Kalnai

Wednesday morning I woke up with one solitary thought in my head: "I just want to go home." It ran over and over in my mind, and a flash of images flicked past my closed eyes - sunshine on my face, and the memory of driving my car rushing up over the rise on HWY 402 and gazing out over the expanse of green summer farmland stretching out to the white-capped wall of peaks. "I need mountains," I thought, "I NEED my mountains."

I don't get homesick very much, really. Home is such a complicated and fraught term for me anyway. But I do get mountain-sick. I can count on it like clockwork every couple months.

I love that God put us on a planet with cracks and crevices, ravines and ledges, peaks and canyons. I love even more that the Psalms are so full of the landscapes of the authors, and how those places mirror the spiritual state of the writer. I am not separate from the land I'm in.

So when the Psalmist writes in chapter 42, "My soul is downcast within me; therefore I remember You from the land of the Jordan, from the heights of Hermon - from Mount Mizar. Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls, all your waves and breakers have swept over me" - I love the fact that when soul is downcast, he calls upon himself to remember the Lord "from the heights." Memory of God's goodness is recalled by the place where that goodness could be so clearly seen. In Psalm 43, the writer again calls upon the Lord's "light and truth" to guide him to "Your holy mountain, to the place where You dwell."Landscape is not insignificant.

My heart hurts right now, and the best thing I can think to do is to climb up on something tall and look out to the horizon. Life can seem so flat and unchanging, small and grey, when I am not able to see out beyond the paths I am walking on. This is metaphorical for me - I need to get up high, to see the flat open landscape like a map, like the page of a book. To see that, yes, I am so small, but also that my life is not all there is. Mountains help me to be less self-centered. I need to look out and see the bigger story - see the story I am caught up in, and then my heart will survive. I need to see the sun on the other plain-lands of the map, see out of these dark forests, see the brevity of this heart's chapter.

Someone, please tell me where I can find a really big hill, some rocky place where the earth pokes through its skin.