Those of us who visit wild places the way others visit churches and concert halls visit because we return transfigured, recomposed, exalted and humbled at the same time, enlarged and dissolved in something larger at the same time. We visit because there we undergo some essential self-composition in the poetry of existence, though its essence rarely lends itself to words.

~ Maria Popova from, https://www.brainpickings.org/2021/05/25/thoreau-walden-nature/

I’d never thought of it that way. But, maybe it is just that. There’s a definite feeling of dissolution I occasionally experience out climbing. I have been far off the trail, and perhaps the feeling is more common farther off the trail. But I’ve also experienced it standing in a parking lot, say, next to Niagara Falls. It’s a feeling of deep stillness. A feeling that all is right as rain. All of our recorded history is less than a blink in geological time scale… so there’s certainly plenty of time, at my scale, to pause right here—wherever that is, be it a mountain or desk top.

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