Music: An authentically pleasing or harmonious sound or combination of all the sounds: the music of the wind. –

The American Heritage College Dictionary, 4th Addition.

Autumn wind moves through the tree tops and higher, pushing clouds across vivid blue sky, pushing them against distant sun-lit mountain peaks, then diving down and flying across earth, snatching up snow, swirling and twirling it away.

The road up to this cabin is rustic, impassible when snow melts in to it like this. I would be nervous except I drove my SUV down yesterday, down the slide of muddy road to a properly graveled one where I won’t get stuck when I go to leave at dusk today. I will have to carry everything down to the car, carry a backpack stuffed full.

Yesterday, when I moved my car down to the other road, and walked back up to the cabin, two buck deer peered at me through a thicket of lodgepole branches and bushy sage. They looked at me, then disappeared as quickly and seamlessly as if they had stepped between worlds.

The silence on this mountain is musical. It underlies the rest, as if it holds the ground, like a conductor’s open arms create the anticipation of sound as the audience waits for the musicians to to play.

The cabin is silent. There isn’t any electricity to hum through the walls. But then there is the crack of wood burning in the stove, and last night an infusion of moon song as I tramped through the woods, moonlight reflecting from the remaining snow to give the night a subtle brilliance.

Music. The sound of my own voice, talking, signing to myself. The tunes caught in my mind from the gypsy-song CD that I listened to as I readied myself for this retreat. Folk music that I replay in my mind, imagining I dance to it.

Music. The resonance of words that I read as I sit at this cabin’s table, every now and then looking up, looking out over the miles of mountain, across a view that pretends there aren’t houses tucked everywhere. There’s a sweetness to that illusion.

I can hear the sound of wildness here, faint, but present, and nourishing.

And then there’s the cadence, the scratchy expression of my pen dragging across dry paper as I call my experience forward and write.

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