I consider Mount Rainier to be the most beautiful mountain in America. Its massive size, multitudinous glaciers, stunning wildflower gardens and lush old-growth forests make it the stuff that wilderness dreams are made of. In fact, "The Mountain" is so beautiful that I find myself compelled to drive 1200 miles each summer to camp, hike and photograph there for the better part of a week.
However, Mount Rainier is also one of the most dangerous mountains in America. It is, after all, a volcano - a fact that becomes evident when we recall that the next volcano south - Mount St. Helens - erupted violently in 1980. Rainier also happens to contain the most glacial ice of any mountain in America. The havoc that lahars - volcanic mudflows that consist of a mixture of ash, gas, ice and heat - would wreak on nearby towns in the event of an eruption could be utterly devastating.
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/translating-uncle-sam/stories/which-us-volcanoes-are-likely-to-erupt-next
How can so much beauty and so much potential danger occur in the same place? As the poet Rilke once wrote, "We are so awed, because beauty just barely disdains to annihilate us." On a spiritual level, intense beauty - like that of Rainier - possesses the ability to "melt" our individual identity in the heat of desire we feel for it, enabling us thereby to attain union with the Divine Reality of which that beauty is a part. Here, of course, it is the ego-self that is momentarily destroyed, allowing us to attain to a much more expansive and liberating identity. We might, in fact, put our ego-annihilating response to beauty in terms of intense JOY. John Muir once spoke of it in this way:
"We are now fairly into the mountains, and they are into us. What bright, seething white-fire enthusiasm is bred in us - without our help or knowledge - a perfect influx into every pore and cell of us, fusing, vaporizing, by its heat until the boundary walls of our heavy flesh tabernacle seem taken down and we flow out and diffuse into the very air. Now I am no longer a shepherd, but a free bit of everything!" It sounds like a volcanic eruption of the heart, doesn't it!
While I pray that we might escape the physical danger that the beauty of a mountain like Rainier embodies, I also ask that we - on a deeper level - might allow our passion and enthusiasm for the intense beauty of life - including the beauty of other people and cultures - to aid us in the quest for divine union! Indeed, that is actually a major motivation for shooting and posting THIS continual lahar-stream of Photo-Quotes!
Photos: Reflection Lake, Magenta Paintbrush, and a Pasqueflower, with Mt. Rainier in the background; Paradise area; Mount Rainier National Park, WA; July 26, 2014
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