Once I completed my Leadville 100 summer, I was in my dusty old Subaru and on the road back to Minnesota. Today is a Friday, October 27th, and it’s been about 2 months since I parked in front my South Minneapolis house, turned off the ignition, and sat in the humid car for just a second more.

“I have to water my plants,” was somehow my first thought.

In the 99 degree midwest heat, I collected my belongings from the piled up back of my car and pulled them inside my home. No more mountains right outside the back patio. No more thin air or alpine bird songs or single-track trails alongside gushing waterfalls or encounters with through hikers who tell me their trail names, like Chipper and Stump, Idaho and Limpy.

What happens to us when we carry a whole world in a heart and body that breathes in someplace entirely different?

Good grief, I think.

These past two months, I moved through the rhythms of work schedules and clear weekends. Of reading books and scrolling phones and watching the world outside shift from summer breezes to copper painted tree leaves. Of trying to write about what I just experienced and fighting with the urge to let it all lay in my heart instead.

Because we do that, don’t we? We break our own hearts because life has a way of moving forward and moving us along with it. We experience great love and reach the part where we must say goodbye, where we must take who we are and what we learned into the next stages of our live

Maybe you’ve heard about the Minnesota Goodbye: The welp, the hugs, the walk to the door, the doorway chat, the ‘we really should be going’, the second round of hugs, the hand on the doorknob, the slow door open conversation, and finally, the window wave.

I have given my Colorado summer the Minesota Goodbye. I’ve felt (and am feeling) the good grief. I’ve broken my own heart just so I can keep on remembering what makes it beat so brilliantly in the first place. I’m certain my Colorado summer has told me to “Drive safe” because that’s how you say ‘I love you’ here. Go. Go out into your world and drive safe and get to where you’re going and remember how much you are loved, no matter if you’re here or there.

I won’t be rushed. I’ll feel it all.

And I’ll welcome the next great thing, the next wild heartbeat, in my brilliant, beautiful life.

I’m sure the trails will show me the way.

They always do.