Yosemite's Cathedral Lake is a perfect embodiment of meditation practice!

While at Yosemite, my wife and I had an absolutely magical afternoon retreat on upper Cathedral Lake. Here is a passage from my journal:

"It's one of those timeless Sierra afternoons - neither long nor short - that Muir talks about so passionately in his journals . . . "This, I may say, is the first time I have been at church in California" . . . Meditating here, on this gleaming peninsula of granite jutting out into the lake, I now have a new standard for my Wilderness Insight Meditation practice. The open lake and the deep silence are embodiments of the spaciousness of my awareness. The gentle breeze that comes and goes but always remains in the distant trees is the mutual love and bliss of God and Goddess which permeates my meditation. The chuckling of the lake water against the shoreline is the movement of my thoughts, today taking on a soothing quality, as though their rise and fall are the fingers of Mother Earth, caressing my heart from inside. The sound of passing airplanes, their bass drone descending gradually like notes on a musical scale, are the voice of silence, dissolving gradually and serenely into the horizon beyond. Raucous Clark's Nutcracker calls embody the craziness of many of my thoughts and emotions. Chickadee songs appear as those thoughts which are light and joyful. Sunshine disappearing into cloud cover and then reappearing once again: this is a manifestation of my own clear insight into the echo-quality of thoughts and emotions, an awareness which then turns cloudy as I momentarily latch onto them, and then remember to release them all back into the sunlight once again. This is also true - par excellence - of the constant play of light on massive Cathedral Peak just across the lake, which embodies the open screen of my mind upon which the cloud-like sequences of thoughts continually play: appearing, increasing, and then dissipating back once again into open awareness . . . Ah, how wonderful is this afternoon!"

Photos: (Top) Lemmon's Paintbrush, Upper Cathedral Lake, and Cathedral Peak; (Middle) View to the east side of the lake; (Bottom) Female Mallard Duck resting in the grass. All three photos were taken in Yosemite National Park on July 23, 2015