I am turning 49 tomorrow. I have never been consistent with this blog. But this year, I have gone exactly one year without writing an entry. I have some drafts in a folder but nothing finished and they are mostly poems as it seems like the “tell the truth but tell it slant” wisdom of Emily Dickinson was the closest I could approach sharing from my life this year. Thinking more about the reasons why, an image came to my mind: the first time I ever saw Mt. Rainier, only I didn’t.

It was the summer after I graduated from college and I embarked on what became a 9,000 mile solo roadtrip through much of the western and northern United States with a special focus on their national parks. I had never driven that far north and of the many sights I looked forward to seeing, I was especially excited to see Mt. Rainier for the first time.

However, when I arrived, the mountain was covered in clouds. The closer I got, the less of the mountain I could see. The clearest view I had was of the backside of the RV creeping up the highway ahead of me. At a viewing platform, my face was touched with mist as I looked up at a wall of white, feeling the immensity of the mountain hidden by the clouds. I mentioned in passing to a local–a ranger, a gas station attendant?–how I wished I had arrived on another day when the weather was clearer. And they responded, somewhat bluntly, that nobody gets to see Mt. Rainier except maybe twice a year.

In the moment, I rightly felt like the outsider to this landscape that I was. But at the time, this became a symbol for me of God, the vastness that is known by how it cannot be seen in its entirety.

In my own home landscape, the Central Valley, I have come to know this same quality through our tule fog winters. Tule fog is a ghost river that demands as much respect as its whitewater counterparts. Slowing down is the best way forward through dense fog, second to not going at all, if it can be helped because the fog can be truly treacherous.

This past winter, during a stretch of dense, relentless fog, I was called to the hospital to provide support to a young person who was there on a psychiatric hold. They wanted prayer and support as they awaited transfer to a long-term treatment facility. We talked and they shared their many plans for the future, including their soulful intentions to get better, repair relationships, and use this time of crisis towards serving others.

Learning that we were from this same landscape, I offered the idea of how we learn to drive in the fog. This young person knew, like most who drive in the Valley, that you do not use your high beams to find your way in the fog. If you do, the light reflects off the fog and creates a glare that makes visibility even more difficult. You use your low beams instead, pointed down towards the road. I invited them to remember the future is too hard to see right now but that they can focus on the road right in front of them and, with help from others, find the ground underneath them from which to take the next step. They nodded with agreement and recognition. Our conversation slowed down a bit. I felt them relax. We held hands, we prayed. I hope they kept their low beams on as long as they needed. I am trying to do the same.

I think of Mt. Rainier, of the tule fog, not because there isn’t something to share but because there is. But it is bigger than my own story, wrapped in the stories of others. It is neither the right time nor my right to share their stories. And it is difficult to know any other way to tell them. Many times, I have felt like I am punching at the fog, wishing there was a way to see through beyond simply taking this time to live each slow step forward. But it is not time yet to tell the story of this chapter of my life, except maybe through a poem or a memory about an invisible mountain or the tule fog that is its own guide: Slow down. Keep your lights low. Watch the road right in front of you.

It is June, we have hit triple digit temperatures here in the Valley, and we are as far from the foggy season as we can get in the year. But I am turning towards 49 and I am feeling love for the void that hides the mountain and for the fog that requires our respect and slowness. Perhaps I will find more words this year. Perhaps not.