Perpetual Magic
By Owen Clarke
I pulled my Subaru over to the side of the gravel road and lay my bedroll out on the ground, underneath the still-warm exhaust. I munched on a handful of salted peanut shells, chewing them up into a paste. A cool, crisp desert breeze was flowing down from the north. Somewhere in the distance, a handful of coyotes loosed staggered howls into the vast expanse of night.
I was a hundred yards from the entrance to Cielo Vista Ranch, an 80,000+ acre ranch in Colorado’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Cielo Vista is home to Culebra Peak, the only 14,000-foot peak in Colorado located on private property. Culebra was one of the few 14,000-foot peaks in Colorado (there are 58) that I had yet to climb, and as the only one on private property, it was the only peak with a modicum of red tape to be circumvented. I had secured a permit to climb the mountain six months prior. Now here I was, wallet noticeably thinner and hair noticeably longer than when I had purchased my permit.
I lay down belly first on my bedroll, thumbing absentmindedly through a copy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera by the light of my headlamp for a few moments before turning off the light and rolling onto my back.
A shooting star arced through the sky above. Make a wish, I told myself. Almost before I could, there was another. A few minutes later, another.
I counted no less than five shooting stars before I went to sleep that night.
——
We tend to think of shooting stars as anomalies, rarities, occurrences bordering on the magical (“Make a wish!”), but the reality is that they’re regular occurrences. According to Astronomy, “Under a dark sky, any observer can expect to see between two and seven meteors each hour any night of the year.”
There are two key points to note here, however. The first is the clause, “under a dark sky.” Shooting stars are passing us by constantly during the daylight hours, we simply can’t see them. Meanwhile, even at night, if you’re living in the light-polluted metropolises of modernity, you’re going to be hard-pressed to see much of anything when you look up at the sky. At high altitudes, and in remote regions like the Sangre de Cristo range, shooting stars are impossible to miss, but the point is that they’re there regardless, whether you’re in Manhattan or the high mountains.
The second, and more important point in the passage from Astronomy is the specification “any observer.”
In other words, you have to be looking for a shooting star to see one.
Shooting stars are passing us by constantly, incessantly, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. We just aren’t looking for them.
Like shooting stars, much of the beauty and magic we think so rare in the 21st-century world is actually thriving all around us. We simply have to 1) inhabit an environment conducive to recognize it, and 2) look for it in the first place.
Much of the difficulty comes from the speed at which we live our lives. The world is at our fingertips with smartphones and the Internet. It conditions us to live fast, work fast, play fast, and think fastest of all. International travel has become commonplace and affordable, and we’re told that we can find beauty in the Swiss Alps, or the Grand Canyon, or the Taj Mahal. We see photos from around the world daily, constant stimuli to go, go, go, anywhere but here. There’s a reason no one vacations at home.
Another important aspect to realize is that unlike shooting stars, rainbows, or the Grand Canyon, which are all widely accepted instances of beauty… most of the beauty we’ll find day-to-day is entirely dependent on our own perception.
There is a scene from Sam Mendes and Alan Ball’s film American Beauty which illustrates this point well. “You wanna see the most beautiful thing I’ve ever filmed?” teenage boy Ricky says to his next-door neighbor Jane.
He shows her footage of a plastic bag, drifting aimlessly in the wind.
“That's the day I realized that there was this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever,” Ricky says. “Video's a poor excuse, I know. But it helps me remember... I need to remember... Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can't take it, and my heart is just going to cave in.”
Is this plastic bag beauty for you or me? Perhaps not. Was it beauty for Ricky? Clearly.
Understanding beauty, searching for it, is an art that takes time and effort to master, and said mastering is an intensely personal experience, but it’s been perhaps the most rewarding undertaking of my life thus far.
There’s no easy way to explain the process, and it differs from person to person.
A longtime friend of mine and a writer for this publication, Gentry Patterson, told me that for him the beauty around him increased hand in hand with knowledge and understanding. Working as a forest surveyor, the more he learned about the woods around him, the more he saw beauty within them. “Before I had any knowledge about the woods I was working in, trees and flowers would just be trees and flowers,” he said. “Once I started learning what all the different plants, trees, flowers, and so on were, it made it all more interesting and meaningful.”
For myself, the opposite is often true. If anything a lack of knowledge, a “pulling back” from concrete understanding, helps me to see the beauty all around me in everyday life. Mystery and beauty run hand in hand in my eyes. Too much understanding can strip a place, a plant, an animal, a plastic bag blowing in the wind, of its magic.
The more mysterious the origins and processes of a thing are, the easier it is for me to find beauty within it.
The lazy loops and swirls of a housefly in the air are not so different from those of a World War I-era stunt plane at an air show, nor is the feel of the warped bark on a humble dogwood in your backyard so different from that of a towering California sequoia. The cool water in the pond behind your home is not so different from that lapping at the shores of Lake Como, nor the rustle of a brisk wind in the leaves of the trees along your suburban street so different from a symphony orchestra.
To clarify, it’s not “imagination” I’m advocating. A housefly is a housefly. I’m not saying to “imagine” that a housefly is a stunt plane, only to realize that the beauty of its flight is not so different from one.
If you let yourself see it as so, even the most mundane, monotonous activities, microwaving a bag of popcorn, raking leaves, watching clothes dry on a clothesline, filling out a form at the DMV… they can become practices of beauty.
We don’t have to go to Timbuktu or Kathmandu or the high mountains of the Sangre de Christo to find beauty in this life. Like shooting stars, beauty passes us by, every hour, every day. We just have to put ourselves in place to look for it and be ready to see it.
——
Upon returning from the Sangre de Cristo three days later, after summiting Culebra (along with Kit Carson Peak and Challenger Point in the nearby Crestone subrange), I grabbed a beer from the fridge and sat outside. I was living in a house with my girlfriend, renting a room from some friends, in the small mountain town of Carbondale.
Our backyard had a small porch swing, and I sat on the swing and drank my beer, watching a deer munch grass on the other side of the road behind our house. I breathed deeply and tasted the beer in pleasant sips. I scratched at some dirt caked on the side of my neck, feeling grit come off beneath my fingernails, revealing warm skin beneath.
There was an ant crawling up the side of an apple tree next to me, a crumb pinched in his jaws. To this ant, the tree must have appeared taller than any mountain I had or would ever climb. The ramparts of its trunk and branches stretched skyward with dauntless enthusiasm, not so different from the North Ridge of Kit Carson Peak, which I’d scaled the previous day. Did the ant know where he was going? Where was he taking the crumb? Would reach the top? It was not so different from my own jaunt up the mountains of the Sangre.
A leaf fell from the tree, pirouetting in the air like a ballerina, rocking back and forth as it floated towards the ground. In the sky to the west, dark clouds massed, and a sheet of rain obscured the mountain ranges from view. The deer across the road raised its head to peer at me. Then a bolt of lightning lit up the sky, and it bounded off into the hills.
It was all so beautiful.
Owen Clarke is a writer, motorcyclist, and mountaineer currently based in Colorado, and the founder of this publication. You can find his work on his website.
