like yourself, what joy.
The first day of the road trip brought the first edition of the WE NEVER GIVE UP road trip meal plan, which involved a simply bad mandoline I had bought for the purpose, gluten-free bread I had baked for the purpose, a sandwich workshop in the shotgun seat and salad production in the trunk. Our diet is very restrictive, and I will die on the hill that it is one of the most important things we do, the thing that lets us keep up the pace. It takes a certain kind of woman to handle it with five different people's palates, allergies, preferences, and balances within the limits of the possible.
On through even more desert, more mountains, formations, straight roads, mile after mile, we reached the Bonneville Salt Flats two hours before sunset and had an experience for life with the crisp, crunching salt under our feet, while the sun slowly sank and changed the colors a little at a time.
It is hard to describe how wild it is. So I'll let the photos speak.
The next morning, after a good night at a Motel 6 that doesn't charge extra for dogs and gave us the space to make evening sandwiches, take showers, make tea, and sleep, we got up before sunrise, packed the trunk, and drove out to see the sunrise over the same salt flats. A new location, new salt formations, the light as the sun broke through a cloud, as the sun rose, as it hid again, a photo shoot, really taking it in. The salt is enormous, and even though the experience was big enough in itself, it was also overwhelming to drive more than a hundred kilometers further through the salt before we reached the Great Salt Lake itself and Salt Lake City.
Is there a chicken-and-egg connection between daring to be raw and present in life, standing by your truth, standing sharp as who we are, and maintaining strong mental health? Sometimes it feels as if the first undermines the second, and that is where we have to stick together. That is where we need each other, that is where we have to BE the light for each other, be aware that the more we try, the clearer it becomes that it is the relationships that carry us, love that is the glue. In return, maybe there are no limits to how good life can be, how many problems we can solve, how beautifully beauty can unfold, how magnificent every part of existence can become.
The salt in Utah points to that story for me. When you stand on the crunching salt, and it stretches in every direction, and the mountains stand strong, and the turning of the earth shifts the shades, things become clear.
We are strong enough. Especially when we are together.
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