When you want to run into the wild

Of my Top Four Passions—

Christ,

People,

Travel,

and Wilderness

—the first and second always trump the third and fourth.

I feel the tension deeper sometimes, like now, when fall blazes and swirls yellow leaves around cattail skeletons.

The best of all seasons never lasts long enough, at least here in Canada. It’s the texture in the drying out and dying of everything that makes it so haunting. I’ve never been able to fully absorb fall before it disappears underneath the snow and ice of northern winters.

It has become even harder since moving south into the city.

Life is ironic. Ironic in a funny, aching way.

I have talked to so many girls who just love the city. Girls who think living in the city would be a dream come true. They love the people, the bustle, the color, and the millions of adorable shops and stores hidden everywhere. And, truly, I have become more like those girls the last four years. I do love my city. I do love the people. And there is something to be said about being able to ride the street car to your favorite used bookstore, tucked beside a convenient little coffee shop. Yet, if it wouldn’t be for The Call, I would not be here.

No way.

It is worth it, yes. A million times over.

But it still aches.

Because my “dream” life, if only orchestrated by me, is very different.

I cannot, and never have, describe to you the feeling of coming alive that happens when I paddle a canoe or sit by a camp fire. Its as close as I ever get to what C.S. Lewis describes as what he thinks heaven will be like. A sudden, clear, “Ahhh, so this is where I have always belonged. Now everything makes sense” kind of emotion.

It is moss and tall white birches and blankets of tangy pine needles. It’s fierce red leaves and silence and the call of a whippoorwill. Its bare rock and paddles and a cedar strip canoe. It’s the smell of wood smoke and the sound of a snow machine, and the way the snow squeaks when its cold.

I love it. I have always loved it. I have never grown bored of paddling, or hiking a ridge, or sitting quietly by a lake.

I mean, what I would absolutely love, would be one of these.