Sometime in last few months, I was listening to NPR Weekend and heard the “This I Believe” segment. Tarak McLain’s essay was featured. He wrote it when he was six years old. In the back of my mind, it has been calling to me, challenging me to state and then affirm my own beliefs. So here goes:
This I believe
If you stand in the cradle of a Sunwapta pass between Banff and Jasper National Parks in the Canadian Rockies, you’ll see the clean cleft of earth rising from the mountain floor below, where the cars look as small as the smallest ants. The mountain face before you rises up as a solitary rock into the sky as far above as it is below. Large ridges rise along that clean rock face. Like scratches across its skin, they declare the path it took as it rose in ancient years past out from mother earth. It takes your breath away. Looking past the mountain face before you, you see the mountain face is not alone, that same rock, that same cleft of earth defines the face of the entire mountain range as far as you can see. In your mind, you see the mountain range traveling down the entire continent into the United States and beyond to the very tip of South America. The force of that movement boggles the imagination. All at once, your body feels light, immaterial, insignificant. Somehow small as you are, you are reassured that you are part of all this, all creation. You don’t have words for it, but perhaps you know that you are stardust and all is well.
I believe in the power of nature the restore the soul.
I believe the very atoms of our body commune in the most mysterious way with every other atom in the universe.
I believe we are all connected as sentient beings.
I believe in learning and that in every experience in life, a lesson is offered.
I believe that every life has a purpose and that purpose is often revealed in time layer by layer as one ages, matures and comes into one’s own.
I am blessed.
There is so much more I believe, but for now this will suffice. I know I will return to this again.
