I walked at sunset tonight, which I haven’t done for many months in favor of morning sun, and remembered the power of dusk falling on the canyon. Drinking in the texture and color of the sky, I felt another page of this Topanga chapter being written inside of me.
All of us, we are all human stories walking around on earth with innumerable chapters filed away within. At the end of our lives, perhaps we may tell the story these chapters write, in symphony. Perhaps there are chapters that hurt too much to tell. Certainly there will be chapters that are told more often than others, favored for their humor, the way they make us appear, the glimmer of hope they give in the cadence. And there will be whole chapters forgotten by way of loss, trauma, fear, or flat-out boredom.
But this. I am so grateful for this Topanga chapter. These trees, this sky, those mountains, they have been a refuge to me. I worked hard and saved hard for years to find such a refuge. To find myself in a place like this, which has been a refuge for millennia, and will continue to be—if those colonizing its land can remember how it must also be respected.
This canyon. It wrote itself in me. I won’t forget. Even as the page begins to turn to the next chapter.
