LOL! That's right... And work on a southern or western drawl...
There is an expression when someone looks around in spaces like The Big Empty and the plains East of there, that furtive look that betrays the desire to find something,
anything to hide behind, that is unmistakable (and, I might add, amusing). It's a different face than the one seen on mountaintops taking in the view, rather instead a betrayal of a feeling of being small and naked before nature's fury... It's something that takes time to accept, to look at a night sky and get the feeling you could fall off the planet into the vastness of
all those stars in the universe beyond.
But once you do, something changes. Sufficiently humbled, with all of this put in perspective, there is the realization that there is so much more than even the pettiness of people and their squabbles to be king of their particular dungheap, and you're left content to have a few friends you'd run the river with, and be comfortable in your own skin, so long as you are at peace with Almighty God.
Of course, there are those who flee at the first opportunity, but perhaps that's just as well.
Robert Service said it well:
I’ve stood in some mighty-mouthed hollow
That’s plumb-full of hush to the brim;
I’ve watched the big, husky sun wallow
In crimson and gold, and grow dim,
Till the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming,
And the stars tumbled out, neck and crop;
And I’ve thought that I surely was dreaming,
With the peace o’ the world piled on top.
The Spell of the Yukon
By Robert W. Service
