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The Dolomites

September 4, 2023


Greetings from what has been waiting,


I am sitting in a small town with many names because it is filled with people with many languages. Nearly everyone has a pack, carries walking sticks, and they are smiling. My travel things are scattered around me like the detritus from a child’s birthday, which is appropriate since I’ve been opening gifts all week.


In the past I have been shy with my dreams, and what I hoped for, and I can tell now with experience it didn’t serve me. I’ve learned, through too many years, to hold the next moments with an open hand, to be more flexible with what comes to me, but also to listen more to what my heart tells me to pursue. I’m still practicing, and in all of it the words written on my arm remind me: never underestimate the day.


I saw a picture in Runner’s magazine many years ago of someone running in the mountains. It was a beautiful vista, and the woman in the picture was smiling, floating above the trail. She was framed by a ragged range of peaks, unlike any place I’d seen before.


These were the Dolomites.


I’ll admit I felt a glimmer, this idea that one day I would go there, probably said as much out loud. I’ll also admit that it seemed more like a daydream than a possibility. I let the idea go until about five years ago, and nearly let it go forever. Thankfully, the universe conspired to make it possible, and I noticed.


Even so, after wondering and thinking and researching the place, I couldn’t fully accept what an incredible experience it would be. I was still listening to Aesop’s lesson from a thousand years ago: be careful what you wish for. I put a lot of pressure on my dream.


The Dolomites are a range of mountains in northern Italy, strung across the border, mingling with the Alps. If you are not intent on seeing them, you could spend your whole life not seeing them. I confess, it was very important and I still nearly missed the possibility. Pay attention.


I walked along a trail surrounded by deep green forests, and then up beyond the tree lines. I stepped over creeks and rivers, some casually moving among mossy stones, other places rushing and bubbling, clear as crystal against white rocks. Snow with all the white melted out of it, chasing ragged banks down from where the frost never ends. Beyond the tips of the trees I watched the mountains reach out, form outlandish shapes, become new colors. I was in awe.


Hiking through the mist, inside the clouds high above the valleys, sensing their secret recipe for the rain they would send to the innocents below. Watching the sun play in places a hundred miles away while the shadows of storms darkened the rocks around us.


Even in the rain, as the clouds formed around the escarpments, and hid the peaks in sensual veils, I felt as if I had discovered a new part of me, along with this new place I explored. There was this voice, perhaps in my head, perhaps whispered from the wind in the trees, or maybe sung from the passing rivers: “Where have you been?”


We hiked through a dozen trails, winding through soaring bluffs, clinging to the edge of narrow ledges carved into the cliffs, clambering over boulders, pulling ourselves up by cables and branches to the next precarious spot. And every turn was a reward. Each place revealed a new, astonishing beauty.

Of course, Italy is more than the mountains. The food, the coffee, the wonderful people we met, seasoned the experience, made the moments fuller. Even the drive from one mountain town to the next, slaloming on narrow roads slung through the rocks, carved into the forests, bored into tunnels, made the days richer. Nearly every evening I put my head on the pillow I would think: “Did all of that happen today?”


Our hikes usually took us to a Refugio, or more than one, these respites along the trails into the mountains. First built as a necessity, now a civilized sanctuary along the challenging climbs, we sampled the coffee and pastry and pasta and wine and beer, all of the fundamentals of good exploring.


We moved between statuesque pines, holding their skirts fifty feet in the air, silent except for the wind that sighed between the branches, or the soft whisper of a nearby stream. Then as the forest gave way to the rock, the real drama began. Sentinel mountains, survivors of glacial divorce or volcanic dispute, or seismic tantrums, reached into the Italian sky, some dark, some marbled, all of them astonishing works of art.


There were a few places where we came to a lake that was the most remarkable color of jade, there is no way to recreate it for you other than to tell you to go there. We saw a few rivers, the same color, frothed a little lighter by their galivanting, pouring into these gorgeous bodies, liquid porcelain, creating a stunning green mirror for everything on the shores.


I won’t make this into a travelogue, because I only have one message from the passion that this experience has instilled in me. Don’t wait. Don’t shrug off the big dreams, or hope that you will find time, or better timing. Make the sacrifice, delay something else, just go do what is calling you now. Take the risk that your dream might be even greater than you hoped.


Yesterday morning I walked up to the ridge of Seceda, the iconic Dolomite image that first caught my attention years ago. I stood in the wind and looked at the shapes and colors of that place, and the world that surrounded it, and with tears in my eyes, thought “I can’t believe it is real.” It was so far beyond what I expected. Not just what it looked like, but how it made me feel, as if all of my senses were back on. I’ll never take that for granted.




Hope this finds you opening the gifts,



David







Copyright © 2023 David Smith


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