Summer is upon us.

Mountain Memories

“Mountains surround us, middling high and purple

No matter where we stood they protected us

with perspective.  People call them gentle mountains

but you can die in there; they’re thick

with creeper and laurel.  Like voodoo…”

                                    by Mary Stewart Hammond

                                         Out of Canaan

             I can feel my gut unwind as soon as the smoky blue of the mountains is clearly visible.  Like a coil unfolding, relaxing; this is home.  Born in the thickets of laurel and rhododendron along the Hiawassee, I love these mountains and valleys; they are for me the giver of life.  There, the music of water over rocks, the heady fragrance of sweet grass in bloom, is the essence of summer.  Lusty cicada songs fill the night with the pulsing rhythm of life fulfilling itself. Waking very early and clomping along dirt roads while the mist still lies upon the river is a mystical experience.  I feel like Merlin in Avalon.

            I wonder if there is a place with which you connect in this way.  A place, maybe not ‘home’ in the sense that this is where you were born, but ‘home’ in that your soul recognizes it; where you feel so ‘at home’ that your truest self emerges?  When my son visited Ireland several years ago, he went to the small town where our ancestors had lived.  He wrote to me that it was so familiar he felt he’d been there before. 

            If there is a place of deep connection for you, I hope you go there this summer.  Almost as a pilgrimage, we should return yearly to whatever land we call our own.  Being there recharges our batteries, and gives us new perspective, or perhaps taps into an older, wiser perspective that we carry always in our DNA.  I am going next month.  I can hardly wait.

                                                Keeping the faith,

                                                Jane