Shasta, Briefly

If you’re going to be alone, a mountain is a rather good place for it.  It’s incredibly beautiful, and generally unscarred by man.  The scale is other worldy, and lends perspective to trials and tribulations well.  There’s a saying in climbing that I’ll clean-up for this family language friendly outpost – The Mountain Doesn’t Care.

Each step is a test of whether you’ll give up.  The ones who make it to the top have only tricked themselves into making the test worse by maximizing the downhill steps.  But when you poke your head out of the tent at night because you either can’t sleep anyway or it’s time to start the day’s test, there’s some magic that occurs.

The stars shine brightly above the haze and light pollution below, and you can see the Milky Way clearly.  Hurtling through space on a beautiful marble, with thousands of distant suns visibly twinkling in the impossible (as yet) distance; you’ve been gifted another day.

What are you going to do with it?