Hello friends.
I'm back online and to work after a trip of grace and restoration in Alaska with my husband and 4 other delightful traveling companions.
The wilderness that is Alaska is vast and ancient, and yet change is visible. Where there was ice packed in hundreds of feet is now open water. Tree diversity is limited, but the 3 kinds of spruce are abundant. There is no real shoreline: the tree density goes right to the saltwater, and then the water is immediately 200-300 feet deep so humpback whales rub against the shore to strip barnacles during the season there where they feed before they travel to Hawaii to frolic.
We also got to visit Denali National Park where the highest peak in the US is located. He is massive and has his own weather pattern as a result. It's weird to me after seeing the Rockies in US and Canada, which are big, long, crowded, jagged and so visible. Denali sneaks up. You can't tell the ground is heading towards this massive mountain. He hides in the clouds most of the time: only 30% of folks get to see him when visiting and then often only part of the mountain or one of the summits. We got to see him every day for 4 days, and in total and partial views over several hours each day. This is grace to me, unearned favor, not something we got to see because we deserved it or invested correctly or are "good people".
This is what living with melanoma is often like for me. It's massive like Denali. It dominates the landscape. I can't always tell how close or far away it is. There is great diversity around and on the trip. Streams interrupt that serve different purposes. Glacial fed ones are full of silt, churning and the color of dark, wet cement. Freshwater streams and lakes shift with the seasons. Salmon use both streams for birth, spawning, and death. In the glacial streams they are hidden with deeper recesses of water, but the force of the water is powerful. Clear runs make them visible to predators, but closer to the goal sought. It's amazing that any fish finds the way home, and not all do.
Progress and change have seasons, like glaciers. There are times of advancement and piling on of snow that becomes ice that extends the reach of the living frozen water. Then environmental changes occur, natural and perhaps man-made, and the glacier retreats, there is open water and new vistas to explore, new mapping that needs to occur to find a path. It is agonizingly slow in the making.
As a human, a tiny life-being in this wilderness, the essential limitedness of my being is once again ever-present in the vastness of Alaska. I've felt it before, embraced the truth, and let it wisp out of my grasp when I leave the wilderness places of Alaska, Montana, the middle of the ocean, the edge of the volcano in Maui at dawn. But for now, I have returned settled, far less anxious, trying to remember the truth and grateful for the grace that I've been again permitted to stand in during this in-between time of living with cancer.
Appreciate ya'll letting me muse here a bit today.
Peace,
missy
