I was 5 years old when I was initiated into the mountains. We were living in Grosse Pointe Michigan where my father was the manager of the Grosse Pointe Hunt Club. Grosse Pointe was and probably still is the tony suburb where motor money lived. He taught people to ride, trained horses...Charlotte and Anne Ford were once his students. My mother got sick in the winter/spring of 1948...a pneumonia called Friedlander's bacillus and wonder drug penicillin wasn't touching it. They thought she might die and in a desperate measure decided to try the new wonder drug, erithromycin. It worked. But for reasons a 5 year old is not privy to, a decision emerged about leaving the Detroit area...and maybe the fierce winters of the Midwest. I don't know but I do know I had a tonsillectomy that spring and one of the motor magnates offered my father a position managing the Roaring Fork Ranch in Carbondale, Colorado...and suggested that a summer in the Rockies would help my mother restore her health.

And so we headed for the Rockies and my memory bank is still punctuated with images and feelings from that magical summer in the Roaring Fork valley. Monika tells me that the Roaring Fork Ranch still exists and my heart is good with that.

Something got constellated in me that profound summer. Of all the memory fragments and pictures, the most vivid was the day that I danced for the mountain. Mt. Sopris, one of the fourteeners, as they are called in Colorado, overlooked the valley and the ranch house picture window framed her in all of her snowgarbed glory. I had access to a little victrola and remember placing a 78 recording of Manuel de Falla's Ritual Fire Dance from his opera the 3 Cornered Hat on the victrola...carefully placing the needle on the record...and then dancing for the mountain.

Fate must have struck the gong in me, for that memory lives still and while it took a while and more years of life, eventually I knew that I had to live amongst the mountains. I absolutely had to live amongst the mountains. There was another brief sojourn as a child...10 years old returning from our life as Army dependents for 3 years in Germany and my father was stationed at an old cavalry post above Salt Lake City...Fort Douglas, where I went to sleep, awoke and spent the day defined by bugle calls. We were in the Wasatch Mountains then and I flourished playing outside winter and summer, being wild things with other kids galloping around in the high mountain crystal air and surrounded by the magnificence of the Rocky Mountain west again.

There was another long...very long hiatus and it wasn't until I was 45 that the mountains found me again...this time the Cascades and the Olympics of Washington State. I was seized again on a vacation trip to the Olympic Peninsula and spent 10 years that went by too fast in the bosom of the mightiness of ocean and mountain.

The next stop was Southern California with 3 years as a stranger in a strange land and then, inevitably, the mountains found me again. A trip as a seeker took me to northern New Mexico in 2003 late spring for a vision quest. I had found horses again and this experience joined me and the horse in the spiritual quest for finding my dream again. And again the mountains seized me. I had passed through New Mexico as a 7 year old on our way to Germany that fateful year, and never forgot it in places that my mind didn't remember...but heart and soul did, and in 2004 we moved to Santa Fe.

What is this journey down memory lane about I'm asking myself now...this morning...tapping away on the keyboard? And the answer is immediate...that the mountains hold me. They are big enough to hold me in their embrace and to keep me present in how the magnificence of the wild world is as essential to me as breathing. The land teaches me...it has always been my nanny of sorts...and I cannot live away from it. When all else failed, the land nurtured me to health and healing and spiritual tracking. I lose my way in an urban setting...adrift, aimless and at risk for losing connection to my Soul.

I needed to be with Brandy and Paul desperately during these early weeks after the calamity of Joseph's death...but need to be in the embrace of the mountains again to settle me...calm me...love me...replenish me. I cannot be who I am without being planted amongst them and it's so crucial that I never forget that. I didn't know that so much when I was young...I didn't know about the Indigenous Soul until I ripened. I've spent so many years learning to feed myself the right food...but I'm back home again.

This time I'm staying.