Looks like it’s going to be

dirkashlyknoedler:

a really cold quiet night in by myself. Questions, comments, anything welcome in my inbox. I’m thinking about where to go to be near mountains. Suggestions? If you’re thinking about going somewhere, where do you want to go?

This is a perfect question and the perfect reason to be diverted from work, which I seemed to have let swallow me whole of late.  It will temporarily take my mind off my aching ankle too.  That’s a good thing.

Oh, I am always thinking of going somewhere.   I am going even when I am not going.  I’m a great day dreamer, with all my senses working overtime.  I probably do live in fantasy more than I care to admit, because often it feels like I have banked real experience through my dreaming.  I think this in part because I have been to places that I never thought I’d live through or have the courage to isolate myself for.  In that isolation, I truly believe I have come to the doorways of that “more” we often search for.  That moment when you look up, and see forever in.  So much is possible if you dare and dream.

Before this year is done, I will be returning to the Yukon Territory for the fourth time.   If there was ever a place to stop and pitch your tent, to stand with the clouds on your shoulders, to be on the world, inside it, surrounded by it and connected to it, that is it for me.  I have probably painted the Richardson mountains a few times with my questionable skills as an artist but never will it rival how I have repeatedly painted them with my mind.  It is an emotional experience simply writing this.  And it is slowly turning this sorry day into a rich and thankful one.  I thank you for that. 

My mountains are inside me, thank the stars.  But whenever I do make the trek and we are face to face outside my reverie,  I feel reborn and reunited. 

Come north!

And if you ever you have the inkling to see Northern British Columbia, do it.  Brave it.  That landscape is a haunting, living, breathing world all on its own.