Stillness… how strange it is. How strange it can be.
We all return ultimately to stillness, but in the pursuit of ‘life’, we abhor it. Yet, when life stalls, paradoxically, at least for me, it is the stillness of the outdoors that hinges life back to being bearable. Such stillness is quaint. They don’t have a name. But, they shroud us like clouds during fading lights. Like mountains, they provide reassurances against forces of erosion.
Let me share with you two such moments of stillness from our recent Colorado trip.
In the beautiful Rocky Mountain National Park, the Alpine visitor center has a glass-wall that looks down from 11,796 feet into the stunning Fall river basin to the east. NPS has put in a couple of couches/benches by these walls that are seldom used by hasty visitors. When we were there after driving up the nostalgic one-way Old Fall river road, Rishabh sat on one of those benches while I habitually chatted up the park ranger. After my conversation with the ranger ended, Rishabh asked me to sit next to him on the couch by the glass wall. I did and leaned back on the comfortable seat. In front of us, the blue sky was busy passing an armada of puffy, overweight cloud-balls to nowhere, whereas the land beneath – the cirque – was grossly overdressed in her autumn attire. Looking straight into this scene, Rishabh calmly rested his head on my shoulder. I felt his leaning and the father in me teared up a soupçon inside. Joy erupted into stillness of the hinging kind and despite pressing talons of my realities, everything felt peaceful in the world past that huge glass-wall.
The second such moment happened later in the day, when Rishabh and I stood next to each other at the gorgeous Gore Range overlook at 12,048 feet and watched the fading light play with mountains and their cloud curtains like kittens and wool-balls. He showed me the panaroma he had captured on my iPhone. When I praised his image and told him I was going to replicate his frame, he smiled ear to ear. Joy spurted again, but this time, the stillness borrowed heavily from those mountains and filled me with – in Peter Matthiessen's words – 'a light-filled immanence, shimmering and breathing, and yet so fleeting that it left me breathless and in pain'. Sweet pain.
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