"Listen! the mighty Being is awake"

This journal is becoming the chronicle of my life’s perfect moments. Sometimes, several of these moments happen at once:

I'm leaning against a rock in the wind. The sun and the rain clouds are doing that dance they do sometimes when both have lost the will to fight for the position directly above me. The result is a series of rainbows that streak across the sky like the falling stars I watched last night.

I stretch out on a blanket of dark red high tundra, watching four ram sheep gathered to chew and rest for the afternoon. They alert to something far below in the valley between us, and I see a cow moose sprinting across a creek, her calf close behind. Something has made this mother move, and her calf is learning another critical survival lesson.

Farther down the canyon, I can barely see three bull caribou feeding in the muskeg. A Northern Harrier shrieks as he flies below me, and I see his white rump patch even from here. His fly-by upsets a flock of mottled willow ptarmigan; they are starting to turn white already in preparation for the far-too-soon winter.

The size of this valley is unbelievably humbling, and I try to avoid thinking about the long walk I will eventually make to those sheep above the rimrock. As if on cue, a giant woolly caterpillar makes his way up my leg and onto my glove. The caterpillar and I get on well enough, probably because he's the only creature within a day's walk that isn't mortally afraid of me. It's good to wait. The sheep will stay all day on their thrones above this violently red kingdom.

The wind blows a light rain to me; then the sun moves in to dry my clothes. I can hear the whistles of the goldeneyes that are resting from their Southern migration in a high mountain lake nearby. I get up to stretch and to take another handful of blueberries from the bush which the caterpillar seems to like better than my glove.

Right now, life is amazing. I’m experiencing more now than I ever have in school or at work or in a book or at church. I’m alone with God on a sheep hunt, and he’s showing me that everything is fine. Another rainbow streaks across the sky and then disappears. Then the sun again. Then a cloud. The rhythm is impeccable; the music is everywhere.

I have a long walk ahead of me, and everything is fine.