mountains beyond mountains

Yosemite Mist against the indomitable walls of the Captain.

Enjoying a sublime serenity of watching the sun set from the top of the world.

"No matter where your interest lies, you will not be able to accomplish anything unless you bring your deepest devotion to it." Matsuo Basho

Northover Ridge is an amazing Ridge walk and we really need to go back when we can see it! The fog and wind and sideways rain made it more challenging . When we got to the very narrow sections with death drops on either side (with 40 lb packs) we crawled across on hands and knees, haha! (And double checked our gps to make sure we were actually on the route).

What’s your favorite nap spot?

Tranquility.

Smoke covering the mountains in Glacier National Park.

“You constantly feel the abyss pulling at your back. To resist takes a tremendous conscious effort; you don’t dare let your guard down for an instant. The siren song of the void puts you on edge; it makes your movements tentative, clumsy, herky-jerky. But as the climb goes on, you grow accustomed to the exposure, you get used to rubbing shoulders with doom, you come to believe in the reliability of your hands and feet and head.

By and by your attention becomes so intensely focused that you no longer notice the raw knuckles, the cramping thighs, the strain of maintaining nonstop concentration. A trance-like state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence—the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes—all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose.”

“I don't ask for the meaning of the song of a bird or the rising of the sun on a misty morning. There they are, and they are beautiful.”    

- Pete Hamill

“No matter where you go, the mountains call you back.”

- Karan Bajaj, The Seeker

“My foot slips on a narrow ledge; in that split second, as needles of fear pierce heart and temples, eternity intersects with present time. Thought and action are not different, and stone, air, ice, sun, fear, and self are one.

What is exhilarating is to extend this acute awareness into ordinary moments, in the moment-by-moment experiencing of the lammergeier and the wolf, which, finding themselves at the center of things, have no need for any secret of true being. In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us…the present moment. The purpose of mediation practice is not enlightenment: it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life.”