to see the world in a grain of sand & heaven in a wild flower. hold infinity in the palm of your hand & eternity in an hour..

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Photos Taken @ Grand Teton National Park.

Earlier this summer, I had the amazing opportunity to spend a week with my family exploring the gorgeous Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks in Wyoming.  “Blown away” is an understatement for the feelings that consumed me during this incredible adventure.  I looked out the window of our rental car on the first day driving into Yellowstone and every bit of scenery seemed to belong on a postcard.  These drives in and out of the parks proved particularly time consuming as I often could not help but ask that we pull over so that I could get out of the car and take in what I was seeing (and try to capture it in a photograph.)  The sky was so blue, fields shaded like a watercolor painting, mountains so ominous, forests so vast, yet inviting.  I was witnessing  on the grandest scale I had ever experienced, nature in its true and perfect form.   I felt close to God (whoever or whatever that may be) and really, really happy during the days we spent hiking and exploring the parks.  My excitement and enjoyment honestly surprised me.  I had never felt those emotions simply from spending time outdoors.  Sure, I have always loved a day at the beach or a picnic in the park, but to be truly eager just to see what I would discover around the bend of a trail, that was certainly new to me.  

On the second day of our trip, my family hiked a trail in the Jenny Lake region of Grand Teton national park called Moose Ponds.  It was a loop trail of tall grass, beautiful birch trees, small streams of water, and many various wild flowers.  These flowers had colors and textures that seemed to form a bouquet more perfect than any florist could fashion.  Within this setting, I felt intensely lucky and wonderful to be a part and parcel of the planet Earth.  My life and my being: my worries, regrets, bridges burned, successes & failures, seemed insignificant.  I felt very small.  But I also felt undeniably connected to the oneness of all living things; I was a part of the world just as they were.  My role was quite different from that of a wild flower, but we were both alive in this strange, mysterious and colorful place.  During these moments on the trail, I found myself effortlessly able to concentrate most of my energy and focus on the beauty that surrounded me and be very present.  This notion of being completely present at during a moment keeps popping up in what I have been reading recently.  This past summer I read Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Wolfe tells the true tale of Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters as they set out across the country in the early 1960s to inform America’s youth about the benefits that they believed LSD could have to “open” one’s brain to perceive the world in a more enlightened way. It seems that it eventually became clear to these acid diehards that what they were really striving for through their drug trips was the feeling that they were completely one with their Earth and surroundings for a moment in time.  A moment of being completely present seemed to be often just out of reach for most, however.  Ken Kesey reflected: “Live in the moment.  Lots of good heads said it.  I tried.  I devoted much time and much energy.  To find that those good heads had been tricked-that simple trick of I was right about living in the moment but we can never get in the moment!”  Another work that I read this summer, Self-Reliance written in 1841 by the wonderful philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, strangely has many of the same notions of striving for those moments of complete presentness.  Emerson writes, “But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to see the future.  He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present above time”.  

Sometimes we catch ourselves in a moment where very briefly, we are completely happy and satisfied.  This happiness radiates from our core and we are not thinking, just feeling.  We just are. These rare moments are often so strange and uncommon to us that we can remember them for a long time after they are over.  During these fleeting moments, are we are as Emerson suggests “present above time” or as William Blake suggests holding “infinity” in our hands- time does not exist outside of ourselves?  Maybe so.  Or perhaps it is as Ken Kesey suggests, that we can never really be totally one with a moment-our complete presentness is always just slightly out of reach. Maybe it doesn’t matter- because maybe the point is that we should at least strive to slow down sometimes and be content with what life has given us right now, at this very moment.

<3 ang.