It’s the before-times. It’s winter and the air is damp with cloud. Somewhere in the fog we hear a repeating sound, a horn, warning of the perils of the Quillayute River.

We’re on the lands of the Quileute tribe. Through the ground-hugging shroud we see a sea-stack jutting sheer up out of the ocean. The rocky outcrop is jammed with tall cedars, edge to edge.

In this moment, I breathed in the landscape. It settled within me, like a seed, and then was nurtured with every dripping branch, every fathomless lake, every sheer mountain-side crested with snow.

We think of landscapes as external to us. They also live within us, make inroads that we revisit in solitude. They comfort us and give us a sense of place, a sense of home, even when that home is not where we’re from.

How can we feel at home in a place that isn’t home?

The Pacific North West isn’t where I’m from. Moving to Seattle after devastating fires in Australia, the cool, dampness was a salve.

It’s part of the reason the landscape embedded itself within me. It’s why there’s mountains in my heart and rivers tumbling in my ears as I lay in bed late at night. It’s the otherness of the Pacific North West that has wedged itself inside me.

When you have a landscape inside yourself, you have to return to that landscape again and again, to fit the two halves together, the one within and the one without.

See more of the series, The Mountains Within Us, at raymonde.com.au