I have spent a fair portion of my life tramping around in the woods looking for backcountry lakes without human habitation and no campsites, or maybe one unoccuppied campsite. I like to sit there, listen to the birds and watch the world unfold.

Wind over lake: the image of inner truth.
      - I Ching

Living in harmony with beauty, nurturing your inner beauty, is the outcome of living right. If you take a step towards beauty, it takes ten steps towards you. So in theroy it shouldn’t be that difficult.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful,
we must carry it with us or we find it not.
   - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everett Ruess in a letter to his sometimes girlfriend, from the book Vagabond for Beauty

Beauty and peace have been with me, wherever I have gone. At night, I have watched pale granite towers in the dim starlight, aspiring to the powdered sky, tremulous and dreamlike, fantastical in the melting darkness.
I have watched white-maned rapids, shaking their crests in wild abandon, surging, roaring, overwhelming the senses with their white fury, only to froth and foam down the current into lucent green pools, quiet and clear in the mellow sunlight.
On the trail, the musical tinkle of the burro bells mingles with the sound of wind and water, and is only heard subconsciously.
On the lake at night, the crescent moon gleams liquidly in the dark water, mists drift and rise like lifting enchantments, and tall, shadowed peaks stand guard in watchful silence.
These living dreams I wish to share with you, and I want you to know that I have not forgotten.
Love from Everett Ruess.

 Blue sky. I am eight years old, lying on my back on the ground in the woods. I lie there and stare for two or three hours at the mashed potato clouds and their changing forms as they drift by overhead.
One afternoon, about twenty-five years later, I was driving north to canoe for a week in Canada’s Algonquin Park. I stopped by my parents’ house in Ottawa, and as I was leaving, I overheard my dad say to one of his old army buddies, “He lives for these trips.” That surprised me. I am not even sure I had yet come to completely realize how much those one-week solo trips, which I found time to take only every year or two, had come to be the center of my life. I was surprised he had seen that. I got in my car, waved, and drove off. I never mentioned that off-hand comment of his to him, but I think often of it.
On the surface, I was in my early thirties, had a young family, and was working in the investment business. On the surface, my dad was an ex-soldier, a senior bureaucrat in Canada’s secret police. We had lots of ups and down, my Dad and I, and yet maybe we understand more about each other than we let on.
Thirty-six or so hours later, I was sitting beside a lake that was shrouded in a gray, pre-dawn fog. I had gotten up in the dark, packed my canoe, and was sitting out at the shore sipping tea. Two loons drifted in and out of view. One stretched and called that haunting call of the wild.
Four years later, I had to spend one week every couple of months in a hospital getting experimental chemotherapy. I would lie in the hospital bed, close my eyes, and see and hear that lake and those loons. The actual experience lasted perhaps twenty seconds, but it sustained me through hours and months.
Perhaps each human life is fed by the underground spring of a few experiences. When we are there, we touch something beyond words. They make me who I am to me, who I am under the personas I assume to negotiate my way in the world.
It amazes me how often in my life I have embarked upon work, upon commitments that have absorbed years of effort, that have nothing whatever to do with those moments of deep peace and joy. In fact, I can say that I have spent much of my life living as if I was trying to prove that those moments don’t matter. At the age of sixty-seven, I see my life as serving, with my art and words, a very few experiences.

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