In the great outdoors

So now I've made it past grizzly sixty what's next? Here on the other side of oblivion life is...just the same really. There's no finish line or flag, no result, just other slender days accompanied by a greater feeling of distance between you and the past. Mountains and life events are far away and remote. You still see things you can't climb towards and you understand why you can't be bothered trying and there are always other things to do that are both closer and easier. The world remains an irritating place. Full of powerful, two faced people repeatedly and blatantly doing the wrong thing for the wrong reason. Facts present themselves as facts but they are lies, truth is confused with opinion and opinion is forever distorted by your capacity to see the multiple sides of things. There are a lot of people shouting loudly, leaking their speeches and hogging the limelight with their dull wit at all levels of life. We, the reasonable people, tolerate it as if was wrong to mock the politically afflicted and the philosophically certain.That's just the way it is.

So at the weekend and a party of eager townies rose up and set upon finding the country. Sure enough it was there, just outside of town and filled with parallel language signage, buzzing motorcyclists and threatening insects. The views however made us all speechless and kept us set in a poignant sense of scale. One where nature is truly big and beautiful, raw and all too clever for us. We are roaming misfits here, OK for a day or two of chewing the rocks but then our weak flesh and thin shoes and clothing finds us out as we scuttle backwards into the concrete.  We are spirits in a granite and volcanic world where trade, petty wars and economics have clouded our judgement and messed with values and ambition. There is space to think but most of it is not in our own heads or on a screen (however well developed). It's in the tiny silences and huge spaces, that void between the land and that sky that young children always draw. Then they grow out of that when some distorted sense of adult gravity and proportion comes in. We need to explore it a bit more before it's lost, or just get back to the future.