Red Peak, Eagles Nest Wilderness, Colorado // Mountains always have a different character when you get up close. What you lose in towering massive silence you gain in an explosion of detail and variety: jagged peaks revealing themselves as precarious piles of rock, being held up by the magic inevitability of the angle of repose. From a distance it almost seems impossible. How could something so massive, so solid be so complex, so chaotic? How can such obvious order be so illusory? I suppose it's just like human nature to miss the rocks for the mountains.
North Routt County, Colorado // Being alive is a lot like being an improper fraction. Here we are, these little gangly amalgams of atoms, molecules, cells--systems layered on each other in time and space. Automatons perpetuating themselves, only separated from the rest of the physical universe by our superficially unusual skill at self-replication. This much is objective. But somewhere in those systems, those layers, some cosmic accident gave us the ability to ignore all of that, to be subjective. We have the unique power of ignorance, of being unable to comprehend the whole of reality, of projecting our hopes and fears and imaginations onto the thematically blank canvas around us, to see not less but more than there is, more than the sum of physical parts, to experience beauty, to experience anything at all. We humans, nature's honor-roll idiots, faced with the whole 1 of creation, see 3/2. At least, in my opinion.
Willow Lakes, Eagles Nest Wilderness, Colorado // "Here, this, is It. The world as it is, is Heaven, I'm looking for a Heaven outside what there is, it's only this poor pitiful world that's Heaven. Ah, if I could realize, if I could forget myself and devote my meditations to the freeing, the awakening, and the blessedness of all living creatures everywhere I'd realize what there is, is ecstasy." From Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums.
