Trekking through the mountains of the American West recently (as I indicated I would be doing), specifically, California's Sierra Nevada, I had much time to think and ponder.  Mountains seem to do that to us.  Rising surreally out of the earth, easelessly piercing the sky with their sculpted tips and summits, standing majestically over the land around them, they make us think of bigger things, greater realities.  They make us wonder how life can be so simple yet so complex.  The innate purity of a mountain day, a day on which the sun is shining, the meadows sparkling, the lakes so unfathomably blue at times exceeds human imagination, moving us to wonder how such things can possibly be.  How can anything be so amazingly beautiful?
    For many, mountains make them think of God.  For others, mountains underscore the remarkable character of an uncreated universe, that from something entirely impersonal such marvel has sprung.  Yet what is perhaps most amazing about mountains is the notion of beauty that seems to inevitably accompany them.  From where does beauty come?  From where do we derive a value like beauty?
     The easy answer is to say that it is the fact of God, that it is the presence of God that ensures the fact of beauty in the world.  Though I cannot disagree with this, I would also say that the real essence (and lesson), that is, the "beauty" of beauty is that in a vast and unfathomable universe it exists.  Whether we say that beauty is relative or absolute, we all marvel that amidst all the wonder and bewilderments of the cosmos, beauty exists.
     Life has worth and meaning beyond what we can, in our individuated and truncated lives, possibly create:  beauty announces the fact of an open world.