There are many random thoughts in my life and I suspect in most lives, all swimming around waiting to be expressed and nurtured. We do our best!
I have just returned from a week in the Rocky Mountains in the famous and popular Banff region. There is something about that majestic area that makes us feel we belong. It is a home-coming place, an immense backyard for people and animals. I acknowledge that for the First Nations people it has been part of their home since very early times. As visitors, we slip between those great mountain heights and feel we have arrived.
An area around the Cave and Basin hot springs was declared as Canada’s first national park, that was over a hundred years ago. The park is a lot larger now. It was the coming of the railway that gave access to the area and the same railway company built the Banff Spring hotel and invited the rich to come and play. Time to call it a National Park!
My first visit to the Banff Rockies was many years ago. It was a holiday on horseback for a week’s adventure with the Trail Riders of the Canadian Rockies. We had a basecamp and daily outings and people who cooked for us and looked after the horses!
My heritage growing up in southern England was a very different landscape. It was all about the water: river and sea. In the UK you are always near the sea coast and that is where people go. We appear to be drawn to nature that is so much bigger than us. We need to lose ourselves in the majestic and the enormous, in the infinite expanse of the oceans and the dizzy mountain heights. Other places also cut us down to size such as the apparent infinity of the prairies and the Canadian Great Lakes. It is calming and reassuring to be just part of a great chunk of nature and in a positive way to be insignificant in all that wilderness. Some years it has to be a local river, a city park, or a nearby nature reserve. As I said, we do our best!