Have you?

Do you know about the highlands of the north, how their mystery and beauty enchant? How they weave a spell on the heart of a man, how they hold him and won’t let him go?

Have you seen how the trees crouch low, huddling close to the refuge of earth? Maybe they’re trying to stay hidden from the embittered wrath of winter, or maybe they’re already so close to the skies that they don’t feel the need to strain and grasp for the airy heights like their cousins down away in the lowlands.

Have you smelled the sweet pungency of pitch and of earth mixed with the gentle incense of flowers and grass? Has it washed over and through you on the wafting and waves of an ocean of pure azure sky? Have you savored the rumors of distant high meadows or a wildwood in a valley long hid? Has the scent lured and beckoned you further and higher to its fount at the birthplace of dawn?

Have you heard the silence that beckons you to enter in and listen, to discover that it’s not so silent after all? There’s a bird over there, and a creek in the meadow, there’s a rustling that recedes in the grass. There’s a gust as it whispers to the crag in its passing, and sighs to the tree tops before it moves on.

Have you felt the chill breeze off the glacier on your face while the heat of the sun warms your back? Have your feet ached with a mixture of pleasure and pain as you plunged them deeply into a frigid stream of startling clarity, newborn that very day from its icy womb on the side of the mountain? Have your hands felt the nuances of time immemorial on the cheeks of the ancient rocks, or the gnarled strength of a branch that spent much of its life grappling with the backbreaking weight of snow and the ferocious gales of winter?

Have you tasted the nectar of beauty distilled, and aged over eons of time? Have you savored the essence of illimitable joy from the wilds of this unbridled land? Have you stopped in your tracks and remembered an echo of time-splintered light, a hope, a longing, and a yearning desire. This taste, this taste so painful in its sublimity, is but a dilution of the true draught, this sound but a faint echo of the true laugh and this ineffable beauty is but a pale shadow of the true home.