Golden Hinde
Up past the shoulder of Burman Ridge, where the wind begins to carry more than just air, everything softens and sharpens at once.
Sky opens, wind arrives.
Everything breathes differently above the trees. Lichen crusts over stone like old memory, and the path begins to flicker and dissolve—moving through rock and low-lying heather, losing itself in small switchbacks, only to find itself again in a sudden spill of light. One moment, the gleam of sunlight pools gold on the slope; the next, a sudden white hush. Mist curls over the ridge like a held breath. One moment, the stone is warm beneath my hands; the next, rain gathers and moves on. Fog swallows distance. Blue sky splits it open again.
Below, the lakes mirror passing weather, holding the sky in restless reflections. Ahead, the Golden Hinde cuts its shape across the skyline—stoic, shifting, like time itself—moving in and out of the clouds as if remembering and forgetting itself.
In this place, I stop expecting consistency. There’s no promise of sameness here. Nothing holds. Everything offers. Even the stillness feels like motion.
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This is the kind of place that teaches by doing. As the weather moves through, the land remains—changed, but not diminished. There’s no resistance in it. Just presence.
Trust.
This place doesn’t explain itself, and it doesn’t ask me to. It rearranges me without asking anything of me. It is a place where everything belongs: the bloom and the frost, the blaze and the grey. I start to think maybe people are meant to be this way too. Shiftable. Tender in their extremes. Not made smaller for comfort, but left wild enough to be honest.
Some places don’t flinch when the weather comes.
Some people don’t either.
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By the time the trail turns back down toward the valley, everything has changed again. Cloud lifts off the shoulder of the Hinde, and for a moment it stands in full view—bare, luminous, impossibly far and impossibly near. I know it won’t last. But that doesn’t make it less real. If anything, it makes it more so.
As the mountain folds back into cloud, there is no other way to say goodbye than the way we never said it. How we never had the chance. There is no closure. No decrescendo. Just a sense that not everything beautiful needs to be constant, and not everything steady needs to be explained. And there—something in me, just a little more willing to weather.
Deanna and I make our way towards another cairn, and as we do, I find myself holding to this—all things must change, must deliquesce and turn to other things.
So may we let our loved ones be wild. May we let them change. Let them be ridge-lit and thunderous, golden and undone. Let them be grey and unfinished, held and not handled. And when the weather moves through them—let us stay. Not to cling—although we love each other. Not to quit the fight—for we love each other too. But to know—beyond the fathom of our lithosphere—that what’s burgeoning might as well be generous. Might as well be free.