HOMETOWN

…. was the last place on earth I wanted to be stuck in, so I took off the morning after I graduated from high school. I flew the coop for grander stages.

Over the years, boomeranging back and forth across the country from New York to L.A. to San Francisco, back to New York, back to L.A, back to San Francisco and so on, I became wildly-worldly and weary to the bone. I was so dizzy I couldn’t see straight until I began a serious meditation practice in order to catch my breath. Living in solitude in an ancient stone farmhouse high on a hill in rural France, I could at last see where I’d been and dream of who I might become. (And that’s the last forty-some years in a wee nutshell.)

It’s been a phantasmagorical ride!

Now, as it happens, I’m back where I started. Walking beside Clear Creek on this splendid, crisp winter day — the flow of the mountain waters, never-ending (I HOpE and pray), moving onward despite any of our collective climate mischief. At least, at this moment it is still flowing and I feel myself flowing with it. It is flowing from the perfect mountain with the “M” on it. I tell my grandkids “M” is for Mimi which is me. I tell them it is my mountain but not to worry i will share it with them.

Why is it my mountain? Mainly because it came to me in a dream not long ago. No, it was a visitation. It was as if it rose up from the darkness of unconscious realms of myth and magic, and in its aliveness It embraced me with its powerful presence. And it loved me with its vibrating MOTHER Earthiness and said, “You are home”.

Who in the world could argue with that?

So since that dream or vision or whatever it was, I have been returning daily to my little town which is called Golden-Where The West Remains — as the welcome arch which spans main street announces. Or, at least it used to till the town fathers decided “remains” sounded a bit too much like a graveyard (which they wanted to avoid becoming) and changed it to Welcome to Golden Where The West Lives.

Anyway, I cannot get enough of my mythic mountain. It bears telling that i actually grew up at its base and rode my horse whose name was Trigger on the hill beneath it. But in those days it just looked like a regular old mountain and I don’t remember it ever vibrating or calling to me. Maybe it’s like good old T.S.Eliot says,

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time”

I gaze upon my mountain from different angles on my walks through town where every footstep is a memory of childhood. I fill myself with its otherworldly grace. I inhale it into my being. It was always part of me only I didn’t realize it until now that I am an elder of the earth. Now that I can hear its silent wisdom and feel its strength.

And now is when I need it. Don’t we all?

Peace