The Saturday Stoke #42
Listen to The Stoke
Read The Stoke
If you ever have the chance, do yourself a favor and explore the Four Corners area where New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona all meet. It’s the kind of place that feels like God took extra care to create.
In New Mexico, you can drive a hundred miles in any direction, stop the car, and step out into the resounding silence of a mesa desert where the quiet hovers, permeating the entire region.
The Durango silence differs; there, Colorado’s San Juan Mountains rifle up toward the sky, thick with bristle cone pine and aspens. Creeks and rivers knife down and through the mountains, splashing liquid white upon the outdoor canvas.
And then there’s the sound. At 4:00 a.m. on a clear June night, you can see just enough of your surroundings to feel uneasy. All is still, except for the air whistling ever so gently through the pines while the aspen leaves rustle their approval. And when you look up, through the trees, the stars jump out of the darkness like millions of surfacing whales, majestic and fearsome.
Beneath the canopy, you can barely see your campsite. If not for the whale stars, all would be black. As you stand outside your tent, you can hear your heart beating, but just barely. The silence has a rhythm—the cadence of the leaves, the flow of the rushing water, and the crackle of a neighboring fire. These are the sounds of the San Juan silence, and they are wonderfully deafening.
Next, head west, just over the mountains, to Moab, Utah. Grab some java at Mondo Coffee and hit the Porcupine Rim trail on your mountain bike or take a jeep tour of the red desert. Then, continue northwest and spend the night in Bryce Canyon.
In Bryce, another kind of silence awaits, the brilliant kind. Camp near the rim of the canyon if you can. There are plenty of sites. Do your best to wake up well before dawn. Hike over to Sunrise Point and set up your camp chair facing east over the canyon. And wait. If you have coffee, bring it; you may also want your journal.
From this vantage point, you will be able to see more stars than you ever thought possible. They are not the same whale stars from Durango; these are the minions of God — the infinite army of light soldiers, their shields shimmering like a pirate’s treasure. They’re a spectacle so vivid you can decipher them by color and size.
But this is not why you’re sitting here.
As the sun gets closer to the horizon, the stars fade and the canyon begins to wake and the valley stretches out before you. The thin mountain air crystallizes the view.
And then it happens: the first peek of sunlight shouts past the horizon like a growling giant. The canyon explodes with color. The sky bleeds into a rainbow while the canyon dances in shadows and light.
The sound is brilliant, painted with color and majesty and wonder, and a touch of magic.
“But Tim,” you say, “color and majesty, wonder? They don’t produce sounds. Do you expect us to sit here and listen to you pontificate about abstract concepts that supposedly ring the sound of silence? I mean, it’s logically impossible.”
“Ah yes,” I reply. “I do see your point. But can it be that within the vision of beauty you and I experience a kind of silence? That is to say, the weight or fullness silence posseses—especially when discovered in a place of solitude?”
Perhaps what I’m getting at is more along the lines of finding places and opportunities with which to hush ourselves before God so that we can take in the beauty of creation without distractions.
And don’t worry. We don’t need the Four Corners to experience this kind of silence. Just the will to get away for a moment or a morning or an overnight campout, to listen for the sweet breathing of God in the hushed moments of life gives us.
Stay stoked my friends.
Photo by Ken Cheung on Unsplash - Bryce Canyon, Utah
