Unimaginable

Hiking Kelly's Mountain Trail

“Look deep
Into the water
Of your nearest stream
For the spirit of it
Will capture you
And you will never need 
To thirst again.”
                John Williams, Look Deep
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Fairy Land

One of the reasons I don’t like watching nature shows is because the narrator almost always ends his narrating by mentioning a threat to these wild areas.

Say for example, I’m watching a show about a pristine untamed area. The wild animals are minding their own business in their wild homes. The creatures, big or small, beautiful and flawless in every curve and line. The trees tall and thick. Strong and ancient. The waters clean and drinkable.
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But, Oh, Oh! Here it comes. It goes something like this. “This area is under growing pressure from industry, and it’s ever increasing need for resources.” 
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Chop, tear, gouge and scrape. Nothing is safe from a culture which sees everything as having a bottom line. Including for ourselves.

​“When Nations grow Old, The Arts grow Cold--
And Commerce settles on every Tree.”
                    William Blake
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Look Out! Here Comes Dominic

There is a poem that brings tears to my eyes. I believe I’ve quoted it before. It’s about the last wolf who is running through a crumbling city. Civilization has collapsed. A person waits for the wolf in their room. They listen to the wolf’s approach. 
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Jalal Taking A Photo

Here’s part of the poem.
“I heard his voice ascending the hill
and at last his low whine as he came
floor by empty floor to the room
where I sat
in my narrow bed looking west, waiting
I heard him snuffle at the door and
I watched
He trotted across the floor.


He laid his long gray muzzle
On the spare white spread
And his eyes burned yellow
His small dotted eye brows quivered


Yes, I said
I know what they have done.”
           Mary TallMountain, The Last Wolf 
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Out Of Focus Photo Of a Bobcat

I remember the night I baled out of theology. I’d been attempting to cope with the study of the stuffy imaginations of the human mind. In a stone hard place where we dissected God and tried to comprehend the comprehensions of theologians and philosophers. This building, filled with mummified air, seemed non-transcendent and unconnected to where my soul wanted to be. Studying God had tired me out, and when the Prof told us that we could take a ten minute coffee break, well, I took a life-time coffee break. 
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Find The Cute Little Face

I remember walking down the hard steps, imagining that I was a wolf, who had escaped from his cage. 
A stone, slung out of David’s sling. 
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“God is an ambiguous word in our language because it appears to refer to something that is known. But the transcendent is unknowable and an unknown God is transcendent, finally, of anything like the name “God” God is beyond names and forms.”
         Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
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Winter In The Forest

One can find great strength in knowing that the Creator is not understandable and is outside our brain’s ability to see beyond opposites and three dimensions. 
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Winter's Back

A person can also drown in this view, but for myself, knowing that the universe is huge beyond my knowledge is a source of strength. Peeking through the invisible veil’s tiny holes is enough to keep me afloat. It allows me to have faith that what I can’t comprehend is rock-solid and authentic. Is where my soul dwells.
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Scene On My Morning Walk

Last Sunday, Judy, Jalal and I hiked part-way up Kelly’s Mountain. It was gorgeous. The snow clung to pencil straight trees. They looked like a line of white hooded monks bordering the trail.

Another Scene On My Morning Walk

When I walk on these trails, and look at the beauty that surrounds me, I try not to think about how much our society’s main belief is to make everything refer back to ourselves. To view all of nature as ours. To see every creature as inferior to our great and overwhelming brain organ.  
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He Loves Them All

On this particular hike, my friend said that she felt as if she was on a fairy trail. In one photograph I took, she mentioned that although our clothes were modern, they didn’t diminish the sense that the photo was not taken in the twenty-first century. It was timeless.
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Another Morning Walk Scene

At one point, she took a picture of a tall and thick tree. When I looked at the photo, I felt that it, in some way, preserved the tree. Immortalized it. It was as if she’d put a ring around its trunk and then it became a representative of everything that exists. All that we can’t put in words. 

​Maybe that’s one reason I take photos. 
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Judy Taking Photo at Broad Cove

“These the Visions of Eternity,
But we see only, as it were, the arm of their garments
When with our vegetable eyes we view these wondrous Visions.”
                            William Blake
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Too Cute