A few years ago, I backpacked through a part of the Rockies with two dear college friends.  As I reflect on our trip, I am struck that, in an eventuality of which I had no inkling beforehand, we ended up following a trail on which my wife and I had hiked forty years before.  It was mind boggling, really, to revisit a trail so full of memories, a trail that represented our first foray into the wilderness together, all those decades in the past.

     But the mountains had not changed.  The peaks were as jagged as ever, the meadows still overflowed with wildflowers, and the lake, our destination, as lovely and serene as it was forty years before.  It was a picture of timelessness, really, a picture of the incredible ability of a landscape, when untouched by human hands, to sustain itself, presenting fresh wonder for every successive generation of backpacker to tread its depths.

     

    One of my Colorado companions believed in God; one did not.  The one who did not often struggled to balance his sense that something spiritual ran through this world with the notion that, on the other hand, this could not possibly be.

    Who is right?  Well, it seems odd that we humans believe we can entertain thoughts of the ineffable without also entertaining thoughts about why we, material and finite beings.

    Many years before, as I backpacked through Alaska's Brooks Range in 1972, I emerged from a thicket of willow bushes to see a grizzly sow and her cubs some fifty yards away.  Happily, the sow didn't seem to detect my presence.  As I quietly slipped away, however, I thought of how wonderful it was that this family of grizzlies was able to continue its ways, unbothered by human intrusion:  all sense of time and chronology vanishes.