Saturday, April 10, 2010

Why I hike - Part 3

Fold an 8 1/2 X 11 piece of paper in half, lengthwise, then open it up to form a V. Make it the color of dead leaves. Never mind, make the sheet of paper out of earth, and cover it with crushed leaves. Then put rocks on the surface, large boulders as big as a house, small pebbles, and everything in between. But don't spread them out evenly, make it random, but save a lot for the center of the V. Then put in trees, hundreds of trees, with leaves just beginning to open in the spring, but so many of them that you can barely see the sky. What you can see of the sky is so blue as to almost be black with a few small puffs of white barely moving. Now raise on end of the paper so that it is like a hill with a 60 foot waterfall at the top and a large stream on the bottom. So much water is coming off the waterfall through the rocks in the V that it is all you can hear.

Now find a flat rock about halfway up and take off your day pack and take out a sandwich and drink for lunch and just sit there, in the quiet roar of the water and the cool warmth of the sun.

For fifteen minutes yesterday my world was peace and beauty.

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