Can I still see it new, feel it new, when time and again was it the same rain that fell light and cold on my face, and the same tall grasses that soaked my jeans and leather boots?
I reach for my camera then put it away. I have taken the same before. This is not a child forever changing and growing though I have amassed as many photos of the mountain as I did my child in his early years.
How do we know it is time to move on when the land calls us so strongly, the quiet muses tempting and taunting in the song of the late season trickle of the creek and twinkling light of the plump Aspen leaves. If you listen, you’ll know. She is not calling us. Perhaps, only perhaps, she tells us to leave. She too would rather dance alone.
A tingle like nearby lightening when riding over the Divide. Too close, and exposed. Without protection of the trees.
We could run back for shelter. Where it is safer, it is known.
Or hunker down in the saddle and move on.
Even when we don’t know where “on” may be.
Such a wide and wild world. I wouldn’t want it otherwise.
Gin Getz 
i love your flow here, gin. here’s to the wide and wild world of new dreams taking shape in a haze of uncertainty…
You and I never were a part of the mountains. Simply we and they co-existed. They did not call us, but rather each of us imagined a call because that suited our states of mind. In such circumstances nature has been more generous than she was obliged to be. In time she came to push us away, like birds that must leave the nest in order to spread their wings. There is no malice in that push, just the course of the very wilderness that we sought to embrace.
As T S Eliot wrote: “there is no fixity…”
There are more places in which to thrive than a high wild place where summer lasts a few short weeks. Perhaps it is time to leave behind the fierce asceticism of a bleak place? You and I have been purified as far as a tough place can remove the dross. Now maybe it is time to grow in more fertile spots and to surprise ourselves as to just what is possible?