A post from one of my other blogs

This is from one of my now abandoned blogs....I am posting it here, because it was an important life lesson I would like to share.

Thursday, September 4, 2008
Mountains

When I moved to the Rockies years ago, I arrived at night. The flight into Salt Lake City dropped down on what would over the next few years become a familiar, stomach-testing approach into an airport that sat deep in a valley. In the darkness and the rush to gather baggage and get to a hotel, I could not really see the mountains. Although the pilots who had landed my plane knew they were there, and knew how to maneuver down safety between the ranges of the Wasatch on the East and the Uintahs on the West, they remained invisible to me.

In the morning, I walked outside to go get breakfast and stopped cold. I was completely surrounded by mountains. Although the closest ones were probably 10 miles away, their size and unexpected presence felt enclosing. A Florida flat-lander stood, mostly in awe, but a little in fear. What had I done?

Looking back, those mountains and my reaction to them was more than just a change in geography. It was the first real leap into a new world. And my first encounter with that feeling of enclosure and awe and what have I done...

That feeling has come back to me again and again, as I've moved into my life. And for awhile, my reaction was the same. Fear. Awe. Even panic. But I've learned something from that mountain experience.

Over the years in the Rockies, I learned to feel less overwhelmed by those mountains and all the others I lived among. I went back to Florida and drove my car, alone, across the country from South Florida to Utah. In the course of the drive, over switchbacks and steep climbs, I learned to see the mountains better.

Then there were days spent walking on the mountains, feeling their shape and strength and substance for myself, whether through the soles of my favorite purple hiking boots or barefoot in an icy mountain stream. I don't think I ever lost my awe...they remained beautiful, especially when the rising or setting sun painted them in a dozen different colors. But I lost my fear. I stopped being shocked to see the mountains when I stepped outside. They became accessible.

I am learning to apply that lesson to my life.

When new things happen in my life...things just as sudden and scary and enclosing as that early morning view of the mountains, I still get scared. And I wonder what I have done. And I see how close the danger seems to be.

In those times, I try to imagine the mountains. I try to remember that moment in the hotel parking lot, and the very different feeling I had years later walking in the same mountains on a cold winter day shooting roll after roll of winter photography. Same mountain. Different world.

Posted by Seeker at 5:28 AM

Labels: colorado, life lessons, lindsay39, mountains, rockies, salt lake city, utah