I am standing on our tiny balcony this morning with a blanket wrapped around me, staring at the saddle between Mt. Ajax and Mt. Telluride, at least I think it is Mt. Telluride.  I know the nearer peak is Mt. Ajax because Melissa and I climbed it yesterday: six hours, 4,000 feet of elevation, and almost twelve miles.  Dragging our spent legs to the summit, we saw stones arranged in the dried brown grass like ancient hieroglyphics.  It took a moment to decipher the message: “Welcome to Ajax Peak.”   

On the balcony, I am waiting on the sunrise, staring at a spot dead center on the saddle between Ajax and Telluride, the lowest dip, the point where, yesterday, I said to Melissa through ragged breath and only half-joking, “now we make the final push through the death zone to the summit.”  She rolled her eyes and pushed past me, her water bottles nearly depleted.  Sometimes an attempt at humor lightens the mood.  That was not one of those times.

Her exasperation with me was justified.  Before we turned off onto the actual trail that switch-backed up the slope of Mt. Ajax, we trudged for two and a half miles on what can be called, in only the most generous use of the word, a road.  This “road” climbs over the pass from Telluride to Silverton and is, astoundingly, open to off-road vehicles, a steady slow march of which squeezed past us as we hugged the uphill side of the road, holding our gasping breaths in case the four-wheeler slipped off the precipice or clipped us.  In our trail book, the author recounted an incident involving this same road, a jeep, and a young couple who fell to their death while trying to pass another jeep.  After this accident, the authorities declared the road one-way only, believing, I suppose, that this declaration would somehow mitigate the inherent dangers.  On this Labor Day weekend, dozens of off-road junkies believed, or at least were willing to trust, those authorities.

 As we approached the sixth or seventh hairpin turn on this boulder-infested, dust-caked road, one whole side of a jacked-up long bed truck elevated two feet off the ground trying to make the turn.  Melissa gripped my arm.  “How much farther on this road?” I didn’t answer.  For the last two miles I had told her we only had “about a hundred yards before the turn-off.”  If I had said that one more time, she would have pitched me off the edge.  As I said, her exasperation, as we made the final push to the summit, was justified.  Fortunately, we had packed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which we ate with relish, sitting in the prickly brown grass on the top of the world.  Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at 12,000 feet with a 360-degree view of endless beauty have magical restorative powers, a superfood, an acai bowl with a vitamin boost.  

Staring from the balcony, at the lowest dip in the saddle, the pale-blue morning sky begins to melt into white, as if a flame is burning through paper.  Despite my deep breathing, my efforts to shut out the noise in my head, I am restless waiting for the sun to crest the line between earth and sky.  Thoughts spark across my frontal lobes the way lightning strikes these mineral-rich mountain peaks during summer thunderstorms.  Yesterday, we lingered on the exposed peak as the day faded into afternoon, me staring through binoculars at a distant lake, at the splintered ruins of mining shacks, at the bumper-to-bumper line of toy jeeps backed up on a road that should not exist.  Melissa reclined on her backpack, eyes closed, smiling, chastising me gently as I narrated everything I saw like a kid star-gazing for the first time.  “Shush, love.  Too many words.”  With autumn nipping the heels of summer, afternoon thunderstorms were no longer a threat.  Our biggest threat was finding enough energy to overcome the sweet inertia that rooted us to a place on the earth only inches from heaven.

My spirituality, my religion, if that is a word that still fits, boils down to three simple mantras.  Find God in all things.  Practice a faith that does justice.  Be a contemplative in action.  These are not original mantras.  They come from the wisdom of Jesuit Spirituality.  In the last several years, my travels with Melissa have both expanded the breath of these mantras to include the wisdom and spirituality of others and deepened and focused these mantras to sharpen their application to everything in my life.  God is now big enough to include the God of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.  God is now a word, a signpost that points to something big enough to encompass Buddhism and even atheism, which sounds like a non sequitur, but truly is not.  The only thing that limits God is me, and I can no more deny or limit the felt reality of the transcendental, no matter what it is called, than I can deny or limit the love I feel for Melissa as we sit exhausted on the top of the world, eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.   My faith is a willingness, because of or in spite of my myriad life experiences, to give my heart to something, something worthy of me, of my life, of this inexplicable gift I have been given.  That thought is only original in the sense that I have come to embrace it.  I first read it years ago in a book by the theologian, Marcus Borg.  I confess it takes me a few years to understand certain things I read.      

The tip of Ajax lights up like a struck match, and in an instant, that spot in the middle of the saddle bursts into brilliance too bright for my naked eyes.  Morning has broken, or crashed, or poured itself out, chasing night’s lingering shadows from the mountains.  The sun unhinges from the horizon lifting higher into its blue ocean.  I feel the warmth of a new day, a regeneration, a thin spot in the veil separating existence and infinity, a moment of bliss.  Something worth giving my heart to.