Tag: Mt Baker

The Edge of the Known World

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I came here to study hard things
– rock mountain and salt sea –
and to temper my spirit on their edges. 
“Teach me thy ways, O Lord” is, like all prayers,
a rash one, and one I cannot but recommend. 

These mountains — Mount Baker and the Sisters and Shuksan,
the Canadian Coastal Range and the Olympics on the peninsula — are surely the edge of the known and comprehended world…. 

That they bear their own unimaginable masses and weathers aloft, holding them up in the sky for anyone to see plain, makes them,
as Chesterton said of the Eucharist, only the more mysterious
by their very visibility and absence of secrecy.
~Annie Dillard (who lived in Whatcom County in the 70s) from Holy the Firm

Sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountain
in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,
when I forget or refuse to go
down to the shore or a few yards
up the road, on a clear day,
to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.
~Denise Levertov  “Witness”

Even on the days like today when the mountains are hidden behind a veil of clouds, I have every confidence they are there.  They have not moved in the night, gone to another county, blown up or melted down.  My vision isn’t penetrating enough to see them through cloud cover today, but they will return to my line of sight, if not tomorrow, perhaps the next day, maybe not until next week. 

I know this and have faith it is true – the mountains do not keep themselves a secret.

On the days when I am not bothering to look for them, too preoccupied so walk right past their obvious grandeur and presence, then they reach out to me and call me back, refocusing me. 

There are times when I turn a corner on the farm and glance up, and there rests a mountain, a silent and overwhelming witness to beauty and steadfastness. I literally gasp at not noticing before, at not remembering how I’m blessed by it being there even at the times I can’t be bothered.

It witnesses my lack of witness and, so in its mysterious way of being in plain sight, stays put to hold me fast yet another day.  And so I keep coming back to gaze – sometimes just at clouds – yearning to lift their veil, and as a result, lift my veil, just one more time.

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There’s Never Enough

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Just as a painter needs light
in order to put the finishing touches to his picture, 
so I need an inner light, 
which I feel I never have enough of in the autumn.
~Leo Tolstoy from Reminiscences

I was drinking in the surroundings:
air so crisp you could snap it with your fingers
and greens in every lush shade imaginable
offset by autumnal flashes of red and yellow.
~Wendy Delsol

Let’s go I said,
to find some light, but not just any light I said.
Sure he said, let’s go.

He loves to drive winding roads to breathe chill alpine air.

We headed 90 minutes northeast to find what I needed.
The highway empty going up.
Gas tank nearing empty with no time to fill up.
Only a few photographers there, searching too.

What we see from our backyard forty miles away overwhelms
when standing awestruck in its own front yard.

Now my nearly empty tank slowly fills part-way.
This dose of inner light will last me until next autumn.
Overcome, overwhelmed, overpowered
as though it’ll never be enough.

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Drawing a Fresh Breath

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One sees great things from the valley,
only small things from the peak.
~G.K.Chesterton

Two things are yours that no man’s wealth can buy:
The air, and time;
And, having these, all fate you may defy,
All summits climb.

While you can draw the fresh and vital breath,
And own the day,
No enemy, not Hate, nor Fear, nor Death,
May bring dismay.

Breathe deeply! Use the minutes as they fly!
Trust God in all!
Thus will you live the life that cannot die,
Nor ever fall.
~Amos Russel Wells “Inalienable”

It is all a matter of perspective-
what we see from where we are standing,
whether on the peak or down in the valley.

We need to breathe deeply of this time,
wherever we are.

it takes great strength and determination to climb a peak,
looking down upon the valley left far below
where even mighty mountains seem diminished.

Yet what gives our lives most meaning,
what encourages our faith,
what instills our hope,
is how we are met by the Lord
in the deepest of valleys.

He dwells alongside us,
watching over us,
never leaving us,
always encouraging us
to lift our eyes to the hills

to gaze at His dream-like peaks above.

photo from the summit of Mt. Baker by Josh Scholten
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Standing on Holy Ground

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I am still skeptical about the reasons some seek spirituality in the land,
for the spirituality the land offers is anything but easy.

It is the spirituality of a God who would, with lightening and earthquakes, sneeze away the bland moralism preached in many pulpits,
a wildly free, undomesticated divinity,
the same God who demands of Moses from a burning bush,
“Remove your shoes,
for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”

When God appears to Job, the comforting sentiments we might expect to feel are absent because such sentiments
are at most God’s trappings, not the infinite himself.
The God who speaks to Job from the whirlwind reminds him that, comforting or terrifying, he alone is God.  
To be satisfied with anything less
would be the spiritual catastrophe the Old Testament calls idolatry.

Some of our idols shatter in the West’s rugged vastness, others remain.

Perhaps God leaves exposed the land’s brokenness –
the scars of forest fires,
the fossils of extinct biospheres,
rifts showing ancient continents now scattered like puzzle pieces –
to remind us that he is greater than the icon, too.

The heavens and earth will wear out like a garment, the Psalmist says, like clothes that are changed.

“But You neither change, nor have an end.”
Psalm 102:27
~Anthony Lusvardi from “Nature is Your Church?”

We are now 45 days into a hotter dry spell this summer with a slight possibility of some rain next week. Everything here in the Pacific Northwest is looking as it would in late August with the snow melt in the Cascades much accelerated from its usual timeline. With the fires already happening for weeks on the eastern side of the state, as well as to the north of us in British Columbia and south in Oregon and California, we are looking at a withering August of smoke and ash.

Dan and I headed up the Mt. Baker Highway yesterday evening to see how bare Baker and Shuksan look up close. We wonder what snow will be left before our typical precipitation begins in earnest in early October. These seemingly unchanging monoliths are being stripped of their usual garments, now naked and vulnerable. They are subject to God’s transforming power just as surely as we are.

When I stand at the foot of these peaks, I never fail to be awed to a whisper, as if I were inside an immense cathedral. God reminds us to remove our shoes out of respect for His holy ground. Yet I worship not the mountains nor the awe-inspiring landscape they are placed in, but worship their Creator whose strength and love is greater than all.

I tread lightly. I speak softly. I remove my shoes. I witness the fading light.

God, the eternal, the unchangeable, takes my breath away, as only He can..

Here is an opportunity to own a Barnstorming book of more photos like these along with poems written for each poem by Lois Edstrom. It is available to order here: