3/1/16

Sunday, Annie and I went hiking at Smith Rock on a weekend getaway for our twelve year anniversary. Smith Rock is a beautiful cathedral of peaks and cliffs in the midst of central Oregon's desert plains. As it happened, the first reading at church that morning was the passage from Exodus where Moses goes up the mountain and hears the voice of God. Many ancient peoples from around the world held mountains to be sacred places, and standing upon the summit of Smith Rock, I could easily understand why. In that quiet and solitude, surveying the natural beauty of the landscape surrounding me as far as the eye could see, I felt at once both insignificant and the centre of the universe. And in that moment, I felt so overwhelmingly thankful for everyone and everything in my life and wanted to share that feeling with everyone I knew. But the feeling faded once I was back home and separated from the conditions that gave rise to it; and the question that I now find myself faced with is, How can I cultivate that same kind of feeling in my day-to-day life?