Today I sincerely wished I was once again perched on the rock in this photo. I remember, as if it was yesterday, the day I hiked up that trail and found that spot. It resonates within me with crystal clarity. That hike was my first experience of tramping on my own two feet up a trail through glacier-topped mountain peaks to the place where rocks and sky become one.
I live in the east-central part of Canada, home to the Canadian Shield, ancient granite formations of hills and chasms carved by glaciers from eons ago. Great hunks of magnetic, blue-grey rock millions of years old that hum with a deep, abiding stability.
But on the day of this hike, I was on the other side of Canada, in the west, home of the beautiful Rocky Mountains. The Rockies are young, relative to the Shield, and I could feel a dancing, lightning-like vibration emanating from the rock. It felt like tiny electric shocks where skin touched rock. These mountains are very much alive, restless, and on the move.
I had meandered off-trail, rounded a curve of boulders, and found myself in a place out of time. I could see for hundreds of miles in every direction. The locals say that days like this are rare, as the highest peaks are most often obscured by weather systems. It was a gift.
I have hiked trails, perched on rocks, but this was the highest elevation I had yet achieved. It was beautiful and rugged and awe-inspiring. Yet as I stopped in that spot, the air had an unnatural stillness, as if I had entered a void. The wind had stopped; no creatures were stirring. I could hardly move my lungs to breathe. It felt like all of life was suspended, and my body was a vibrating bridge between earth and sky, human and soul, finite and infinite. Pure sensation. Something within me soared instantly to a greater communion and clarity.
I could use some of that clarity today, for I am currently at the opposite end of the spectrum. Stuck down a rabbit hole! I am working through the first draft of a new book. This is only the second book I have written, and the process of writing books is still quite new to me. Yet I recognize this rabbit hole from my first book and know inspiration will arrive and out I will pop.
It is fascinating how the process of writing this book is the same as the last book, despite the different subject and text. Perhaps it is because I am the same person doing the writing each time. It is not the story struggling to be written, it is me fighting through the layers of my humanness to set it free. To leap above the linear progression of thought, logic, and analysis. To find my way back to the spiraling, circling, rippling expansion of feeling and sensation.
All we ever need to know is found through our senses. First, we sense. Then we know. Next, we think, in an attempt to define and describe what we know, ultimately, in full circle, to share the feeling and the sensations.
Up the mountain, down the rabbit hole, and back to Earth
