Urge for Going

Yesterday we say the first snow on our mountains this season. It always amazes me, even after years and years living next to them, that they never cease to be breathtaking. As soon as I start lamenting the loss of the autumn colors, they get dusted with snow and become more captivating than I remembered they could. I wish I had a picture to share, but you'll have to imagine. But seeing the mountains like that always makes me think of this Judy Collins song.

I'll share a confession with you: one of my favorite things to do is listen to this song and gaze at the valley below my feet from campus, or at the mountains as I walk to school. I sing this song in my head, post snippets of lyrics on my walls, and even wake up to it, sometimes. It's one of the musical embodiments of fall to me. So you should love it, too.

Philmont got its first snowfall on Thursday. I love winter in the West. There's even more solitude, more vastness and emptiness when the landscape is offset by snow. It's not "softened" when it comes to the west. It's more often made starker and more forbidding. Yet I love it.

And I can't see snowy mountains without also smelling phantom juniper smoke. Juniper smoke is the west to me. It is winter, to me. In fact, since I'll be gone for winter, I plan to take some juniper incense with me, just to remind myself what season it really is.

"The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante's paradise could equal it. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West. Long may it burn." - Edward Abbey

Long may it burn, indeed. 

Welcome, winter.