Part one.

Our intention was to be here forever. We were building what was to be our forever home.

When I married Bob, I thought I was also marrying the mountain. The two were close to one.

I have since learned there is a connection between man and land, but the two are not inseparable. It is a connection created only in the minds of those seeking something solid to hold. A meaning and importance, connection and definition.

But the land does not define us. We only use the land to describe ourselves, find meaning in a more universal sense, one that others can comprehend and characterize. A false and temporary explanation of self. The exterior as a mode of classifying the interior. As a shell that does no more than contain and protect that which lives within.

We are both learning to re-write these labels, and learn who and what we truly are, not based on the walls we built and the mountains we climb.

How do we, then, define ourselves? Somehow we feel lost without the label.

But I am not the mountain.

I am not my husband, not my son, not my dog or horses or job.

I am me.

Of course that’s too ambiguous.

How do I define me except in relation to all these things?

And how when these things are all changing?

Will I remain the same?

Do we ever?

For now I don’t know who or what I am.

And now I recal the words of Cyndee sharing the image of the horse running free, when all four feet are in flight, above the earth, ungrounded, unbound, exhilarated…