What's your favorite season? I have at various times and places really enjoyed them all. I once wrote a Christmas letter about the distinctive season in each place I had lived---that was in Minneapolis and I was adapting to winter there. Yes, I, the native of Northeastern Montana, said,"Adapting." It was a whole new level of winter. As one folk song put it:
"Once or twice it's so damn nice, it's just like heaven to me.
LA's got the climate, Boston's got the sea, Denver's got the Rockies,
Minnesota's got to me."
I'll take the sea, or the mountains, or the climate---but I loved the Twin Cities. My friends there taught me to live in the city. I hadn't known when I lived in Seattle. I also had a connection to nature, my horse. In medical school in Seattle, money was tight enough that I couldn't keep a horse there. I kept him at my uncle's about two hours away. Even then I wound up selling him--regretted it later, but...
I think overall that autumn is my favorite season--the incredible colors, not just in trees, but in the sky, the prairies, the mountains, and the rivers. In New England, where I went to college, and Minnesota, the landscape became a patchwork quilt. In Montana it becomes a stained glass window of shades of blue and gold, sometimes veering as far as green and orange. Two of my favorite combinations are September and October along the Yellowstone: green, gold, and some orange trees, turquoise water in September. In October the water color deepens to cobalt blue, echoing the distant mountains. If it only lasted from the end of August until late November instead of sometimes a mere two weeks. Snow can come any time during this period and destroy the season.
Spring is also a time when I feel wonderful---new life all around me, such a sense of potential in the air. If I were independently wealthy, I would live in Portland, Oregon in the spring; outside Butte or Helena, Montana in the summer; Portland, Maine in the fall, and Arizona in the winter, or maybe Florida or Hawaii and just fly to a ski resort for a week each month. I took a Facebook quiz on where in Europe I should live and it came up with Lubljana, Slovenia. I looked into it, and it really does sound good--the beach not far, the Alps to the north, long springs and falls. A lot like Portland, Oregon, which really is a great place to live. Portlandians emphasize the rain to keep the population down, but...
Where ever I live, it must have mountains. This was why I left Florida. I SO missed my Montana mountains--and my mom. One of my favorite poems comes from a nature-themed Ideals magazine Mom had when I was a child:
"When you live beside the mountains, you soon become aware,
Of a sense of deep serenity which permeates the air.
When you see their massive outlines looming skyward by your door,
You gain a breadth of vision that you never had before.
You will learn a new integrity, invincible as stone,
For if you love the mountains, their strength becomes your own."
I also want to be able to reach the sea. Byron expresses it best in his Childe Harold's Pilgrimage:
"THERE is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal."
I also need to have a horse. There is something about being on the back of a horse that takes me out of myself, and gives me that same sense of being One with the Universe. On a wagon train in the Highwood Mountains of Montana one time, I took the little Appaloosa that was mine at the time, Firefly, and took off at a gallop through the large pasture next to the corrals where we were camped. Such a feeling of freedom and exhilaration I felt. Flea, as I affectionately called him, was also glad to be free of the restrictions of keeping with the pack all day. I could sense him stretch and come as close to flying as horses do. It connects me with my primitive being. There was a whole series of pop psychology books about that need. It happened that at the same time as Flea's and my unauthorized flight, Mom was riding up to camp with some friends. One was a local woman, and the others were from out of state. The local woman was regaling the crowd with stories of the American Indians in this region. About that time, Flea and I topped a ridge at a dead run, and came into view.
"Oh, My God," one woman gasped, "There's one now!"
Mom, recognizing the horse and my clothes, answered, "Yes, one of mine."
I agree with the pop psychologists on this subject. Our souls are aware of other dimensions, and when we are in touch with our primitive part we are in touch with our souls. It is difficult to live in this world and be in touch with your soul too much. The soul doesn't care about money, or food, or job, or even what others think. It loves with abandon, trusts in the Universe to nurture it, and believes that all others feel the same way. People who are in harmony with their souls have a deep inner peace which permeates their being.
Are you in touch with your soul? Are you comfortable with your whole name? That can be a clue. There is an exercise in the field of neurolinguistic programming that is called, "Me, Myself, and I": Sit or lie down and relax into a meditative state, and ask yourself, "Who and where is Me, Myself, and I?" Then nurture all three, and keep at it. Eventually their real nature will exert itself, and you will become "comfortable in your skin" as they say in the Caribbean.
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