01/28/2023
It would be a perfect place to be with hot tea and lots of layers of clothing. I’ve been in the winter and it is indeed a different park.
The land has no confession beyond its inventory. What it knows, it yields without deceit. Tour the park this winter and this is what you’ll find: prodigious monuments of stone, groves of trees green in protest to the season’s chill, and the diligence of a river again renewed by the casual melt of that most generous snow. Concern yourself with these because the world expands in observation. The twitch of a branch can reveal alike the alighting whimsy of a jay or the leap of a plant’s posture when suddenly freed from winter’s weight. It falls to you to discern the difference, to witness it, and to declare, “This and so much more!”
To gaze into the rocks and read their formidable age, to hold the trees accountable for their silent growth, we have no greater task than this, for where else does humanity manage its business than in the list of nature’s stock? Every human deed and worry has, too, a place assigned. Here, amidst the severity of the planet’s imagination, our earthly circumstance appears obvious, but the merit of the soil should not decline with distance from cherished spectacle.
The monolith in frame is Sentinel Rock. Its vigilance is often overlooked for El Capitan’s command and Half Dome’s proportions, but here it stands nonetheless, as proudly adorned in snow as the rest. Are we to discount by degrees its majesty in comparison to what so commonly dominates our fancy? Or can the horizon of wonder be extended by perspective and curiosity to everything that grounds our human view?