Where The Lake Is Bluest
Our car was packed – in fact to the hilt. Our daughter was wedged between the ice chest and the door.
My son’s seven year old legs were propped up on top of one of the sleeping bags. No room was left in the trunk nor the camper shell atop the car. We were headed for Banff and Lake Louise. It was a long way from where we lived. My mind needed a rest. A three week trip to the Canadian Rockies, camping in the wild seemed just the ticket.
My mind needed a rest from the profound grief following my mother-in-law’s passing. She was dear to me in the way that a mother can be terribly dear. I loved her with all my heart. She had lingered for a couple of months in ICU when a surgery went all wrong, a terribly painful experience for all.
I cried myself to sleep the night she died and thereafter for many nights, trying to grasp the enormity of what had happened. It was time to get away from it three months later. Some time in the wild seemed perfect.
Banff was beautiful. Lake Louise even more so. But I kept looking for something. We moved on to Glacier National Park. Still searching. We came south into the United States’ side of Glacier National Park. The mountains were fresh out of glaciers, but Lake MacDonald was grand. It’s colors intrigued me: pale blue at the edges. Deeper farther from shore, the deepest blue far out in the middle. I was drawn to that deep, deepest blue.
I took a ride in a rowboat. My husband was rowing. My kids were by my side. I wanted to get out into that really deep blue part of the lake, but the distance was too great. I had to settle for meditating upon the color for awhile. It eased something inside. There was something quiet about that blue. I wanted to fill my soul with the quiet. Whenever I closed my eyes to meditate, that color would appear, and I would feel a sense of quiet.
Where could I go to get that quiet? And so deepened an urge to travel. At first our trips were local: to the top of Mt. Diablo, to the ocean, and a yearly pilgrimage to Yosemite. There were no cameras along in those days. For me it was a trip to the quiet. When it came time to travel farther afield, a camera was a necessity. The places I loved were the ones that took us to the quiet. The camera came in handy for it taught me to find the beauty in nature, the deeply peaceful places, the places where the quiet dwelt.
The places I loved most were unfathomable in that they took me to a place inside that I had not realized existed at all. Places like Africa, places like Patagonia, places like Hawaii. These places settled me inside, in deep places within, where I glowed in the kind of quiet that exists in the wild. Yosemite called me like no other place. As long as we stayed away from the crowds and listened to the thundering of the waterfalls, the wind coursing through the valley, the quiet of first light as dawn was preparing its entrance: we entered a state of being I can only describe as a deep quiet. The deep quiet restored my soul.
The deep quiet is a kinesthetic, auditory, absolutely visceral state of being. Sometimes olfactory , visual, and tactile, too. It is a place we go inside when we meditate. My favorite mantra is the wild Merced River thundering down the cliffs, overflowing with the spring melt, making its way through Yosemite, and roaring down the mountain , an experience of intensely visceral joy! A day of meditating on its waters as they pour over rocks heightens my feeling of deep quiet in the white noise of the waters. The flow of the river creates images of infinite variability within sameness that wrests us away from our daily cares, just like meditating on the breath of our bodies. The Merced, with its smell of fresh snowdrifts, drenches our being in aliveness, in lushness, in a visceral abundance the way moments in the deep quiet of meditation do. Standing at the foot of Yosemite Falls in spring to meditate upon its magnificence, with the wind whipping the spray from the falls into our faces, brings our attention into sharp focus, just as any meditative technique will do.
We’ve stood against the elements in other places, like Patagonia, too. Photographing Mt. Fitzroy is a joyous experience in the quiet of this wild place. The wind was blowing so hard we put our tripods own low to the ground in wind position, watching the infinite variability in sameness as clouds and sunlight played hide and seek with the spires of the mountain. Wind blown to bits, we photographed there for hours, in complete surrender to a deeper quiet within while we meditated upon the mountain.
The African wild places brought a new twist to this profound meditation upon the natural world. In one breath we beheld the arc of a coming storm, three cheetahs – a mom and her two yearling cubs -- in the quiet where the only sounds were the clicking of cameras, and the love we watched flow between one cheetah and another. The constant attention to every detail of photographing creatures of the wild, noticing the relationship and bonds, portraying the love with complete authenticity required attunement to the quiet, both within and amongst the creatures.
Hawaii, too, brought repeated visits to the deep quiet. On Maui we went snorkeling with the sea turtles. We had to avoid touching these lovely, curious creatures who often swam quite close to us, as well as to avoid frightening them with sudden movements. For me, swimming with the turtles was a slow, careful dance that required constant attention to the turtles but also to our own movements. It required me to let the turtles come to me, rather than seeking them out. It required me to make space for them in movement and in spirit. I had always been fond of turtles, but these were definitely the largest turtles I had ever seen – quite a beak on them, you know! Swimming with them evoked some fear and then required that I let go of that fear and replace it with love. The movement was a form of underwater movement meditation. And every meditation brings up the possibility of fears arising, the need to let them be transmuted into love.
