There is a fundamental need to get away. To break from the routine. We develop muscle memory for our day-to-day that allows us to be efficient and successful but in that efficiency, we underutilize our capacity. There can be weakness, contracture, atrophy in other areas less used or neglected. Taking a break, going on vacation or if necessary a long sabbatical, allows for a reset.
Having grown up and lived in Florida nearly my whole life with only brief periods of living in colder areas, I have no innate understanding of cold and freeze but having spent a week in the high desert mountains of Utah, watching the snow melt (early) I’ve envisioned the ice and snow encrusted object.
We all get encased in our seasons.
The natural cycle is to thaw, to emerge, to spring forth and remember that our DNA is encoded to grow – regrow, restore, repair. The is an innate of living things to find homeostasis, balance, equilibrium. But life drives forward.
We drove to southeastern Utah and went to Arches National Park. And the mountains still dance. The earth is eternally changing. The wind, rain, lightening strikes, snow and also the rumbling of human presence erodes the land and the mountains twirl away bits. Eons of the dance of life has created majestic and ethereal movement in stone. Somewhere I heard that mountains dance, and Arches testifies to the creation and vision of the greatest artist. And the mountains ever change, revealed by the light and shadow.
My nature metaphors have always been water based, ocean driven. The waves on the shore, the currents of life, the ebb and flow. It is a lexicon of constant movement, cycles of tides. But it is a rapid cycle compared to the mountains. But we will all dance with mountains, the edge of change along a fault line that lifts the crust of the earth, changes us, too. We are each a mountain, connected together we form a range.
We often resist change. We know what we know. We’ve learned our skill. We get adept. And then something changes. The earthquake. Or maybe a meteor strike. Cataclysm.
Yet, and yet, from that destruction arises beauty and grandeur. Too often our efforts to change are meager; maybe we lack courage to be devastatingly creative, like an earthquake. But usually the Richter registers anyways. The Universe knows what is needed. I have always accepted the ocean currents and allow their erosion. Like the wind and water that carve delicate arches of stone from a mountain, I will receive the change, the destruction, the creation that transforms me into something different. And I will dance with the mountains.
