Time spent crying over Time With Leonard.
Time With Leonard — by Walter Kevin Eubank
Time With Leonard is a Kickstarter project to fund a book of the same name, about Leonard Knight and the legendary Salvation Mountain. If you haven’t heard of it, or seen mind-blowing photos of it in luckier friends’ Flickr account like I have, Salvation Mountain is some crazy cement mountain in the middle of the desert in Niland, California. This precious old man is 80 years old and has been camping out here for 30 years, painting and re-painting colorful messages of faith and love with what he estimates to be about 100,000 gallons of paint (all donated by the mountain’s visitors).
Despite being an unbeliever who has never made it out to Salvation Mountain, this video had me crying at my computer monitor, wanting to hug everyone (although Project Videos That Make Me Cry could probably be a weekly feature).
Leonard greets hundreds of people a day and tours them around the mountain and its gift shop — where he’s been living the past 18 of 30 years — and I imagine sharing the same message he talks about in his video, with a tone of conviction and this perfect old man squint:
“God loves everybody in the whole world. Period. That’s everybody. That’s all people, everywhere, period. Love can get so big that in can cover everybody in the whole world, if you’ll let it.”
For much of the 90’s, Leonard was embattled with local supervisors over alleged toxicity levels in the surrounding area (lead paint), but the issue was resolved and in 2002, Salvation Mountain was entered into the Congressional Record of the United States, proclaiming it a national treasure.
“Somebody told me on the internet there’s over 100 different countries now that know about the mountain here in Niland. So it’s slowly getting it out there.”
It’s clear that this is his life’s work. To sit in the desert painting, greeting tourists and pilgrims alike, sharing his message with a contagious joy.
“It’s a easy message,” Leonard says in the video, “— to love somebody is the most easy thing in the world to do,” the way he says easy breaks my heart for some reason, maybe because it always feels so much less that that. “Just love somebody,” he says, “Be nice to ‘em. And all of a sudden that guy’s gonna be nice back to you, and nice gets bigger — oooh— and it’s gonna spread the whole world. Love is gonna do it.”
