In our concrete world of skyscrapers and noisy streets the soul grows tired. Tired of the artificial brightness of the fluorescent lights that follow you giving a slight aura of cold sterility to the monotony of your daily movement. Manufactured, from the bellows of human ingenuity and resourcefulness to offer nothing more than practicality.

The mountain, the desert mountain stretched in all its glory right in front of you. Unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. A feeling grows from seed inside your heart, it tugs on a part of you that’s been buried under your many layers of dirt-free skin for a long time. She is wild and free, finally able to escape the controlled rigidity of your citified body, regaining a fraction of your ancestor’s ancient connection with the sky, the desert, the air you breathe.

You finally begin to see. To see how much there is to learn and how the books that you take into your mind are only half of the picture. How you must be open to the wisdom that the quiet stillness brings. You must be open to pushing your body to the limits. The ones you constructed to keep yourself inside your safe prison where you sat to watch the world burn around you.

With every labored step, the sweat drips down your forehead, your back, the inside of your knees- a place you didn’t even know you could produce a river of sweat. It is a constant reminder that you are in foreign territory. That the mountain holds power over you in the form of life giving water. It lies at the top of the treacherous narrow winding path and your Nalgene and Camelback become more empty the further you hike. The switchbacks that seem to stretch endlessly into the dusty horizon are the yellow brick road to your land of Oz- the tiny spring. When you begin realize your fragility, you become small. Your ego shrinking like a melting ice cream on a hot day as the silhouette of the mountain surrounds you. You feel what it’s like to be uncertain about the future in the most literal animalistic sense. Your survival and the survival of the millions of years of history that lie in the canyon.

You even being there on the remote trail is hurting the landscape that you are trying to love. But you wonder how can one find wonder and awe when to do so is the very disturbance that leads to destruction, change, exploitation. These questions plague your mind as you struggle to understand the implications of what you and your fellow inhabitants have been doing to the world around you. You wonder what happens when your efforts to love and protect are flawed and fail in a way that is magnificently imperfect. Can we say that it was not in vain because we gave it our very best shot? Can we be forgiven for our inability to understand the vastness?