Friday, July 30, 2010

Rocky Mountain Rejuvenation (Part 1)

I have been more or less in hibernation for the past week. Two of the three summer months are now gone and with them, my summer vacation.

I returned from 10 days in western Colorado with a sense that seasons are shifting. It must have followed me home. Summer is short in the high altitudes of the Rocky Mountains and above 10,000 feet there are patches where the snow never melts. 
The realization of turning seasons literally overtook me as I have barely left my house in a week’s time. Part grief for what is on its way out and part preparation for what is to come, I am fully alive. Right now I can’t see the calendar’s next page even though I know it will turn soon and make way for new events. Yet somehow, I have hope in knowing that what lies on the next page is still unwritten and full of possibilities.

It has been five years since my last trip to the homeland. A lot happens in five years and going back to the place where I grew up reiterated that to me.

The last time I took in the magnificence of western Colorado, I didn’t find it so magnificent. It was the summer before I moved to the east coast. I had been contemplating the move but was wrestling internally with fear and insecurity. Jumping off a cliff into the unknown without a job or a place to live or any other guarantees was daunting. The more I thought about it, the more paralyzed I became. That summer, I wanted to stop thinking about the move for a little while so I took the trip back to the places and some of the people that represented my formative years. It caused my heart additional turmoil. While I was wrestling with making a change in location and lifestyle, I was also fighting against years of being shut down and bottled up. Those things originated in the small county where I grew up and in the summer of 2005, I despised that spot in western Colorado that few have ever heard of….  (more to come)

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