Waking just at dawn on the first full day in Glacier National Park, provided the opportunity for doing my morning sit on a bench overlooking Lake McDonald.  The cool weather warranted a light jacket, as I walked out to the bench –  the big sky still faint with the night lights of the distant stars.  The still surface of the large glacial lake, grey in the hue of the dimly lit horizon.  The wind moving but not wreckless.   So much was out there and in here – this wilderness sky with stillness that was anything but stagnant. 

There was a collective depth of conscious awareness and nonlocal communion immediately present that seemed to cross over linear time.  Caution in cadence, responsive with clarity.  Voices feeding and being fed, hurting and healing, teaching and listening, sobering yet still welcoming.  The sense…I am this place…I am not this place.  This place is… now!  The stillness that holds its own atmosphere while simultaneously waking over the permeable shores that allow and engage the transmission. 

Was this that intercedere, the yielded between that Cynthia cites from Helen Luke’s book Old Age, where solitary work flows out to join all other work at the same vibrational level[i] The interacting web… this mysterious middle that activates…

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Leaving the Lake McDonald lodge cabin where we were staying, after a quick breakfast and coffee, Leonard and I headed out of the parking lot and across the Going to the Sun Road (GTTSR) to the trailhead up to MT Brown Lookout.  This was the hike that the couple whom we met on the beach the night before had recommended.  It was described as one of the most steepest and grueling trails in Glacier National Park, as described in the Falcon Guide book I was using.[ii]  As we left the parking lot, if we squinted, we could just make out the dark dot on the false peak of Mt Brown, which was our destination, a fire lookout tower that was situated 4,305 feet higher than the trail head we were just beginning. 

You activate your imaginal citizenship by walking the path persistently and consistently.  How you get there is where you’ll arrive. [iii]

5.4 miles up and the same 5.4 back.  It would be in and out and everything in between.  The first part of the trail was moderately steep and led its way through a wooded forest.  If it stayed like this, it seemed that it would be doable.  At marker .7 miles, it all changed.  The trail took off to the left and what we would learn through series after series of switchbacks – straight up!  There were times when it would have been helpful – to say the least – to have had hiking poles.   At times, it almost seemed as if the pitch of the ascent made for our heads being as close to the ground as our knees.  We leaned into it slowly but with no small amount of humility.  We were silent but moving.  Yes, Cynthia was right, “the feet, the moving center, get it before the mind does” (p, 114)!

Flying crickets accompanied us along the ascent, and seemed to cheer us on with a clicking noise that I would assume was made by their wings.  They also may have been helping us to make noise as to avoid surprising a bear along the way!  That’s what we were telling ourselves anyway. 

As the sun continued to rise in the sky, we could see an ever-growing expanse of burnt forest from a raging fire a couple years prior.  The contortions of the trees still standing, burnt and bent were complimented by those which had already fallen.  Fire had burned ferociously and left scars.  It was also clear that something was released in this energetic exchange.   Through the burnt forestline, from this perspective, Lake McDonald could now be seen below.  The grey hue of the dawn in its waters was now sapphire blue!  Fire and water, height and depth!

The secret of our identity does not lie in the outer form or in how successfully we manipulate the forms of the sensible world.  But rather it lies in how were able to set them (and ourselves)  aflame to reveal the inner quality of their aliveness ( Eye of the Heart, 50-51).

There was life in the standing burnt trunks around us.  There was aliveness even in the fallen and swaying.  Roots from trees grew out from rocks, diving down and outward,  entraining with the inner world of the mountain at those shockpoints suddenly revealed.  Height and depth, leaning and holding, burning and falling, giving and receiving, and yes…flowering. 

We are transformers (Eye of the Heart, p. 44)

 Transformers alive all around and within us. Exchanging upward and downward, depth and height, and laterally leaning… just touching at a point somewhere… tangentially…in The middle.

When we reached the top, there were several people there.  A young woman from New Zealand had brought along a portable coffee maker and we shared a cup with her and her friend on the catwalk of the lookout with the majestic peaks surrounding us.  Two young men with their mom were busy taking pictures and we learned of their own stories of brokenness and healing from divorce (the mother) and a motor cycle accident (the younger son).  The young man was still recovering from the brain injury he had suffered as a result of a motorbike stunt.  His older brother and his mother obviously adorned him with care and support. 

Small details in a vast landscape make an unalterable and indefatigable difference, an irreversible contribution to abundance without preference. 

After resting under the gaze of this horizon, we took stock of our water supply, now greatly diminished, and began our descent.  The afternoon clouds made art of the sky, as each footstep brought increasing discomfort to our hips.  And it was straight down, through the same territory, but of course not the same at all.  It was another exchange.  The pain of arising, now being matched by the pain of descent, diminishment.  And yes, still the fire remnants all around and within us.

I wondered if we could be with each step, paying for our arising, our individuality, lessening as much as possible the suffering of our common father.  There were times when I realized that our prior (physical) conditioning may have not been ‘optimal,’ but here we were, stubbing our toes, tripping on jutting stones and outgrown roots, joyfully making the downward path, as much as possible accepting the accompanying pain.  Was there something being exchanged?  Perhaps the wrong question.  “How you get there is where you’ll be.”

Three hours up and two down.  The total hike along with the vistas atop, about 6 hours.  Yet, it was not so much an experience from here to there as much as it was an engagement with the NOW in each step.  Each footstep up and down the mountain, caressing the earth in a singular unique touch of flesh on boot and soil and rock.  Our feet were sore and they plodded on in hope for the cold waters of Lake McDonald.  Another moment of celebration of travel, water, coolness and refreshment.

After spending time in the water and rocks along the shoreline of Lake McDonald, near the cabin where we were staying, we decided to make our first ascent up the GTTSR.  In the late afternoon of our second day in Glacier National Park, we began our ascent up the West side of the impressively engineered 48-mile long road.  We have been down this road so many times over the last 6 trips to the park in the past 25 years, yet each time, it is something new and fresh.  There is both familiarity and wondrous emergence each time.    This time was no different, but then again, it was. 

“Yahweh, my Lord is my strength, he will make my feet as light as a doe’s
            and set my steps on the heights.”       (HAB 3: 19, New Jerusalem)

The road continues above Lake McDonald and follows Lake McDonald Creek, which pours into the Lake for a few miles, and then begins to climb rather steeply.  Heaven’s Peak, one of the most prominent mountains seen from the road and from many vantage points in the park was first present in our left-hand view from the jeep, and then at the hairpin curve switchback in the road, which is called the Loop, suddenly Heavens Peak appears on the right, as we continued our ascent toward the Continental Divide and Logans Pass.  The narrowness of the road is striking if not frightening, especially for first-timers.  Leonard drove it as if he knew every turn already. 

The perspectives of the mountains as the road climbs changes constantly.  In fact, for the first time, on this trip, I realized that some mountains that I took to be separate ones were simply the same mountain scene from a different angle, a different side, and a different altitude.  Oberlin is the name of one of those mountains.  For some miles during the climb it appears as a great monolithic stone ship moored in eternity , yet one still moving, changing.  By the time we reach the Garden Wall area, Mt Oberlin is a great wall with a lush green fringe buttressing Logan Pass with an entirely different ‘look,’  like Rumi’s great pachyderm that cannot be fully grasped by any one blind person’s touch.

Here we are in a jeep, driving along an extraordinarily designed roadway into the heart of a glaciated mountainscape formed many years ago by a traumatic tectonic push that broke and pushed a tremendous  block of stone 42 miles over the adjoining rock strata.  A sacred place for the native peoples of this land is now a national park.  So many names and categories, and manipulations and marginalizations.  This Big THIS!  But indeed, whom is looking at whom?  And from Where? 

And yet, in all this ‘long view,’ there is that notion of apprivosier that Cynthia speaks of in her book with reference to St. Exupery’s THE LITTLE PRINCE.  This apprivosier, rather than simply meaning a ‘taming’ or ‘domesticating,’ has more to do with overlapping connotations of gentling, caring for, and creating a sense of specialness.[iv]  This is precisely the SOMETHING or other that these mountains are in being and asking in return.  What a responsibility of exchange. 

Here it was, this day: the upward and downward transmission that both together are required in order to cross that “hesitation point” and the infusion of a different kind of energy that flows in a different direction.[v]  Downward we went back into Lake McDonald valley, full from our first full day here, and all the more lighter and transforming in being. 

“That is the enormous cosmic gift potentially ours to give as we become increasingly willing to set fire to tallow-and-wick of our outer lives in order to release the heat and fragrance coiled within”

                                                                                                                                      (Eye of the Heart, 51)

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[i] Cynthia Bourgeault, Eye of the Heart: A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm (Shambhala: 2020), 147.

[ii] Erik Molvar, Hiking Glacer and Waterton Lakes National Park (Falcon: 1999), 50.

[iii] Eye of the Heart, 112.

[iv] Ibid., 132.

[v] Ibid, 51.