Finding Enlightenment (and we wernt really looking for it) :: Essays Papers

Finding Enlightenment (and we wern't really looking for it) I knew it was coming. I just didn’t know what it would look like, how close we would be, or if it would trap us like the siege of St. Petersburg. It is hard to explain why I didn’t ask these kinds of questions before the twenty-three miles we’d gone that day, but it is easy to see why I couldn’t picture such things. Being in new places and seeing new things everyday and you just end up succumbing and rolling with the punches. The magnitude of what we were in for could not be documented on a chart or a map, which was the extent of our resources. For whatever incredible inventions humans have created, numerically speaking, the earth in all its vastness and beauty easily outnumbers human technology. There are trillions of enormous and miniscule creatures, spectacular mountain ranges that reach so high they touch the limit of mortal tolerance. There are evolved and intricately worked canyons and caves, wide fields and forests that never seem like they change but in all actuality have never stopped moving or changing since the beginning of time. We as humans look mighty ignorant to believe that we are the most special things ever to enter this world, especially when we are more destructive to our symbiosis with the natural world than preservers of our relationship with it. But on this particular day when I was confronted with something I’d never seen before, not even on television or in a text book , there it was so enormous that from 2 miles away I felt like I could reach out and touch it. Realistically, had I been close enough to scrape my frail human skin across its front side there is no doubt in my mind that I would not be around to tell the story today. That morning started so early, I felt as though the night before never came. During the summer in Alaska, the sun never sets and thus the day never ends, and if the day never ends then the next day never actually begins. I constantly tangled with this very confusing theory and lasted long into the night writing in my journal, fishing while my two-week permit lasted, or basking in the beauty that was and is Alaska. It was Day 20 of my 30-day excursion to Prince William Sound in Southern Alaska.