This winter finds me in a new micro-climate. Chinook winds blow up over the mountains, creating a rapid warming as the air comes down the other side. The clouds recede in a beautiful and dramatic arch, a perfect canvas for prairie light to play. As always, my barefoot spirituality cannot resist the relationship between nature and my life. I am captivated by the connection between chinooks and change.

Moving brings change at almost every level of our lives. We have been making new friends, unpacking and settling into new space, and finding new places to learn and work. And, we have been exploring really different landscapes. The southern Alberta foothills and mountains have so much more extreme personalities than the flatlands of southern Saskatchewan.

Cochane is built around a big hill, Manachaban, and the retreat centre where I work is tucked into the forest on the north side of the big hill. Our home is roughly 800 metres from the retreat centre across a deep ravine on the other side of Big Hill Creek. The Friary roof peeks through the trees across the valley from the walking path on the edge of my neighbourhood. The roads have been built around the big hill, the creek, and the Bow River. It takes 22 minutes to drive through the town and around the big hill to get to work.

Advertisement

And it was these geographical circumstances that had me wonder out loud in front of Marc’s mountain-biking cousin about walking or biking to work. It might have stayed just a thought if I hadn’t had a powerful witness. But Paul has a gift for making ideas reality. After an intense experience on a mountain biking path (never again!), I was supported in finding a suitable electric bike and a route through on walking paths and gravel roads (closed to cars). 

Since October, I have been biking to work almost every day. The weather has ranged from 15 to -30 degrees Celsius. The winter studded tires on my bike have handled ice and snow with ease. I have goggles (clear for dark and tinted for sun), a headlamp, and bear spray. In spite of my high-maintenance hair and hatred of exercise, I have become a person who bikes to work – down and uphill each way - in 12 minutes.

Advertisement

The change happened gradually. The idea was followed by the research and acquiring of equipment. Then, getting on the bike and learning how and when to engage the battery for assistance, and coordinating gear shifting with the elevation changes. The hardest part for the first three months was in my head. Convincing myself to get on the bike (when I didn’t want to, when I could take the car, when it was cold or snowy) was a mountain climb every morning. Once I was on the bike, no problem. 

Somewhere in the last several weeks, the chinook moved through my soul. I am finding myself craving my bike. I have begun to resent the days that I must take the car – because driving takes longer, because the car is actually colder that the bike on the worst weather days, and because I miss the proximity to creation and fresh air framing the space between work and home.

It would be easier for the wind, perhaps, if the air was pushed around in a circle back down the mountains instead of over them. I certainly stop doing hard things more often than I persist in them. And I need to be honest: we got the bike instead of a third car, so there were many days I did not have a choice.

Advertisement

Yet, on the other side of the change, I am surprised by the person I am becoming. (My sister keeps waiting for me to become a social media lifestyle influencer!) Isn’t this one of the great gifts of our humanity: that we can be such mysteries, even to ourselves? 

I want to be a beautiful canvas for the mystery that is my life. I want to become more myself through every season, shedding the attachments that hold me back, and growing into the places of beauty and possibility and peace. May I let the Wind move me there.