My family was almost out of sight. If I had shouted, I’m pretty sure they would have heard me, but in the vast expanse of that Colorado valley, I can’t be positive. Even if they could have, it would have taken them a while to get to me.
I don’t know what caused me to wander off on my own. Maybe I didn’t go wandering off enough as a child and this was my inner eight-year-old making up for it. Maybe the three-hour flight and subsequent four-hour drive crammed in with my family made me do it. Maybe it was a simple desire to be alone with my thoughts. That last one probably hits pretty close to the mark.
So there I was, picking my way through the knee-high grasses with soaring mountain ranges off to my left and right. I’d been told that elk herds liked to roam in that area, staying close to the life-giving streams, but I couldn’t see any from where I was. I walked as far as I planned to go, and then laid down in the grass.
It was that exact moment, with my head on the ground staring straight up, only blue sky ringed by grass in my vision, that…………nothing happened. All was calm and still, with a breeze and the buzz of a grasshopper the sole disturbances of my existence. I just laid there for a time, taking it all in. And that’s what I remember thinking: nothing is happening right now, and it’s glorious.
But I was dead wrong. Not about it being glorious – that thought was right on. The first part was my mistake, and it took me a moment to realize it. An immense amount was happening right around me, but since it wasn’t happening to me or any other person at that time, I was slow to see it.
All around me, the parched vegetation was patiently waiting for the rains to come the following day, ready to soak up as much water as it could hold. That buzzing grasshopper was keeping its distance from the trout darting through the clear stream. Bald eagles were almost certainly patrolling the skies nearby. And though I couldn’t see the elk, it was their grass, their home, in which I rested.
I tend to get caught up in my own life at times. I guess that’s probably pretty normal. My routines, my hopes, my struggles, my joys; it’s easy to become preoccupied. I only have one life to live, after all.
But life itself is so much bigger. And that’s a good thing, because all of us are blessed to be a part of that larger existence. We belong to something immense and mysterious and honest and fundamentally good, and we don’t even have to go far to experience it.
Just go find some grass.
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