My True North and God's Solid Earth

In his hands are the caverns of the earth,
and the heights of the hills are his also.
The sea is his, for he made it,
and his hands have molded the dry land.

I grew up on the eastern edge of the Rockies. I could always find north--when I faced it, the mountains were on my left. 

Moving away was tough. In Salt Lake City, I never felt north like the pull of that needle in a compass. The Wasatch were in the wrong place. Eventually I learned that my compass pointed south. Painfully, I had to think through north each time.

Then came years in Iowa. Iowa is not flat, but there are no mountains on the horizon. The rivers that criss-cross it on a diagonal always made me nervous. Things didn't stand still, and I was always having to drive around them in river towns.

Did the geography, with my loss of that distant horizon, my loss of north, contribute to my inner loss of equilibrium? I don't know.

But after my brain blew up, we moved to Central Oregon, the eastern edge of mountains again, the Wasatch this time. I see these mountains out my back door every morning. Not quite like my drawing of them, inspired by local artist's Kathy Deggendorfer's imagination. My mountains, these Three Sisters as they are known, peak over the top of a truck yard on the other side of our fence. We love the truck yard. As long as it is there, our view is protected from another new apartment complex in our rapidly growing little cowboy/tourist town.

Every morning I pray the Venite, Psalm 95. I feel the solidity of God's creation, the mountains that endure even as the nation has lost its equilibrium. I open the blinds and gaze at this view.

I have regained my own equilibrium.