Going West

I'm heading West...wasn't really sure what that meant until I looked out from a Horizon jet on Canada Day and saw the snowy peaks that lined the route between Seattle and Edmonton. I felt like I'd come home, but to a new place. N. Scott Momaday reminds me to experience this new place as fully as possible - the next posts will hopefully share some angles and sense of the place I'm now in....

The Earth
"Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon
the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up
to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from
as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it.

He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at
every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon
it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest
motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and
all the colors of the dawn and dusk.
For we are held by more than the force of gravity to the earth.
It is the entity from which we are sprung, and that into which
we are dissolved in time. The blood of the whole human race
is invested in it. We are moored there, rooted as surely, as
deeply as are the ancient redwoods and bristlecones."

Navarre Scott Momaday

Canada Day in Edmonton

The West -- Day 2 -- Mount Baker with long-time wilderness compatriot Julie


Glacial melt and sun


Mount Baker - a light breeze and perfect corn snow


Happy!

"I know that there are many ways to live there in the sun or shade.
Together we will find a place to settle down and live with the space
without the busy pace back east, the hustling, rustling of the feet,
I know I'm ready to leave too, so this is what we're going to do,

Go west, life is peaceful there.
Go west, lots of open air.
Go west to begin life new.
Go west, this is what we'll do." ---PSBs