Day 4,030
This quote brought back one of my favorite and most treasured memories from our travels. As my friends waited at the gate for our flight leaving the Hilo, HI airport I sat upstairs, outside under the open sky gulping down breaths of the tantalizingly fresh air. I sat quietly, taking it all in, listening to in the moment, savoring each glorious moment of paradise. I was moved to tears due the feelings of grief as I knew I was leaving a place which had so quickly and deeply touched my soul. Ever since stepping foot on the island, taking an early morning swim in the champagne ponds behind our rental home, walking on the blackened lava fields, enjoying the mountains top, savoring the vegetation, swimming at the beach, watching the rainbows, eating the fresh food, and spending so many moments lost in a continuous state of awe, the Big Island of Hawaii felt like home.
To read another person share similar thoughts soothed me so much today, while simultaneously opening my soul to that feeling again.
It reminded me of leaving Iceland. Of leaving New Zealand. Of leaving Patagonia. Of leaving the Canadian Rockies. Of all the places which somehow become so embedded in my soul, the places I long to travel back to over and over again.
The twist is that it is similar to grief – the more we love it, the more profound the feeling of loss when it is gone. A more enlightened part of me understands that the appreciation for the moments spent there are more than one should ask for, yet the most human part of me just pleads for more.
This quote brought back so many of those emotions, the tension between appreciation and desire, and so many memories of places in which I savored each moment so much I couldn’t help but want a little more.
I wouldn’t trade any of those experiences for anything, the desire to return is such a cheap price to pay.
Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard
Having got here at last, I do not wish to leave the Crystal Mountain. I am in pain about it, truly, so much so that I have to smile, or I might weep. I think of D and how she would smile, too. In another life – be this isn’t what I know, but how I feel – these mountains were my home; there is a rising of forgotten knowledge, like a spring from hidden aquifers under the earth. To glimpse one’s own true nature is a kind of homegoing, to a place East of the Sun, West of the Moon—the homegoing that needs no home, like that waterfall on the upper Suli Gad that turns to mist before touching the earth and rises once again into the sky.
Thanks!!!
