We ask
How did I end up here?
or wonder
why we don’t fit
in our family.
Later
we might say
these are my people,
or
this life is
what I should have been doing
all along,
or
here’s where I’m meant to live,
here’s home.
Listen.
Thousand Lakes
is the name
of the mountain range
north of Torrey Utah.
Boulder Mountain
is the mountain
to the south
of Torrey.
But actually
Boulder Mountain
is blessed with beautiful lakes,
and the 11,000-foot ridgetops
on Thousand Lakes
are mostly rocky crags.
Cartographers,
long ago,
mistakenly swapped
their names.
Our lives can be like that,
swapped by family
school
religion
culture
for something we are not.
Our cartographers
were absent.
The challenge
for our journey
is to find our own way.
And we are given no map.
Trout Black, a Zen Buddhist teacher, lives in Northern California except when he’s in his beloved Southern Utah, loves granite and redrock, rivers and slot canyons, Ravens and Lizards, Escalante and Hells Backbone Grill, and his wife Silvia, their two kids, and their three grandkids.
