At several points in my recent travels West, I had opportunity to hike alone in the mountains.  It was a delight.  Although decades ago I hiked alone extensively, tromping frequently and often through numerous and nameless stretches of wilderness across the continent (and no doubt stirring no small amount of concern for my parents!), looking for time, meaning, and destiny, given the other responsibilities that life has brought me, I do not do so as much.  So it was good to be out again.
     One day, as I was trekking through the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, on my way to a lake deep in the range, I realized that although I had encountered other people on the trail earlier, now I was quite alone.  What a marvel:  in an age when wilderness is more accessible than ever, in a time when increasing numbers of people are taking to the hills (a movement which I applaud greatly), I had found a time and place in which I was alone.
     Breathing deeply, I gazed over the water and the mountains set around it, the mountains that seemed to pierce the sky, a sky whose blueness spoke of depths untold, all spread across a day that seemed, at that moment, endless.
     Was I endless?  Of course not.  Yet like countless others who have moved through mountain landscapes over the centuries, I touched the tendrils of eternity.  I touched the vastness in which we all are set, the inscrutable and lilting feeling of openendedness that moves through our finite experience.  Life, and God, spoke to me in fresh ways. Existence shone more profoundly.  For a  moment, the mystery cracked.
     Yet the mystery of course remains.  We're only passing through; we're only catching what time casts aside.  We're just wayfarers on an unfathomably large sea.  As the existentialists might say, we're alone in the universe.
     So I have a question:  are we really alone?
     On your answer hinges the entirety of your perception of existence.