High Places
Sometimes when I need to find some perspective on life, I climb a hill. Looking down, the characters in my mind’s stories fade and become weightless, lightening my load. The human world is subsumed into the whole of nature, its true nesting place. They, we, are not everything. Humans may have made a mark on the surface, but the hills and valleys have a longer view. Two moments of recalibration and reorientation found me in high places. These intense memories were made vivid and virtually indelible by their emotional significance, standing clear like mountain summits above the mist in the valleys of quotidian existence. A Maltese apartment, high above the bustle and buzz of a double-sainted religious festival. A deep and challenging three-day conversation, courageous revelations and radical listening, and we agreed new paths forward. But then we hit an unexpected roadblock of misunderstanding, of not understanding, of seemingly irreconcilable differences of perspective. A litt...