Welcome! I am a contemplative thinker and photographer from Colorado. In this blog, you'll discover photographs that I've taken on my hiking and backpacking trips, mostly in the American West. I've paired these with my favorite inspirational and philosophical quotes - literary passages that emphasize the innate spirituality of the natural world. I hope you enjoy them!

If you'd like to purchase photo-quote greeting cards, please go to www.NaturePhoto-QuoteCards.com .


In the Spirit of Wildness,

Stephen Hatch
Fort Collins, Colorado

P.S. There's a label index at the bottom of the blog.

Friday, June 20, 2014

Every Creature is an Explosion of Divinity!


Today I hiked two miles uphill in solid snow. When I reached treeline, the snow eased up and the meadows were busting full with thousands of Snow Buttercup blooms. What an intoxicatingly beautiful sight! I don't believe I've ever seen so many in one place. As I meandered through the golden meadows, I was reminded of a line in a Rilke poem. Speaking to a rose, he says: "You were rich enough to be yourself a HUNDRED TIMES in just one flower." 



In the presence of such an abundance of buttercups, I realized that EVERY creature has such a surplus of sacredness that we can realistically understand it to be "a hundred times itself." In other words, every being is an indefinable EXPLOSION of divinity!





Photos: Snow Buttercups on Montgomery Pass, Medicine Bow Mountains / Rawah Range, CO; June 20, 2014
Posted by at
Labels: , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)