As a person who grew up in California, filling my childhood with happy times playing on the seashore and camping and hiking in the many mountain ranges that dapple the state, I found the recent passing of Ivan Doig of particular note.  A long time resident of Montana, Doig is most famous for his 1975 memoir, House of Sky.  In almost lyrical fashion, House of Sky recounts and describes a childhood spent learning about the West and the countless possibilities for adventure and meaning it holds.  It is a paean to the wildness and openness of the Western landscape.
     Montana, Doig's chosen state, seems made to "be" the West.  Its license plates proclaim it to be "Big Sky Country," and it really is.  Driving through the vastness of the state, one comes to see that Montana's sky really is "big," and that the person who composed "America the Beautiful" seems to have written it with Montana in mind.
     I'm not trying to elevate Montana to the top of the American state pantheon (although it clearly contains much remarkable beauty), but rather to make a larger point.  That is, regardless of where one lives in the U.S., the West has always held an allure for them, calling, beckoning, and promising experiences one would not find anywhere else in the States.  It speaks of enormity, it speaks of expanse; it presents life as much bigger than it might otherwise be.
     When I return to California, as I try to do with some regularity, and stand before the ocean, stunned, as always, by the depth and breadth of the open sea, I ever realize that life is more, much more than we imagine it to be.  I realize anew that whether one believes in God or not, he or she cannot help but be overwhelmed by the unfathomable nature of existence.  What is it?  Where did it come from?  What does it mean?
     In truth, if there is a God, existence is explained.  If there is not a God, existence is everything--but totally unexplained--a wondrous experience, like the openness of the West, yet an experience without any inkling of what it really is.