just a pretty view. from the overlook above Lost Lakes on a walk a week ago.
My throat is choked and my words will not flow. The stories stay behind the veil of the cluttered surface of my mind as I sit here in the darkness with the gentle crackle of the fire so close, and the dimmed light of my computer screen on my lap. Some days the weight of the world drags me down. The burden of my own thoughts, my own doing, like lead upon my own shoulders, and I can not shake it free.
These are the troubles of the past, troubles of the future. Why do we worry so? There is no trouble here and now, as the cats come to join me and revel in the warmth of the woodstove. Nothing more.
One sits on the windowsill and looks out into what appears as complete blackness at first. I stare with her, and slowly, my eyes adjust. I see the lighter outline of the snow covered peaks, the stripes of the avalanche shoots between the black timber. Smooth and sensuous curves of the mountains lying in layers, one behind the next, a harem of hills, together in a strong protective mass of heavy earth about the valley of my home. They are the unmoving waves in my sea, undulating with eternal time.
A faint and dark pinkness to the sky above us all and I realize the moon, still high over and behind the cabin, is shrouded by a film of translucent clouds. Perhaps a promise of snow, or an empty promise. She mocks our anticipation.
Outside there is no sound, there is no movement. A black screen of a movie waiting to begin, waiting for the sun to rise and the air to stir, the world to waken and the day to begin. The delicately exposed branches of the aspen do not stir, as if their eyes remain closed, like those of my boys, still asleep in these walls of logs around us.
I am in the middle of these surging mountains, a woman in land rising and falling around me, regardless of me. Driftwood on the open sea. The thoughts of the pressures of tomorrow swell back over like a salty giant wave and my breath is cut short. I am dying to scream out, but the mountain listens not. My voice is lost not in the wind, but in the suppressed still of the heavy morning air. My voice carries no meaning in this wild world. We learn to swallow our dreams where they may swell in our bellies and blossom into the promise of new life.
