It's an amazing experience to hike up to treeline and suddenly come upon marshy meadows filled with vast mats of vibrant color. To me, these swaths of pink feel like communities of supremely sentient beings populating every nook and cranny with with their joy-filled blooms. John Muir called them "plant people," and their exuberant color definitely reveals the human aspect of their being.
I've discovered that when I unite myself with a beautiful landscape, the personal and non-personal aspects of life begin to interpenetrate and exchange places. Thus, the hiker transcends ego in taking on the non-personal, billion-year-old aspect of the landscape, and the plants and rocks become communicative in taking on the personal dimension of the hiker.
Here, the experience of joy - felt emotionally as an altered state of consciousness in the hiker, and embodied physically in the vast swaths of color - begins to SWIRL together the seemingly opposite realms of human and non-human, like a Sufi whirling dervish who dances as a means of experiencing the union of humanity and divinity.
Photo: Alpine Bog Laurel, Snowy Range, WY; June 29, 2013
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