THESE MOUNTAINS....

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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.

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Annie Dillard - b. 1945

Pulitzer Prize-winning American author

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