Mama Says Om - Quest

Say the word quest, and I think of early childhood rambles and my clear sense then that something grand, magical and illuminating was waiting behind the next tree or around the bend on the trail ahead. A child has no words for such perceptions, but the feelings were profound and bewitching nevertheless, and how they tugged at one's imagination. "Ready or not, here I come, seeking something magical, mysterious and incandescent, I know not what."

From those magical moments of childhood, one moved on into adult status, marriage and parenting with their multitudinous mundane issues and all those bumps and potholes in the road of life - a road which seemed (most of the time anyway) to be arrow straight and running toward a flat and distant horizon with nary a tree, a hill, a quest or a mystery in sight.

In these elder days, I think of the wind in the trees and of sunrises and twilights seen from the top of the cliff above Dalhousie Lake, of the way the clouds seen from "up there" seem to form a sparkling road, one spiraling right out into eternity and the great beyond. There are equally glorious sunsets to be seen in that lofty place if one has sufficient pluck to climb the mountain in twilight and from the lake shoreline too, often in the splendid company of herons. The sense of questing and a great mystery which were mine as a child (and which only seemed to vanish during my frantic middling years) has returned, and I am delighted.

It's all a quest whether we know it or we know it not: our childhood rambles into the woods and the beckoning fields, the mortgage payments and straight line highways of our middle years, and now (thankfully) sunrises, sunsets and moons experienced from the cliff above the lake. Sing ho for the journey and for the quest of life, sing ho for the great mystery which accompanies us all our earthly days!

Written for the incandescent questing mamas at Mama Says Om.