The mind’s place is a terrain of contradictions. Favorable breezes ruffle a lush rolling landscape that shimmers with dew and blueberries and the sheen of spider silk. Verdant and severe in turns.
![](https://i0.wp.com/www.jonnalaster.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/IMG_4359.jpg?resize=300%2C248)
Charting a course into the unknown.
jl
Topographical layers of a country, both well-known and yet largely undiscovered. Glacial floes of ancestors scrub this interior landscape – linking me to others whether I want it or not.
Cleaved into lobs, woven through with veins and gleaming ores of dream-gold and icy gems.
![](https://i0.wp.com/www.jonnalaster.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/5-24-2012-17-33-29_014-640x415.jpg?resize=300%2C194)
family album
Yet this same territory is subdivided by deep ravines as dark as the dilated pupils of hunters about to pounce.
![](https://i1.wp.com/www.jonnalaster.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_2579-3-633x475.jpg?resize=300%2C225)
jl
Always, the familiar route diverges, unexpectedly opens onto an unknown trail, a hike into the wild, a side-trip of threat and vista, or irresistible allure.
![](https://i1.wp.com/www.jonnalaster.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/003-640x350.jpg?resize=300%2C164)
Alaska Autumn, the road taken
– jl
Even as the avatar of this place, I will never completely know it. That mystery both ignites a passion to continue roaming here and a dread of coming through the alluvial sand to the very end of the world.
![](https://i1.wp.com/www.jonnalaster.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/001.jpg?resize=297%2C300)
jl
It is an act of will to carry paper and pen into the very maw of such a realm.
Writer Elkhound update:
![](https://i1.wp.com/www.jonnalaster.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IMG_4728-451x640.jpg?resize=211%2C300)
The Writer Elkhound.
jl