I LIFT UP MY EYES to the MOUNTAINS - February 19, 2018


'I lift up my eyes to the mountains— Snow prickles against the windows at midnight and sparkles in the sunlight at dawn. Snow swirls from rooftops in pale clouds and slides from cars in slushy globs. Snow outlines each bare branch, then melts and hangs in crystal pendants from each branch tip. Children who rarely experience snow dance about making footprint trails, collecting it from the evergreen boughs and launching it at each other. But best of all, finally, the coastal mountains are frosted with snow. I fell in love with the mountains the first time I stepped from the CN Transcontinental train onto the Jasper platform and met the Rockies. I was a final year high school student on my way to Vancouver traveling with Mrs Kahara's Finnish language class. Our choir "Vahan Erilainen" was scheduled to perform at the Surjuhlat Festival 1974 and our class planned to interview Finnish people who had settled the coastal community of Sointula. We saw and did a great many things but it was the mighty mountains majesty that left a longing in my soul. I returned in 1975 to work for Charlton's Evergreen Court in Banff, in 1986 to Chilliwack for a ProLife conference and again in 1988 to visit friends in Deep Cove as respite from two young children. I spent a winter month in Kelowna in 2001 and in 2003 began what has become an almost yearly pilgrimage to British Columbia. When I look up to those glistening peaks, my spirit is filled with awe at so much grandeur. When I am alone on the heights, the only sound the whistle of a marmot, surrounded by the incense of pine and washed by air fresh from the face of a glacier, the mountains become for me a holy place. Yet this is not always a benign beauty. The thundering avalanche and sudden weather changes are also beautiful in a rather terrible way. Like the Almighty, the mountains are something I never take for granted but always pay them their due. Here then are Golden Ears with Mount Judge Howey tucked in behind taken from across the Nicomekl River with fields of red blueberries canes in the mid-ground.'

Snow prickles against the windows at midnight and sparkles in the sunlight at dawn. Snow swirls from rooftops in pale clouds and slides from cars in slushy globs. Snow outlines each bare branch, then melts and hangs in crystal pendants from each branch tip. Children who rarely experience snow dance about making footprint trails, collecting it from the evergreenboughs and launching it at each other. But best of all, finally, the coastal mountains are frosted with snow.

I fell in love with the mountains the first time I stepped from the CN Transcontinental train onto the Jasper platform and met the Rockies. I was a final year high school student on my way to Vancouver traveling with Mrs Kahara's Finnish language class. Our choir "Vahan Erilainen" was scheduled to perform at the Surjuhlat Festival 1974 and our class planned to interview Finnish people who had settled the coastal community of Sointula. We saw and did a great many things but it was the mighty mountains majesty that left a longing in my soul.

I returned in 1975 to work for Charlton's Evergreen Court in Banff, in 1986 to Chilliwack for a ProLife conference and again in 1988 to visit friends in Deep Cove as respite from two young children. I spent a winter month in Kelowna in 2001 and in 2003 began what has become an almost yearly pilgrimage to British Columbia.

When I look up to those glistening peaks, my spirit is filled with awe at so much grandeur. When I am alone on the heights, the only sound the whistle of a marmot, surrounded by the incense of pine and washed by air fresh from the face of a glacier, the mountains become for me a holy place. Yet this is not always a benign beauty. The thundering avalanche and sudden weather changes are also beautiful in a rather terrible way. Like the Almighty, the mountains are something I never take for granted but always pay them their due.

Here then are Golden Ears with Mount Judge Howey tucked in behind taken from across the Nicomekl River with fields of red blueberries canes in the mid-ground.

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