Weekly Photo Challenge: Muse…Going home

It’s Friday once again (are there more Fridays and Mondays than other days?) and time again for the Weekly Photo Challenge.   It’s another grey day in Chicagoland, threatening more rain that we no longer need.  I’d send some to California if I could just figure out the logistics.  But here at WordPress, there have been several weeks of colorful themes to brighten the days, and I’ve enjoyed them.

This week’s theme is “Muse .”  Nature tends to be my muse for photography, but there’s a specific place that I come back to fill my cup: these mountains in Wyoming. While any mountains will do, as will the ocean or a walk in “my” park, this is where that last piece of the puzzle slots into place, making me feel whole again.

Sit back with a cup of your favorite tea (or coffee, if you must) and enjoy the photos and stories for this week.  Have a wonder-filled weekend, filled with time for rest and refreshment.

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity.
― John Muir, Our National Parks

Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction – so easy to lapse into – that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit