a love letter to montana

I spent most of yesterday driving through Montana. I drove and drove, through miles and miles of grand, mind-numbing gorgeousness: rumpled hills and jagged cliffs and trees bravely grasping at the sky. I could imagine Lewis and/or Clark, clutching at one another's hands, writing breathlessly to Gallatin to inform him of the enormity and perfection of his unbelievable purchase. I can imagine trapper and explorers awestruck with vista after vista.

For a moment, in the car, I felt I was the first person to ever lay eyes on such a scene--and then I realized I was. The sunlight had never streamed just so upon that hill before. The grass had never grown so just precisely there. Every moment was a new creation, and this newness has been going on forever, long before we came along to care. How many storms and sunsets and quiet moments of beauty have been unseen? Nearly all.

Words fail in the face of such a place. But there is something about this place that I have to try to describe. There is something about its vastness, its grandness, its wholeness. Its hugeness and yet its infinitismal detail, its oldness and its newness. Its ruggedness and its fragility. There is something about this place that is so good for the soul, it has to be shared.

As people age, their skin becomes so interesting. Colors change, wrinkles and furrows form. Every pore is different and tells a story of a lifetime. The variation, the depth, the weathering that comes from a century of existence is so beautiful and fascinating. Well, the hills, the rocks, the mountains and sands... they all have it too. Only they've had millions of years for nature to cross-hatch them, to shade them, to sharpen them into infinite detail. And instead of a square inch, earth has miles and miles and miles to work upon.

A painter, an artist, could spend his/her entire life mixing paint to match the variation of color in a single blade of grass. Everything we do in life and in art is a gross simplification of the infinite, incomprehensible detail all around us. But nature takes no shortcuts. In the massivest of vistas, every single speck, every stone, every leaf and grain of sand is formed uniquely and intricately. Not only does the largeness of a scene overwhelm, but the smallness.

It is this combination of opposites: of ageless and fleeting and hard and soft and strength and vulnerability that is so affecting and so powerful. We blink out our little lives in its furrows while its wholeness continues unaffected, giant by all measures. Yet that is the true nature of things, and getting back to it does ourselves good, for we are eternally encircled by this beauty.

My friend once told me of a giant mirror of heaven, broken into a thousand pieces and scattered into what is the earth. I like this very much, but would change it a little, into a wave that came crashing down upon the earth. When the waters of life are still, or sometimes in a tiny drop, you can see heaven's reflection.

Such a place is good for the soul because it reminds us what coolness is, what texture is, what light is. It reminds us what feeling is, what wholeness is, what beauty is. It reminds us what eternity is. It reminds us what life is. It reminds us what is true.

And so, I love Montana.