My first love has always been the mountains.
For as long as I can remember, the only place I’ve truly called home has been between peaks and meadows, among pine trees and moss.
These days, I open the door of my little caravan each morning to the Alpine ridge, and for a moment, everything else falls away.
They put everything back into perspective. Rooted in a timescale our nervous systems have almost forgotten, they remind us that there are rhythms far older than our own.
They change human rhythms.
You begin to follow the seasons instead of the calendar. You wake with the light, notice the direction of the wind, anticipate the rain by the scent of the earth. The endless horizon softens the urgency you’ve been carrying, while the fierce weather awakens something raw and elemental within you.
There are storms that shake the windows of the caravan and remind you just how fragile you are.
And then there is the silence – so vast it crystallizes what was once tangled inside you. Little by little, everything unnecessary is weathered away.
I once heard Zach Bush say that love is the awareness of the beauty around us.
What if love is simply the moment we become quiet enough to see what has been alive around us all along?
Sometimes I wonder if the greatest gift of a mountain is not that we get to look at it…
but that, for a moment, we remember what it feels like to be seen.
Not by another person, but by a landscape that has witnessed it all. These peaks have watched glaciers carve valleys, forests emerge from stone, rivers find their way, species come and go, and generations of humans arrive convinced their worries were the center of the world.
The mountains have never hurried the seasons. Never resisted change. Never confused movement with progress.
They simply participate in the great unfolding of life.
Maybe that’s why I’ve always returned to mountains.
They remind me that we belong to something unimaginably vast and deeply alive.
Something we were never separate from.
