The wind here is alive. It can be completely quiet and calm here, then, I’ll hear the wind awakening the trees in the valley and I can follow its journey up the valley and up the mountain until it arrives here….

Hello my friend! It’s as if you knew I was writing about you. You almost blew these pages right out from under my hand. Thank you for welcoming me to your home.

It’s hard to think of myself as alone here. There are so many “friends” around me. The trees, the stones, the flowers, the birds, the insects, the sky, the clouds, the sun, the wind, and of course, The Source of it all that flows through me even as it flows through all that surrounds me.

It’s interesting that just when I looked up from writing that the first chipmunk came out to say hello. I have heard them scurrying around but none have come out to say hello, until now!

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The sun has gone down behind the ridge to the west. There will still be sun in the valley for a little bit and it will be at least 2-hours before the sun leaves the peaks across the valley.

Time has taken on a totally different meaning and texture here. I move from one spot to another as I feel like it. When I’m hot I move to the shade. When I get cool I find the sun. When I’m cold I put on more clothes. When my back gets sore from sitting, I stand up or lie down or stretch. When I feel like meditating I do. When I hear an interesting sound I watch to see what it is. When I feel like writing, I do. There is no structure or framework, other than the movement of the sun across the sky.

And even though this is such a drastic shift from the pace of my “normal” life I have not felt bored today.

In so many ways THIS feels more normal to me than the way I live out there. Perhaps one of the lessons I am to take back with me is finding a way to integrate this sense of peacefulness and fluidity I feel here into my daily life.

Or perhaps it is the importance of creating opportunities to reconnect with this peacefulness on a regular basis.

Could this experience be the belonging I am so wanting to find? Could it be this simple? Perhaps.

It gets cold here when the sun drops behind the ridge. The wind still blows strong until the true sunset. Last night I crawled into my bag for a couple of hours until the wind died down. I’ll do that now too.

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The silence, when the wind completely stops is profound. It becomes clear just how loud and constant it has been throughout the day. And as if to emphasize that point, my friend, the wind, blows once more through the trees.

The silence is like those moments at the ocean’s edge when all the different areas where the waves break simultaneously fall into silence. That brief but profound silence is so deep I sometimes feel as If I am falling into it. And here, as we head into evening and night, the silence will be longer but no less deep.

Broken, now, by the sounds of the day critters making their final preparations for the night.

The sun is almost gone now. Just the very tip of the tallest peak across the valley still shows the light of the sun. But we’ll remain in the dusky transition for a couple of hours before the stars come out. Though the bright star, and especially the planet that lights up the South East sky will show up fairly soon.

You can read all of the posts in the Vision Quest Journal Series here.