“…my required cosmic contribution is exacted not at the hour of my death but in the ongoing alchemy of my life through the catalytic force of my conscious work.”[i]

On our fourth day in Glacier National Park in September 2020, we awoke gladly to clear skies on Lake McDonald.  I took my morning sit by the edge of the Lake, bright and brisk, but a welcome difference from the morning before, which was cold and windy.  After spending a leisurely morning drinking coffee in the socially-distanced lobby area of the lodge awaiting the temperatures to rise outside, we decided that we would drive over to the Apgar area of the park after checking out of the lodge and rent a canoe to take out on Lake McDonald.

Leonard gleefully led his canoe out to the shores of Lake McDonald, while I willingly stayed on shore to watch his journey and take in the scenery.

I have always had a deep interest in locating mountains, and was so happy to find a mountain guide that actually allowed me to do just that.  As I glanced at the guide, it occurred to me that the very naming of these glaciated mountains was more than a bit presumptuous. They had been here for so long, carved out thousands of years ago.  It seemed feebly naïve and somewhat narcissistic to try to name them.

As I watched Leonard paddling out on this 10-mile long lake, carved out by the grinding of ice and rock pushed forward and downward by gravity and tectonics, it occurred to me what great force and labor was shining through this spectacular vista.  The long duration which stood here in this presence before my eyes was not yet finished.  This snapshot was just that – a moment of alchemical movement undetectable but shot through with an unimagined cosmic dynamism.  What was this movement?  And in all its grandeur of manifestation, there was and is this movement still not stopping. 

Going back to Cynthia Bourgeault’s Eye of the Heart book, I could not help but wonder if this is not precisely that ‘dying before you die,’ which if we let it sink in a bit, really means that living is dying.

The strangeness of this is unnerving; that this mountain range surrounding beautiful Lake McDonald was not a monument to death only, but death and life, or more precisely, dying and living – not separate but polarities of a single converging unity.  Stone and water – both moving together, giving and taking – flexible rigidity and sturdy steady movement, in ice and rock, in water and mountain – not causally linear but radially energetic.

When Leonard returned ashore with the canoe, he described an experience that he had while on the water.  He had paddled over to where the lake’s endshore turns to make its long 10-mile trek into the park, and rested his paddle on the canoe.  Staring up into the sky and the mountains, he described how he felt a deep stillness welling up from the Lake beneath the boat.  Yet within this stillness, there was an upward field of movement that seemed to lift the boat.  It was not just that the boat seemed to be lifting up, but the lake itself was rising as one to meet the mountains in the sky.  It was both exhilarating and unnerving as he described it.  But also wonderful and even familiar.  Somehow a great cosmic yet intimate exchange of downward and upward.

Are we not destined to be more than observers in this beauty, but somehow to be consciously present to and responsible for it in our personal and collective lives?

“…the names of God lie coiled within the physical forms of things; our particular and uniquely human task is to spring the trap and set them free.”[ii]

After I took my turn at the canoe – a much shorter trip than Leonard’s, we decided to drive up into the park again along the 50-mile Going-To-The-Sun Road, to see how much snow had fallen along the gorgeous roadway.  The majesty of the mountains now dusted with the snowfall from the day prior again whispered of this exchange of upward and downward movement that always leaves its residue upon all things.

The smallness of the vehicles on the road compared to the vastness of the mountains was intense.

Yet, even as we climbed into the Logan Pass area of the road, it occurred to me how we as humans have made our own contribution, for good or bad, in the architectural design of this roadway, which included dynamite and death, with the result now of human trekking, which includes appreciation, conservation as well as plunder and  over-crowding.

The suffering of the mountains and their glaciers have carved out an unfathomable beauty, but perhaps more than that, we as humans may be called to task by these cosmic forces not only in our humble existence but our dire responsibility for the well-being of all of our environments – the landscape and soulscape of the cosmos, which is nothing other than ourselves.  An intentionality not just to do no harm but to actually bear up the suffering that may be ours to hold.

“If conscious labor increases our capacity to stay present, intentional suffering radically increases the heartfulness of that presence…It invites us to step up to the plate and willingly carry a piece of that universal suffering , which seems to be our common lot as sentient beings…The size of the piece does not matter.”[iii]

The mountains, the snow, the roadway, the glaciers, the ice, the upward and downward movement all go together.  The movement of Stone and Water is communion, which includes labor in the sense of suffering and dying, and birthing and beautifying.  The scraped cliffs and rounded valleys, the weather and gravity, co-exist and indeed nourish each other in ways that are visible and invisible, understandable and mysterious, great and small.

A mountain and a glacial lake…a small pebble and a drop of water.  The great exchange requires our intentional participation, receiving and giving, laboring and suffering – purified, spacious and generous – for Whole transformation to happen.[iv]

“Then it does its work very well”

[i] Cynthia Bourgeault, Eye of the Heart: A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm (Shambhala: 2020), 58-59.

[ii] Ibid., 51.

[iii] Ibid, 54-55.

[iv] Ibid, 55.