the actual feeling of the mountains and one amazing young lady

Estes Park, Colorado, July 2016

Arrival:

This is the third time I have visited her in her mountain home, and each time as my vehicle enters the shadows and begins threading up and around the curving roads I experience a familiar chain of sensations. The move from valley to mountains is all at once physical, emotional, spiritual, and something completely new, like an echo of a recurring dream I had throughout most of my childhood and sometimes even still. (The dream was about God, stillness, a giant wooden mallet, a hair or maybe it was a thread, and violent spinning until stillness was reached again. It was about chaos and safety and love, I now know.)

In a crescendo, the slate-and-soil, tree-crusted hills bow down to vaulted craggy skyscrapers jutting up into the vacant sky barely fifteen feet from the two-lane road. Boulders of all sizes, spilled some other day probably long ago but not necessarily, sit in heaps, punctuating the clear, rushing, white water river. The river curves down and alongside, behind, and in gentle loops near our ascending path, achieving a ribbon dance between that cold energetic snow melt rife with fish and this man made pavement dotted with people like me. We are all seeking either solitude or reunion; but everyone gets a heavy dusting of mountain magic.

I feel embraced. Every time. The earth and rock on both sides of the road pulse with loving energy. They beg to be touched, explored, admired. The trees offer whispering perfume and welcoming, intimate secrets. The sky- different every time, this time as red as coals!- hovers a little pridefully, crowning all this beauty with still more beauty. Only one structure really interrupts the mountainous skyline: The Stanley Hotel. And it belongs here. It is perfect.

I feel deeply energized, quite against my will or at least with no effort made to feel this way: Something ignites behind the lowest part of my rib cage and then my legs feel bouncy. I start remembering lost loved ones like my Grandma Dunaway who loved to hunt lichen, mushrooms, and wildflowers. She did her magic in rural Oklahoma, but I believe she would have loved Colorado too. I start remembering (with excitement! not defeat) my own forgotten dreams and goals. It’s a wonderful and much needed re-connection with myself.

The physical sense of vibration or humming is very real too. The mountains pulse, and it drums up something vibrant inside me. I cannot wait to escape the car to sort of thrust myself onto the face of the Earth. The hum is a clear invitation and a powerful antidote to frayed nerves. Comforting. All the sights and sounds and smells immediately begin filling my empty places.

Morning:

Sitting on the bare wooden steps at the front of her tiny (perfect!) cabin, I face north. We are nearly to the top of a steep hill, and the mountains on the opposite side of town face me. They glow from the side with this brilliant, stinging daybreak. Shadows cast off to the west. The “Twin Owls” rock formation presides lovingly.

Behind me is the top of her hill, a wild little space where the paved road ends. When I visited in April we had enjoyed a surprise late-winter storm. So that precipice was deeply blanketed in soft, glittering, blue-white snow. The trees were tall Narnia imposters. I was spellbound. We bundled up and hiked in the cold and ate donuts then hiked some more.

Today I sit here gulping strong coffee, wearing thin cotton pajamas, sweating just a little, and that same hill is every shade of arid and now thickly blanketed with seedy, prairie-like grass. The trees remember their Narnia showcase but now are a vibrant green. Fluffy pine bouquets whispering that familiar perfume.

She is evolving and vibrating in her own right, and she is as strong and beautiful as the mountians and as alive as the snowmelt river. My first baby, a woman now and a force of nature.

I breathe it all in deeply, pressing into my cells every vibration I can locate. Remembering, renewing, dreaming, and giving thanks until the words run dry.

“The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.”
~Tennessee Williams
XOXOXOXO