Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living

by Karen Auvinen

Tracking the changing landscape made me pause. The chatter in my brain dulled to a whisper, my pulse slowed. I took a few deep breaths.

Placelessness was a grief deeper than all that had happened.

Or maybe, like me, he simply needed space in order to stop running away.

I could pick a volume from my library and tell you the story of not only where I was but who I was when I first read it. Books keep our histories.

I matched my breath to his own. He’d become my anchor, the cord that kept me tethered to the earth.

Whether you can bring yourself to hope for it or not, things change. The seasons remind us of that.

“Everything in nature,” says the writer Gretel Ehrlich, “invites us constantly to be what we are.” Not who but what.

I’d come to realize, was not really about isolation at all. Instead, it was about embrace: Lonely is a word that describes what it means to live profoundly. Moving deeply in the world, you let the thousand distractions fall away and you become more authentic, more who you really are.

“Knowing no magic ever can set free / That part of you that is a part of me.”

We would forever be joined,

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The love of a dog is no small thing. Every moment of my days with him conspired to alter the architecture of my heart. My life was bigger, richer, deeper, and more profound because I’d taken the dog with the spiked collar home with me. He was my guru, my god, my bodhisattva.

reminder that all we have is the present.

but real strength, I’d come to realize, lies not in resistance but in softness, the willingness to go unguarded into a new day.