Late summer, a handful of years ago, my husband and I went backpacking in the Sierras. On the last day of the trip we woke in the dark to start the hike back down the mountain. We walked through blanketing blue light and watched dawn blur into day. Soon the sky turned pearl. Soon we could see our feet picking over rocks.
Then this: the trail deposited us at the edge of a meadow. We paused to admire the view: rose sky and sunlight spreading like honey, making every surface glisten. Somewhere to our right, two deer burst from the trees and bounded across the length of the meadow. One doe, one stag. Their size was startling. I remember feeling their weight in the reverberations their hooves left in the dew-heavy ground. For some long seconds, the air filled with the sound of hoofbeats pounding in perfect sync. The two bodies leapt through the meadow as one, a blanket of radiant field spread before them, and we stood quiet for a long time.
I’ve thought about this moment many times since then. It was the kind of beauty that hijacks you, that feels like a movie scene, that can overwhelm in its too-muchness. By and large, the beautiful things we encounter are much more mundane. They don’t wrestle our attention to the ground; we have to look for and notice them.
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