Thursday, April 16, 2009

Go West, Young Man

What I wrote last summer as we drove back to the Midwest through Wyoming:
The West is great. There is nothing like it. It’s been one year. That’s not long, but it remains home. This land is blessed and I am blessed by its unpredictability, staggering beauty, and its ability to effect my decisions even after I leave. Seeing the West again has been like pulling an old childhood book off of the shelf. When I see the book on a shelf I recognize it as one of my favorites, but it isn’t until I open it up and look inside that I realize this is the book that shaped my life. This is where I have been built…in these pages or, in this case, on this land. The book represents the purest form of life I know and even though I may not be around it right now or return to it very soon, it is something that needs to be opened, read, looked at, felt, and smelled on a consistent basis or else a huge part of me is going to die.  

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