Only last week, I was wrapping up my final backpack of the summer, this one a trek with my youngest sister in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California.  We had a lovely time, really, a lovely time hiking through the mountains together:  a wonderful gift!  Though we have both been going to the Sierra since we were children, finding the time, as we "age," to step away from the campers who come to Yosemite and moving ourselves into the high country, is always a treat.  In the high country, the land of flower dappled tundra and quiescent lake, of sculpted peaks towering over dense river valleys, of entirely  cloudless and ever blue sky, we find another world, a world which, as my sister remarked on our first night out, that is "real."
     Not that the world we inhabit outside the mountains is unreal; it is quite real.  Yet in the world of the mountains, a world in which what is important is gazing across a glistening lake or taking in the alpen glow of a sunset, we find life distilled into its essential purity:  sheer beauty.  It's the beauty of nature, it's the beauty of our companions, it's the beauty of God.
     As the famous Scottish mountaineer John Muir observed upon hiking through the Sierra for the first time, "These mountains are the finest temples to God."
     You may believe, you may not.  But I suspect you'd be hard pressed to deny the fact of a beauty you cannot fully understand.