A friend from Montana recently moved here to the Bay area. She’s having a time adjusting to the Bay area, of course, it’s so different from remote, spacious Montana. (After I moved to Montana, I understood more clearly what “Big Sky” country means. The mountains are so huge and dramatic, they make the sky look VERY big.) She now lives near the ocean in San Francisco, and the ocean has a very different energy. The mountains, she says, “made me feel secure and grounded. I felt safe living next to the mountains.” Here, she says, the ocean is wild and exuberant. She doesn’t feel so safe.
The natural terrain speaks to us through metaphor–WILD, EXUBERANT, GROUNDED, SECURE, BIG and so on, are all metaphoric qualities that we feel and understand through our natural world. The terrain has meaning and depth to it, beyond what we can see on the surface. The terrain of where we live is constantly “working” us on so many levels. Like my friend, the mountains in Montana also made me feel safe, but maybe I left Montana because I needed a different metaphoric energy to work through me. The Pacific ocean makes me feel the flow of life. It keeps me inspired and renewed.