A trip reflection

“By going out into the natural world, I am really going in”  -John Muir

I’m not great at remembering quotes, but I always remember this one (perhaps because it is on my facebook page which I frequent more often than I should.)

It has always proven to be true. 

The day in Yellowstone (and the rushed ones that followed) where a whirlwind of on-the-go action. A trip with a tight deadline; not my forte. In the thrush of it all, I barely had time to give a solitary reflective gaze out onto some vast landscape let alone write about any of my ponderings. I wasn’t feeling that I was tracking my introspection very well until I sat down one night to look through pictures. 

It is in these snapshots of moments and memory that I see the gift in its entirety. 

It is unavoidable. You travel out. You travel in. 

Perhaps it is simply a convenient narration that we weave for ourselves, but I find that with each small journey, a theme begins to make itself known. Or a certain layer of the soul is addressed. 

It sounds redundant to say that the theme is change. This is not a surprising observation. However, change takes on different energies, is felt in different areas of the being and on different layers. The Journey out to the mountains was a melting, much like the encore of our visit to Glacier National Park, thick sheets of ice slowly deteriorating in what looks like an unraveling. In the case of the park, perhaps a dire sign of our ecological shift. In the case of mother and I, the tension and devastation that some of our interactions triggered was like a melting into our separation, into my separate life out West. 

This journey is a building and restructuring. With tools from my life across the country, and many replayed, recycled and rehashed strategies of communication, mother and I embarked back to the mitten with a surprisingly small amount of rift. Suitably, our journey this time centered around Yellowstone. Its volcanic underbelly swelling and contracting, coursing through deep earth veins, shaking and shifting the make up of everything around us all the time; the world is constantly adjusting and responding, making way for energy to escape, to release pressure. So too do we shift, respond, release and fall into place, again and again.