Alice Down the Rabbit Hole...

Is how I have felt lately. Everything changed so quickly...not that it's bad...it's just change...and it was very quick at that.

I love the new job, but I miss my house. I don't get enough time here by far anymore, but given the way the world is rolling lately, I'm really happy to be employed again. Employed doing things I love doing, so it works out for me just the same.

Everyone worries about the commute when they hear that I'm working a little over an hour away from home. I don't worry about the commute. I've done long commutes for a number of years now, you get use to it. Time alone in your own brain is a wonderful thing and when I need it, my car is my personal stereo that I can burrow down into.

Like I said...I am enjoying the commute, the mornings are my absolute favorite. The traffic is usually extremely tolerable, 80 mph most of the way and the winter mountains are amazing, every day is different. Sometimes I can see Antelope Island from the freeway...some times the sun glitters off of the Great Salt Lake like billions of diamonds.

Sometimes the weather is so melancholic and the weighted purple clouds hang low on the black and white mountains and you can feel the mood of the storm getting ready to crash down on everything.

The other morning, I was in and out of sunlight and shadows...every time the sun broke through it was "God Sunshine"...you know...where you can actually see the rays differentiated like it is time for a Holy Hallelujah chorus. Then it would darken back up again, and snow snakes danced across the freeway, one after another, never ending.

When I drive, across three counties and through three valleys, and three distinctly separate mountain sets, the differences are obvious and stunning. I realized that I am surrounded by majesty no matter where I look. I mean--S U R R O U N D E D absolutely. I'm not sure how to properly capture my feelings about it. I love the forest, I love the ocean and I love the mountains. I feel sheltered here, I guess. This is the land of my adulthood. Forests and oceans were the lands of my childhood, and every time I reconnect with them it is like coming home...but here...this is where I became a woman, and that holds something for me too.

I have memories in all of the valleys I travel through everyday. And funny enough, every time I move into the next one during the course of my travels, my mind wanders through the memories that each of them hold. It's odd, everything that comes rushing back. Years in college, in a place that I rarely re-visist, but that I now travel to everyday. I work close enough to see the mountain that I use to live in the shadow of...and it always brings that aching melancholy...for a time, a place that you can never go back to. The most you have is memory, and sometimes that isn't good enough, even though it's all you have. It's where I met and fell in love with my husband, where life as a singleton changed to a married-one. Everything changed then...almost 18 years ago. It doesn't seem like it has been so long.

My middle valley, is the Salt Lake Valley, where we spent most of our married years...the bulk of them so far. It's where I worked so hard to learn and to become who I am today. I love it there and it is still one of my favorite places. I miss it, even though I am happy where I am right now...but I do miss it...every time I drive through it. It's where most of my close friends live, though there are a scattering of them elsewhere throughout the world.

And further north, where we live now...it's different here...beautiful...more peaceful and definitely less hectic, and I thought I had fully settled in, but as I reflect, I don't think that is quite the case just yet. I'm working it out though. I had hoped that I would have found close friends here, and I have made some good and solid fledgling friendships, but they have their lives that they are involved in and I'm coming in from outside, so that takes awhile to break through. There is a sense of singularity here, of loneliness or more aptly named, of aloneness--which is o.k. but it is different than what I had originally expected.

So there they are, my musings from my wanderings of late.

"She wandered and she wandered through the World of the Bright Shadow...til she came to the World of the Dark Shadow that is Earth, and she wandered there for a long time, scorched by the sun and beaten by the rain, till she came to a beautiful house where a king and a queen were standing together." Celtic Tales by Ella Young