Love and the Rocky Mountains
Listen: “Rocky Mountain High” by John Denver
I’ve had a forty-five year love affair with the Rocky Mountains. My parents drove me and my three sisters across I-70 from Kansas City to Colorado when I was fifteen years old. It was love at first sight. I have now driven (or flown) to Colorado every year since, at least once and sometimes as many as three times a year. It’s my home away from home, and the place where I find my most sacred communion with nature and God.
I have run (distance running), biked (road, mountain, gravel), fly fished, backpacked, hiked, rock climbed, snow shoed, cross-country skied, camped, mountain climbed, observed nature, four-wheeled, and observed nature in various parts of the Rocky Mountains—Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, and New Mexico—but Colorado is my go to. I have thousands of cherished memories from these trips with friends, family, and solo. I have always felt closest to God when I am in the Rocky Mountains.
People have asked me through the years: “Why don’t you move to the Rocky Mountains?” I’ve never had a great answer except to say: (1) I never felt led by God to move to the Rocky Mountains due to my sense of calling; and (2) I never wanted to lose the sense of romance I have when I go to the Rocky Mountains. I never wanted the beauty of the Rocky Mountains to become ordinary or to be taken for granted. Every time I see the mountains, my childlike wonder and endorphins kick into overdrive. It’s one of my “thin places,” where the veil between heaven and earth seems to disappear.
As I am writing this blog (July 2022), I am in the Rocky Mountains near Breckenridge, Colorado. During my morning meditation, I was reading a devotional book by Richard Rohr entitled, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer. Richard opens chapter two, “Vision of Enchantment,” with a quote from Fyodor Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov:
Love people even in their sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all of God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand of it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.
Wow! I love that. In fact, my new favorite Bible verse is 1 John 4:16: “God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them” (NLT). It’s that simple. Love is the story. Everything else is footnotes.
Lean into what invokes love within you. Embrace what expands love in your heart. Hang out with people, visit places, and immerse yourself in experiences which enhance love.
A few days ago, I went on a hike with some friends on Peak Trail which meanders over the mountain between Frisco and Breckenridge, Colorado. Several mountain flowers were in full bloom. I took a few pictures of a lavender Arctic Lupine, a pastel purple Aspen Fleabane, and a pink Wood Rose. Mountain flowers have always intrigued me. These gorgeous flowers bloom in the high mountain country around the world, most of them never seen by a human eye. But the mountain bees see them, and so do the elk and moose grazing in a high mountain meadow. Creativity adorns itself with beauty. Love is woven in the tapestry of the Universe. It blooms and fades. Do you see it? Feel it? Smell it? Hear it? Taste it? Are you attentive to it? Do you embrace it and become of disseminator of it?
They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world (Psalm 19:3-4; NIV).
Shalom
©realfredherron, 2022
