To Be: Continued

"There are only two kinds of stories," he said, "Someone goes on a journey. Or a stranger comes to town."

--Unknown Film Critic, Texas A & M Graduate school, 1999

Journeys have endings, and the first part of this trip ended for me two days ago. I sat with my feet in a stream of glacier melt about a mile north of the Columbia Ice Field. The valley rose immense around me, with stream beds full of gurgling, shallow rivers that run their course and gather eventually in the dark blue lakes I'd photographed over the past week. Grasses, purple and white lupin, and other wild-flowers I did not recognize draped the near hills, while the mountains did what mountains do--humbled me. The sun was warm, not hot on my face and arms. It was as beautiful a place as I'd ever been, and I sat there with my arms around my knees, and I closed my eyes to breathe in paradise. But in one moment, my heart welled for my mother.

There has never been often that I think of Mom without guilt. Maybe it was because my heart was light and open, made soft by the beauty around me, the feeling was so intense. I cried. I cried at the beauty she will never see that I've seen, the places she won't go that I've gone, cried at the fact I would never be able to show her other than in pictures the things her daughter loves. I cried at the fact that her life has been small, constrained by a joyless and dark illness, and that from almost the moment I drew breath I wanted to be away from her as far as I could go with a yearning so palpable that at times it actually hurt. My life has been the story of "someone goes on a journey," even if it was only when I was the child staring out the living room window of a dark house while Mom napped in the afternoons. She casts a long shadow over my life, one for which I have never been present, but always wanting to be--gone away from--love her though I do. That I did leave home and her, and that it is hard to return has been one of the difficulties of my life. I know we all have them.

The problem with travel is this, I've learned. Emerson said it best: "Traveling is a fool's paradise. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from." The second part of this journal will be about the journey home--not away. To see Mom.

I am working on a Flicker Stream of photographs I took over the past three weeks. Some of them are exquisite. I'll put up a link here and write up some events I did not have time to record the past three weeks before I head home.