Love is More Than Personal

 

"Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magical connection of the solstice and equinox.  This is what is wrong with us.  We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table."

D.H. Lawrence

Photo: Mountain Bog Birch flaming in last light in Glacier Basin, with the peaks of the Mummy Range looming in the distance, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, September 23, 2011

Only a Beautiful Way of Seeing Can Uncover a Beautiful World

 

"There is an uncanny symmetry between the inner and the outer world . . . Each of us is responsible for how we see, and how we see determines what we see . . . We have often heard that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  This is usually taken to mean that the sense of beauty is utterly subjective . . . However, the statement has another, more subtle meaning: if our style of looking becomes beautiful, then beauty will become visible and shine forth for us.  We will be surprised to discover beauty in unsuspected places where the ungraceful eye would never linger. . . . When we beautify our gaze, the grace of hidden beauty becomes our joy and our sanctuary.  What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach . . . When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us.  Our real life comes to the surface and its light awakens the concealed beauty in things.  When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us."

(John O'Donohue)

Photo: The beautiful "eye" of Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone National Park, WY, September 3, 2011

The Original Act of Creation is Still Happening

 

"Yellowstone Park is perhaps the best place of all for people who are suffering from the vice of over-industry, who are three-quarters dead by doing good and making money.  For it is full of novel and startling wonders.  Here, if anywhere, you will be awakened and healed . . . In no other place I know of may you more surely learn that the world, though made, is yet being made. The work of creation is still going on.  God is doing his best in it, working with human enthusiasm and making everything sing the first song of creation, to shake up and surprise and frighten even the dullest, least sensitive observer into newness of life, out of soul-wasting apathy, and make him begin to live again . . ."  

John Muir

Photo: West Thumb Geyser Basin, Yellowstone National Park, WY, September 4, 2011

Each Being Manifests Itself and Glows When It Dies into the Next Moment!

 

Autumn leaves are actually an embodiment of the process that is occurring during each moment of our lives - and beyond.  The display of the vivid colors of red, orange and gold is in fact the result of the green chlorophyll - the substance that manufactures the tree's food from sunlight and carbon dioxide - draining out of the leaves and flowing down into the roots, where it is stored for the winter.  When the chlorophyll leaves, the leaf dies and falls off the tree. Amazingly, the capacity of the leaves to glow in all of their glory comes from the process of dying.

Applied to our own lives, this means that the emotions which drain away our spiritual strength - feelings like doubt, disillusionment, anxiety and fear that would seem to "disprove" the insights we've been given - are actually the very condition for those insights to manifest themselves in all of their glory.  These emotions - the "dying" of hope - are like the explosion of the firework and the destruction of the chemicals that produces the glowing display of colored light.  Without the "dying" of those chemicals, there would be no show! Speaking in alternate terms,  we might say that these afflictive emotions are the death-dealing fire that works to produce the life-giving light of insight.

The fact that evening sunsets produce some of the most vivid autumn colors adds its own weight to this realization.  Indeed, it is the dying of the day's light that produces the most luminescent colors.  As the poet Rilke would say, it is the shattering of the crystal cup that effectively produces the life-giving "ring." Let us, therefore, embrace the lessons of the autumn!

Photo: Aspen trees glowing in last light, Never Summer Mountains near Gould, CO, September 26, 2011

Failed Experiments are Better Than No Experiments

 

"Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions.  All life is an experiment.  The more experiments you make the better.  What if they are a little coarse, and you may get your coat soiled or torn?  What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice?  Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Photo: Grand Teton and the West Thumb Geyser Basin at sunrise, Yellowstone Lake, WY, September 5, 2011

True Success is Having No Followers

 

"I have been writing and speaking for twenty-five or thirty years, and have have not now even one disciple.  Why?  Not that what I said was not true; not that it has not found intelligent receivers; but because it did not go forth from any wish in me to bring people to me, but rather to themselves.  I delight in driving them from me . . .This is my boast: that I have no school followers.  I should account it a measure of the impurity of my insight, if it did not create independence."

(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Photo: A hidden sun highlights bigtooth maple leaves, Redwood National Park, CA, 2011

Human Loneliness is Divine Loneliness

 

"Human loneliness is, in fact, the loneliness of God.  That is why it is such a great thing for a person to discover his solitude and learn to live in it.  For there he finds that he and God are one."

(Thomas Merton)

"God is this great feeling of solitude with which we are all born."  

(Ernesto Cardenal)

Photo: Two hemlocks in the mist, Mount Rainier National Park, WA, August 5, 2011

Flirtatious Mount Rainier

 

                                               “Nature is wont to hide herself"  (Heraclitus)

            

                                               "Today the mountain,

playful and not omniscient, thinks itself

concealed among attendant clouds . . .

But you are no more hidden

by complacent cumulus

than Venus by a mask

of black Venetian velvet”

(Denise Levertov, "Masquerade," on Mt. Rainier)

                                                

                                               

                                                Seeking to cover my breasts with my hands,

            I could not, - Just as the snow may not

            conceal the southern hills.

            (Vidyapati, on the Goddess Radha, 

            15th century India)

Photo: Mount Rainier flirting with the camera, Mt. Rainier National Park, WA, August 4, 2011

The Unique Form of Each Individual Thing Constitutes Its Holiness

 

"The forms and individual characters of living and growing things, of inanimate beings, of animals and flowers and all nature, constitute their holiness in the sight of God . . . This leaf has its own texture and its own pattern of veins and its own holy shape, and the bass and trout hiding in the deep pools of the river are canonized by their beauty and their strength."

(Thomas Merton)

Photo: Raindrops on Avalanche Lilies, Mt. Rainier National Park, WA, August 4, 2011

Earth is Partly Heaven, and Heaven, Earth

 

" 'Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard,' etc., is applicable here, for earth is partly heaven, and heaven, earth."

(John Muir)

Photo: Rosy Spiraea and 300-foot Comet Falls appearing out of the sky, Mt. Rainier National Park, WA, August 4, 2011

Within Our Inner Core is the Stairway to the Divine Kingdom

"Be at peace with your own soul; then heaven and earth will be at peace with you.  Enter eagerly into the treasure house that is within you, and so you will see the things that are in heaven; for there is but one single entry to them both.  The ladder that leads to the kingdom is hidden within your soul.  Flee from wrongdoing, dive into yourself, and in your soul you will discover the stairs by which to ascend."

(St. Isaac the Syrian, a 7th century Desert Father)

Photo: Ferns and redwood trees in the mist, Redwood National Park, CA, August 1, 2011

Nature is Our Asylum

"Nature is the beautiful asylum to which we look in all the years of striving and conflict as the assured resource when we are driven out of society by boredom or chagrin or persecution or defect of character."

(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Photo: Mountain Bog Birch flaming in autumn colors, with the peaks of the Mummy Range in the background; Comanche Peak Wilderness, CO, September 16, 2011

Love is Not Ingrown

 

"Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction."

  

(Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

Photo: Two crows in a dead snag, Moraine Park, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, September 17, 2011

Echoes Arising Out of Nowhere

 

Sunday night was magical - sitting on a rock outcrop watching the bull elk bugle and the cow elk mew, alternating with owls hooting and a gentle breeze fingering the leaves of the aspen trees.  Many of the calls - especially those arising from across the meadow - sounded quite ethereal.  To me they seemed like the Great Mystery's never-spoken word of love resounding within the vast meadow of his seamless, spacious awareness.  How could such echoes even arise?  Such is the great mystery of life.

Photo: Bull elk at Moraine Park, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, September 17, 2011

Mountain Beauty Makes Our Substance Glow with Joy

"I think that one of the properties of that compound which we call man is that when exposed to the rays of mountain beauty it glows with joy."
 
(John Muir)


Photo: Mountain Bog Birch at Emmaline Lake, Comanche Peak Wilderness, CO, September 16, 2011

Backpacker's Heaven

"Anyone not capable of enjoying camp life in the mountains is in no condition for heaven.  We forget nowadays what we were made for . . . The peace of Nature gets into your heart before you are aware, without effort."

(John Muir)

Photo: My backpacker's camp in Silver Creek Basin, Maroon Bells - Snowmass Wilderness, CO, August 13, 2011 

Trees and Souls are Innately Noble

 

'"Nothing stands up more free from blame in this world than a tree . . . Methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green."  (Henry David Thoreau)

Photo: Joanne gazing up at one of the world's tallest trees, over 350 feet high, Tall Trees Grove, Redwood National Park, CA, August 1, 2011

California Religion

"In the West, Nature seems to carry the whole thrust of the divine.  Established religions have a very shallow footing in the West.  It is as if the California experience of religion is affective, something entering into you in a physical way.  Especially in the coastal region, where there is the great drop-off point and the intensity of the sea, sustained churchgoing is difficult.  Why should we sit in church on a Sunday when God is walking on water out there?"

(William Everson)

Photo: Monkeyflowers and sea stacks, Trinidad State Beach, CA, July 31, 2011

Love Makes Things Glow

 

"When we read, 'And God said: Let there be light,' we are too apt to think only of the light of the sun.  But it is not the sun that makes the day, it is Love.  In this Light of light, rocks and seas and everything is not only illumined, but transfigured and fused and changed into religion."

(John Muir)

Photo: Redwoods glowing in early morning light, Redwood National Park, CA, August 3, 2011

All of Nature is Scripture

"The notion seems to be all but universal that we can know God only by tradition, as if the fountains of inspiration have gone dry, and he has not a single word more to say to us, not another story to tell.  But God is yet writing passages that we can understand and that come within the range of our sympathies . . . , in the world-building activities of grinding glaciers and flowing rivers,  in the painting of the skies, the planting of the forests and gardens, the blowing his volcanoes, always, whether in calm or storm, working out a higher and yet higher beauty . . . Rocks and waters, etc., are words of God and so are humans.  We all flow from one fountain Soul."

John Muir

Photo: Rosy paintbrush, Maroon Bells - Snowmass Wilderness, CO, August 13, 2011