The Mountain with the Fire Inside
As I was packing this evening I was voice-noting my best friend about how I felt like I’d been preparing for a final exam I’ve been studying for for the last 4 years. Like collecting the pieces of a puzzle that’s only now starting to take shape. Seemingly random parts fitting together. All my personal adventuring, prepping for guiding, all the gear I have accumulated, both for outdoor adventure and filmmaking. It’s finally adding up. The camping gear. The technical clothing. Everything I could think of as necessary was here. I had exactly what I needed. Some merino tanks I’d ordered on a whim, even though it’s too cold for them right now. A hyper compact stove I bought for my kayak camping trip. A powerful headlamp that I got on sale. I know exactly what’s necessary for car camping after doing it for 2 months in the summer. I’ve become more efficient. I’m developing my preferences, my systems. I’ve built a tool kit.
One that includes an extensive collection of merino wool – I’m a natural fiber nerd, and an assortment of candy coloured socks. I have my beauty routine in a tin. I have my eagle feathers, gifted to me from my time on the land. My medicine bag, my tobacco. My ancestor tincture “blood and bones.” My beads. All of these pieces and tools I’ve been collecting now for years fit so perfectly into this moment. For this journey, for the one I hadn’t planned on taking, yet planned on taking all along. It’s the feeling when you step back and realize that what you’re about to step into really took a lot more than 4 years to come together, it was actually decades in the making.
It makes me think back to my first solo trips on Vancouver island, back in 2014, when I first started shooting my own weddings. It was the year I started my media business. I still lived in Vancouver at the time and had stepped into a world that both terrified and liberated me. I don’t know if I’ve felt that kind of leap since then. That kind of exponential growth, a stretching of my edges. I realize now another chapter is here and I’m making another jump into the unknown.
Solo camping in the Okanagan for two weeks shooting an experimental indigenous language film. On the land of my ancestors. In the language of my ancestors. The one I’ve been learning, sound by sound, breath by breath, for the last year and a half. My own fully funded project, that I have total creative control on. I don’t have to answer to any executives. There’s no network notes. This project wasn’t made for money. It’s made for growth. It’s made to be art.
There are moments in my life I feel inside the deepest part of myself that I’m on the path that was meant for me. I realize now how fortunate I am to experience such a feeling and it’s been a long time since I’ve felt that from what I’ve been building on my own. Not from a collaborative vision with a partner, or an exciting career opportunity, but from a place that can’t really be shared. One that comes from where I’ve struggled hard, felt alone and deeply unsure yet pushed toward what my instincts told me.
In my mind I can see myself standing at the base of a mountain. I can see its steep incline rising up in front of me. I am only a speck but I am not intimidated, I am elated. I am excited to take the long and unknown journey. A forgotten memory makes me recall the cosmic crumbs of a Kim Krans tarot guidebook. Lighting sparks for me in the dark. Speaking to me, telling me something I knew to be true yet could not make sense of. A truth that brought me to tears, even though I couldn’t explain why. It was beyond words, I just felt it. I recognized the mountain with the fire inside.
First I thought it meant I needed to learn snowboarding, then I thought it meant I needed to surf again, and it brought me back to the West coast. But today that cryptic message that’s whispered to me since 2020 has become clear. I understand that the mountain with the fire inside is calling me to the Okanagan, and today I stand at the threshold, finally ready to climb it.
tmʼxʷúlaʔxʷ qʷlʼqʷilʼst | The Land Speaks 