{laundry day} Ice Cream Castles in the Air

The Rocky Mountains are home for me. Towering mountains, scores of Subarus, smiling, happy people, thrilled that their lives involve hiking, biking, and just generally being alive; these things signal home. But more than the smiling people, more than the vastness of the national forests, more than the old, western-style downtowns and malt shoppes and railroad depots, the thing that truly tells me that I've returned home is the sky. The sky, out west, goes on forever. Unlike the midwest or the windy city or the rolling hills of Wisconsin or the lake-filled terrain of Minnesota or the cornfields of western Illinois and Iowa, the sky in the Rockies is enormous. It takes up your whole world. And it changes. Immeasurably, minute by minute, it changes, until you go from crystal clear blue to torrential hail to deep afternoon cobalt to the clear night sky of the milky way.

The clouds look crisper there, the blue sky bluer, and the air distinctively cleaner. I love being at high altitudes. The lack of oxygen triggers your body to respond to each breath the way you never do at sea level. No amount of air is wasted, and you can feel the energy rising from each burst of new, clean breath. And hiking, getting up above it all, above the towns and cars and even the trees, makes you feel like you're even more a part of the sky than you already did. Up there, on the ridges and peaks and mountainsides of the snow-capped peaks (quite literally, despite the fact that it's late July), you feel as though there is nothing between you and the rest of the world. And truly, there isn't.

I'm not a religious person. I never have been. But the closest I ever come to feeling that overwhelming, indescribable sense of marvel about the world is when I'm up here, breathing the air and feeling the cold from the wind and the warmth from the sun. It's more of a moment of zen, a moment of pure oneness with my surroundings, with my life. A moment where everything that I've done, and everything that is yet to come, are joined in this sense of being entirely encapsulated by the sky. It's wonderful.

Title song: Joni Mitchell, "Both Sides Now"