HAWN FAWN

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

At the edge of the world, you're suddenly faced with some hard-blowing realizations that can either shake you awake or stir fear into your blood stream and pump it all the way to your heart, stopping it cold.  We are at the capstone of the Holocene, and I am standing, literally, on talus shifted and eroded during the Pleistocene - nearly 2.5 million years difference.  The Sun, a star gone into supernovae, is a mass of Helium and Hydrogen and dust that exploded into existence 4.6 billion years ago, is alive now, is radiating light and heat presently, on my skin, over my head, in my eyes.  And here I am, surrounded by 4600-year-old Methuselah Bristlecone pines.  Here I am, 23-years-young, and only a speck in the eternal timeline, an ephemeral glob of molecules, blood, and organs wrapped in porcelain skin, a non representative piece in the history of existence and evolution.  This can make a person feel small and insubstantial, or, it can make you appreciative of the way the stories of past and present entwine with one another.  

The absence of light does many strange things to people and places.  For one, it makes scaling mountains via winding roads more intimidating than it really is.  Under the cloak of night, before reaching the peak, there are no stars to use as guidance, and your headlights are barely bright enough to help you see five meters ahead.  There are no railings on either side, only a sharp plummet to the bottom hidden under a canopy of greyed leaves.  You climb another couple thousand feet and still no signs of stars, light, or life.  An endless road traveled in a light-lacking night can change a person, even if it's not something permanent.  I remember accepting death and being well aware that my heart would probably stop from the rush of adrenaline before my head collapsed against the windshield, should we lose footing on the road and dive down, down down.  But I also remember feeling especially fearful that we'd never stop falling, that we'd only be engulfed by this opposite-of-light monster and it was ironically so claustrophobic.

Finally, though, at 6000 feet, we reached or destination.  In the dark, I blindly set up camp, though making sure to pitch my tent in the middle of everyone else's just for safe measures, and hopped into my sleeping bag.  I made sure the rain fly was detached - there were probably thirty billion stars in the sky that night, enough to have sensibly weighed down our entire universe if gravity existed in space, and I wanted to be blanketed by all of them.  I think I fell asleep at around 5am that morning.  At 6am, almost exactly, the sun crept into the sky and literally, before my eyes, the entire scene I had imagined during the night changed.  We had unknowingly set up camp in a small clearing of pine trees; the tents were huddled in the middle with the trees hugging us in a 360-degree circle.  I walked half a mile to get used to my surroundings.  This place was beautiful.  It was beyond what I had fathomed.  I remember feeling anxious: I wanted everyone to wake up and see what we had stumbled upon.  And I wanted them to be as much in love with this place as I already was.

But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.

Vincent Van Gogh