Thank you so for this, a much worthy meditation which, for so many reasons, will replace tonight's countless racing thoughts.

How I miss the coastline South American mountains to which I belong. Even in their aloofness toward the higher latitudes, the inhabitants nevertheless, I am told, also pray that our choice over here is the wise one.

LUX, I have come to think of you as Aeolus, caring enough to harness our tempestuous winds into a gentle force that is steady and favoring. Thank you for being.

Nice.

I felt the wonder.

One of the Romantic Poets wrote this great long poem Mont Blanc. And your meditative thoughts remind me of that. I think as we grow older and we face our mortality, we look for metaphors that somehow help us to see the immensity of the world, the way that everything changes and decays and yet endures. (or maybe I've always been of a philosophical bent that way... I think I have) I love mountains for that.

Thanks so much for sharing this. And here is the beginning of the poem, one I have long loved, since college, together with a link for anyone who cares to read more (thanks to da google!):

Mont Blanc

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

(Lines written in the Vale of Chamouni)

1

The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark - now glittering - now reflecting gloom -
Now lending splendor, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters, - with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume
In the wild woods, amon the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.

2

Thus thou, Ravine of Arve - dark, deep Ravine-
Thou many-colored, many voiced vale,
Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail
Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams: awful scene,
Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down
From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne,
Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame
Of lightning through the tempest; -thou dost lie,
Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging,
Children of elder time, in whose devotion
The chainless winds still come and ever came
To drink their odors, and their mighty swinging
To hear - an old and solemn harmony;
Thine earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep
Of the ethereal waterfall, whose veil
Robes some unsculptured image; the strange sleep
Which when the voices of the desert fail
Wraps all in its own deep eternity;-
Thy caverns echoing to the Arve's commotion,
A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame;
Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion,
Thou art the path of that unresting sound-
Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee
I seem as in a trance sublime and strange
To muse on my own separate fantasy,
My own, my human mind, which passively
Now renders and receives fast influencings,
Holding an unremitting interchange
With the clear universe of things around;
One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings
Now float above thy darkness, and now rest
Where that or thou art no unbidden guest,
In the still cave of the witch Poesy,
Seeking among the shadows that pass by
Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee,
Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast
From which they fled recalls them, thou art there!

http://www.netpoets.com/classic/poems/057011.htm

What a wonderful respite it was reading this, Lux. Thank you.

Lux: I miss you. We all miss you. More to the point --- thank you, for being you. You are not only respected -- you are loved.
More in keeping with the mood you were in the day you wrote of Beartooth Plateau:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Dm1-R6sc_c&feature=related
And then, to celebrate the gratitude we feel about tomorrow, in the figurative as well as literal sense, this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKUC92PHa7Y&feature=related
of which somehow you are an integral part, even though tomorrow belongs to the young.