the escape

I believe all of us are given a desire to do something, and that this something is a part of what we are meant to do here on earth. One of my favorite Native American quotes that I've shared here before is "when you are born, your work is placed in your heart."
My own work involves writing. It is as deeply a part of me as my gray green eyes and my size nine feet. I can wear contacts and squish my feet into too-tight boots and perform numerous other and different work activities, but I can change neither my physical realities of eye color and foot size nor my desire to take pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and create sense from a seemingly unending supply of raw words.
I leaned about a dozen years ago, though, that I write best when I go away. When I leave my normal environment and drink in new sights, sounds, experiences. I am not the first to discover this: I know that many writers have expressed their belief that they must leave a locale to truly be able to write about it. And others that when they shake up their world a bit by leaving their home base they are freed to create more vividly. Part of this can be about a new environment, and part may be about a break in routine.
I just broke my routine and changed my environment for a couple days, and I have no idea what will come of it, I just know that something will.
Last week I was faced with a miniature whirlwind of circumstance that spun me around and spit me out of town, leaving in its wake a lost Word file of 5,000 words, a computer virus, pre-back-to-school chaos, and a loss of internet connectivity in my main desktop computer.
I could use all of that as the excuse for why I neglected to post here on friday the 13th, two days ago, but the truth is simply this: I forgot.
enter the escape.
I spent this past weekend in a car, on a raft in the Snake River in Wyoming, on my bike riding at the foot of the Tetons, and sitting on a rock at the edge of Jenny Lake.
I escaped routine, I left my home environment. and now I reenter my world full of the smell of timber, the feel of cold mountain water and air, the image of rocks six feet below me in a stunningly clear river, the sight of a million stars in a deep indigo sky, a waxing crescent moon, and snow on Grand Teton.
I am ready to roll.