We humans like permanency as a comfortable assurance that our lives will be as comfortable as possible and life will go on. So we tend not to stray from the place where we are most familiar, and we regard our own personal space in that geography as our very own, our castle, so to speak, from which we can look out over the world, near and far, with complacency. That is, if we are fortunate enough to live in a part of the world which will permit us to do this. A civilized society with shared civil values and lawful assurances that we will be secure.

And then, we can venture out further if the mood takes us, either to become tourists for brief periods of time, in other parts of the world unlike our own, to familiarize ourselves with how people elsewhere live, their customs, their heritage. Or, like others among us, we can venture into a natural setting to challenge ourselves to live however briefly without the comforts we have become accustomed to, in our daily lives.

Our younger son has done both, as have we, though not to the extent he has. He has gone off for weeks and months at a time to see what life is like in Sweden, Italy, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, the United States and elsewhere, from time to time. And while there he has explored their cities and also their natural settings, although nowhere near as often and as closely as he does where he lives, in British Columbia. His backpacking expeditions take him to the mountains and his canoeing/kayaking forays alongside the ocean on the B.C. coast.

Take this past weekend, when he discovered that there was still plenty of snow left at his mountain destination. Good thing he'd felt there might be, even on the cusp of July, to persuade him to take along some cold-weather clothing. He pitched his tent where he found fairly flat opportunity in the snow on a mountainside and there he stayed for several days enjoying the atmosphere, the sun and the remote serenity.

In our backyard, another type of home has been established. And in that temporary home eggs were laid and eventually hatched. It's a busy pair of robins who fly about back and forth to tend to that nest. The male can generally be seen sitting fairly close to the nest that was built under the floorboards of our elevated deck. And below now sits the mother robin with her two little nestlings.