I am a wilderness lover because my body is at its best when I’m there in the pure air.
The light has a quality that I’ve not met elsewhere.
It is luminous without being fierce.
Penetrating to immense distances with an effortless intensity.
On a still morning the sun draws up the moisture from the earth.
Like a cloud it forms tendrils around me then dissolves and there is nothing in all the sky but light.
As I stand there, in the silence, the silence is incomplete.
Water is speaking to me and, as ever, I’m drawn towards it.
Strong and copious, pure, and cold it flows.
One of the four elemental mysteries, it wells from the rocks and runs away just being itself.
Streams raw down hillsides, tearing deep grooves, rolling boulders.
Pools, crystal clear and deep sparkle, they are living water.
I love its flash and gleam, its music and grace, its slap against my body.
Its mysteries are in its movement, and I cannot live without it.
Its poetry holds an in tensest experience.
I must see it, hear it, touch, and taste it.
Its strength, its power, a sting of light when nature leaps into life.