On nature
There’s so much I can’t understand about the search for the divine, but I often find myself feeling it when I am in nature. Einstein said it best in his beautiful letter, The World As I See It:
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity.”
Puerto Rico
There are moments when you want to channel Walt Whitman and sound your barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world and declare, “I am man. I exist. I can conquer.” Then there are moments when nature dwarfs the need to proclaim our identity by demanding our silence with its magnificent beauty. In Puerto Rico, the moments of silence were deafening. I felt it on our tour of the El Yunque rainforest, listening to the cooing of coqui frogs and the wet dripping of rain. Just like back home in the Pacific Northwest, I noted.
I felt it as we navigated our kayaks through the bioluminescent waters of Laguna Grande in the pitch darkness, surrounded by thick mangrove trees, when all that could be heard was the swooshing of our paddles. All that could be seen with our naked eyes was the flashes of neon light particles in the water produced by the ripples. Left stroke, right stroke, left stroke. We paddled for what felt like miles.
Finally, we reached the circular clearing. I could barely make out the mangroves that outlined the perimeter; the lagoon must have been several hundred yards wide. I looked up at the starry night and felt transported into a dream. Knowing that our cameras could never capture the beauty of this scene, I craned my neck and kept my gaze upward, trying to fill my widened eyes with the panorama. Can this moment stretch on forever? I blinked.
Yosemite
Outside the city,
(Yes, there is life beyond there)
The silence settles.
—
Here, you cease to find,
Right and Wrong; Ego; the Self.
Can we stay longer?
—
In the valley of
Granite and sequoia groves,
We found rare respite.
Hakone
Nature has no desires —
It does not wish to win, to impress, to please, to conquer;
Nature simply is.
Existence itself is already a blessing.
We are here to experience all of it and we cannot leave here with any of it.