The air is crisp with a damp chill, and the path is before you. There are rocks underfoot, but they do not roll with your weight because they are steady, and this makes you feel buoyant though some have eroded to the size of gemstones, which crunch with your footfalls. There is a light fog in the air which hazes the distance. You are approaching the boundary. You have followed the trail, and you have been following others who have walked the trail before. You haven’t yet seen the end, nor can you imagine the outcome, despite your anticipation. There are rocks beside you, lichen-clutched and hemming your path, guarding your pace like sentinels. The sounds of others’ footsteps and the susurrus of wind in the leaves and through the stone outcrops accompany you. You think you can do this, and you want to. The boundary is also a border, but both are intangible. There is no true demarcation from here to there, or from this to that. The goal is far yet, beyond the intangible border, past the untested boundary of your abilities and knowledge. It may be easy going—upwards movement in the sun—or perhaps not. You might find yourself stuck on the cliff face, the day’s light fading to jade, with fear freezing your muscles and tension clamping your fingers tight. You might feel frustration with the awareness that others before you have done this and you cannot, shame at knowing that some below are supporting your ascent with their patience and belief, disappointment and anger at yourself for your failure, causing you to flail and curse and cry, but there is no failure yet, because you are still in process. Scream and kick until you exhaust your fears, then stretch your fingers again and take a high step. First walk, then climb.
While I was making it, this painting kept summoning to my mind the cover of my paperback version of Lost Horizon. It was an old paperback, the type with yellowed ends and a white crack in the spine before I got it—it was one that was likely owned by another family member which then came to me after some decades. The various covers of Lost Horizon share similar characteristics, and I have always thought those cover illustrations to be iconic of mystery, human longing, and potential in ways which surpass the text itself, which is problematic in the typical way of the era of its writing. My painting only holds an echo of Lost Horizon, one emanating from the cover illustrators, rather than from its author. There’s likely also a hint of Bierstadt’s “Sunrise on the Matterhorn”, though skewed on the color wheel in mine to something less rosy. The memory fictionalized above is my own, from Enchanted Rock in the Texas Hill Country, which is also much more pink than what I have painted.