She returns with a familiar feeling, bringing the comfort of a dew drop and carrying the scent of spring blooms. It's time to get goin'.
Out on the trail, I can feel the earth awakening. The light is returning and those dark and twisted days are slowly becoming shadows of the past. The hills are alive with new growth - trails hidden beneath long and wet stalks of grasses, broad and water pooled leaves of cow parsnip, and the occasional batch of glistening poison oak. The ground is soft and wet, no swirls of dust or static crunch beneath my feet as I glide along. The scents I pick up are fresh, untouched, natural.
High on the ridge, the threat of inclement weather only sparks my curiosity... it pulls me in with a ferocious care. I decide to keep steady on the trail, to only turn back when I feel I've really danced in her wicked snare.
I climb up, up and up. A quick peek over my shoulder and I catch a glimpse of the city to my rear - blanketed by the cold pacific waters. Up here, away, she looks calm and quiet but I know her streets are filled with city energies - ridden with frenzied, stressed, and anxious minds, bleak concrete and methodical lines.
These hills provide me with a temporary escape from the mechanized, to a place of solitude and gratitude - where I can fully embrace the natural world - the smell of a flower, the chirp of a bird, the cooing of a tree, and a place where I feel I can sore in the breeze.
In the headlands, the weather can turn on the flip of a switch, grounding me and testing my adaptability. As I finally reach the summit, the comfort of the initial ascent has slightly faded. The wind whisks past the hairs on my ears - the howling rage in the sky the only sound I hear. I stop and stand there, the only thing still - cocooned inside an opaque whiteness. The fog is thick and heavy with moisture. Pellets of rain thrash at my skin like a hundred little bee stings. As the rain penetrates my pores, a quick chill surges through me, sending shivers up my spine. The tips of my fingers are white and numb.
In this moment, I feel as though I'm at the center of it all... For nearly five minutes, I just stand there, breathing it in, literally soaking it up. Feeling the elements become a part of me, or me a part of them.
It was perhaps 12, or 13 or 14 miles later, having run back into the city where there was no wind, the streets dry, the trail the sidewalk and it's the familiar yet unfamiliar urban jungle I've become accustomed to that I smile remembering his words.. "It's all part of the adventure." It was on my traverse along the ridge that I met a photographer making his way out of the storm. He looked at me with a certain indescribable sense of understanding and quietly murmured those words to me. I think he similarly felt that same tug of curiosity, to escape the city noise for the stormy skies on the dangerous exposed rugged hills. He understood the desire to see, and feel, and hear, and be in everything that is awake and loud and alive.
The wind took me to where I'd see clearly in the misty, feel the warmth in the chill, sense the calm in the chaos and find a peace in the noise. I appreciate the contrasting moments that awaken who I am and where I want to be.
Appreciate the experience. Find pleasure in the challenge. There is comfort in contrast.