mountain memory, mountains to come

This is a memory from August 2015. Good to read this as I am packing for a short trip to the mountains.

5 days in the mountains. I took about two hundred photos, but didn't really log into the web for the time out there, and didn't write, not even diary notes. I was just out there, after this long time of being caught in an endless list of doctor appointments and treatment dates. Yet coming back, I wrote this note:

5 days in the mountains

Open time, or rather: this open feeling of timelessness. Breakfast on the terrace. Roads we never took before. Feeling like a beginner again, arriving in a new place.

It is so good to be in France, at this lake surrounded by mountains, and then driving into the higher mountains. Being out there, in places where time is flowing slower, and the news of the world more distant.

There’s a different tune of feelings in me, after the days that I went through. In the days that I am in now. All this sun. The open horizon. And then, finally: rain. Which is okay, too: it belongs to this landscape. I stop to watch clouds, the way they move. And see an eagle, soaring up there, in this valley of larger dimensions.

The pass is foggy, but just minutes later, in the valley towards Briancon, the skies clear. I think of the breakfast conversation: “It’s raining but it’s a good day. Every day without doctor date is a good day.”

This feeling of freedom. I could catch a plane and fly to New York for some days, if I wanted to. Could just do it. And the thought: I should do it, at some point. Do those things I tend to postpone. Make time for them.

Because you never can know.

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