To be subsumed and not consumed.

Thank you for your comments. I didn't know everyone knew so much more about me than I do. Haha.

Today I climbed Mt. Garfield for the first time. Two of the youths took me. It was a lovely, powerful experience pregnant with significance.

We began with the sun hard on our right side. With a slow pace and frequent breaks, we had time to make idle conversation. Kyle talked of dirt bikes and Mary of food, but we shared several noteworthy sights with a lazy fingerpoint and brief grunts of appreciation.

The sky clouded over and we stopped sweating, but took no fewer breaks. We admired flowering cacti and denigrated ugly bushes, and we trudged on.

We reached a field where grass and thistles waved with frantic applause for our small group. There we took turns climbing rocks and posing as supermen.

Passing on from there the wind blew with incredible force. Words were swallowed up and lost their usefulness. We remained silent, and our path became a conversation of clumsy grips and shared slips. We smiled at each other and I was glad in my heart.

Soon the wind blew dust in our eyes and between our teeth. At times the wind helped us up hills; other times it cooled us from beneath our baggy shorts. On a ledge, sediment was blown onto our bodies at painful speeds. We turned around, shut our eyes and pursed lips and stood, stolid as statues, facing the way from which we came.

Facing east.

At the top we were elated and fatigue melted while we took silly pictures. We shared the terror of looking over the edge, and then we left. We drew on shallow cave walls with charcoal and with dreams of confused anthropologists finding our marks. We took pictures of horse dung. My feet bled and we were glad in our hearts.

Oh, how wonderful to be caught up, to be surrounded, to be enveloped, to be subsumed by beauty and by God!