flinging their garment away.

Well, we’re on our 8^th week of guests this week and it’s incredible to me that every week I find connections with the people around me. Sundays are always the hardest because we say goodbye to one group and hello to the next. Sue always tells us to remember that we touch people’s lives and that like us, to our guests; this is their home too. This week I had a little girl tell me that she wished I were her big sister, and even though I’ve never been one, it made me believe that was Sue says is true.

I’ve gotten to meet people from all over the country and also the world. And I wonder if it’s just a coincidence that I fall in love with the guests or if there is something about the West that draws certain types of people to the snow covered peaks of the Rockies. But coincidence or not, this is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Each week, we’re greeted by a new group of 30 smile faces. Friends are made over hours instead of days or even weeks. On Saturday night, when the group has spent a whole week together, the dining room is loud and the families are mixed from table to table. In this one short week, they become seven or eight different families meshed into one giant one. It makes me think of home.

On another note, I was in Denver a couple weeks ago, and I walked past a building to be greeted by this poem by John Ruskin called “O True of Earth”:

“Mountains are the bones of the earth, their highest peaks are invariably those parts of its anatomy which in the plains lie buried under five and twenty thousand feet of solid thickness of superincumbent soil, and which spring up in the mountain ranges in vast pyramids or wedges, flinging their garment of earth away from them on each side. The masses of the lower hills are laid over and against their sides, like the masses of lateral masonry against the skeleton arch of an unfinished bridge, except that they slope up to and lean against the central ridge: and, finally upon the slopes of these lower hills are strewed the level beds of sprinkled gravel, sand and clay; which form the extent of the champaign. Here then is another grand principle of the truth of earth, that the mountains must come from under all, and be the support of all; and that everything else must be laid in their arms, heap above heap, the plains being the uppermost.”

It stopped me in my tracks, first because it was so long, and second because that’s why I’d choose the mountains over the beach any day. They are the support for us all as we lie in the arms of their masses. They are the raw form of the earth, bare and beautiful without the cover of trees, grass, and wildflowers. Their beauty, up close and far away in all the same for its purity.

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