I Lift My Eyes to the Mountains

(Canmore, AB)

The mountains are these barriers, these necessary stoppers that hold back your thoughts, that rein in insanity. On the prairie, your eyes can outstretch themselves, your soul can go too far waiting for some thing to catch it, snag it, slow it down.

They contain you, cradle you in their stony arms. It is possible to be completely flat, 2-D, on the prairie. You scream until your lips bleed and the sound goes out, out, out, skimming the fields until it falls off the edge of the earth. The mountains echo it back to you, and you feel stone in your bones. You ingest the rock and scraggly pines and diamond water until it leaks out of your pores and your eyeballs and you smell like dust and spice and you can see with a vision that is unnaturally clear and you taste time on your tongue.

The mountains have been here for a long time. Prairies remind man of his mortality, that life is finite. He is bound to the soil, to the trees that fade in the neverending wind. He harnesses the land to his own use, and ruins it.

You cannot rule the mountains: you must eke out a niche for yourself. You must give and give and give. Life is not about the getting: it is about the giving.

Travelling: once in a while when two strangers meet they feel a connection. This is not a fondness, or a love even, but a snagging of souls: they cannot help it. Even more rarely, but sometimes it occurs, is when the strangers do something about it. They may strike up a conversation, but most often they stare and wonder and selfishly create dreams that can be seen only by themselves.

It is most tragic when the strangers do start talking. They have given in to the magnetism, and for a while (whether this be a minute, a day, or even a lifetime) they are blissfully happy and the souls paint pictures and create much out of nothing. Often, this will lead to something more lasting, a sacrifice and a giving-in on someone's part. But, when you are a traveller, and your soul snags on another traveller's: well then, beware. For the very thing that pulls you together will without a doubt pull you apart.

It is not sentimental. It is slightly tragic, but the people it most often affects are also the kind of people who will smile bitterly and say "hey, it's life: chalk it up to experience," and move on. They must move on, for even if they wanted to stay, to wallow and sink, their very being would revolt. It is in the travelling that they are saved.

And I am saved.

And I have been saved.

And I will be saved.