Walking / O California (the landscape of my younger days)

"Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts. I wasn’t sure whether I was too soon or too late for the purple lupine which can be so spectacular in these headlands, but milkmaids were growing on the shady side of the road on the way to the trail, and they recalled the hillsides of my childhood that first bloomed every year with an extravagance of these white flowers. Black butterflies fluttered around me, tossed along by wind and wings, and they called up another era of my past. Moving on foot seems to make it easier to move in time; the mind wanders from plans to recollections to observations."

(Rebecca Solnit)

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I'm grateful to have been born into and grown up experiencing the landscape of California.  It brought a joy that is still with me all these years since I left, never imagining that I would spend the rest of my life living a thousand miles to the north in Western Washington which has its own beauty but is not my first love.  Eastern Washington does look much the way coastal California did when I was young but only for part of the year, and the Cascade Mountains separate Western and Eastern Washington. Eastern Washington has snow in the winter and extreme heat in the summer, unlike the coastal region of Northern California where I grew up, never far from the Pacific Ocean.  I continue have dreams where I rejoice that I am living near the Pacific Ocean.