The Adventure Travel Experience - Soft Focus
Updated: Aug 2, 2019
Glacier National Park is that place. It reveals something inside of you. It connects with being. Being just IS. A singularity; Zero fragmentation or division. Lori and I were hiking in an area known as Avalanche Lake - The Trail of the Cedars. This is a special creation. The hike winds on the edge of the easternmost Pacific Northwest. The Cedars on this margin can rise one hundred feet in the air and have a diameter of over six feet. They ascend from a blanket of thick green moss and ferns. When you step off the trail and onto the moss there is this give. It feels hollow beneath your feet but yet stable, soft. My glance from the trail turned into a stare, that morphed into trance, that settled on BEING. Enchanted by the trees. There is no depth and an infinite depth simultaneously. You know it can't go on forever but it appears too.
I left the trail and traveled deeper into BEING, just far enough so I could see the trail, my wife. I turned away from the trail into the vastness of trees. I was in a meditative state without meditating. I don't know how long I was there, more than five, less than15 minutes. Contentment came over me. I was experiencing "soft focus", a phrase I was introduced too in an article titled Is Surfing More Sport or Religion. Soft Focus creates solitude without loneliness. It is a state of flow, an absorption. Wherever your battery is - dead, full, low, medium, you get more. It's rejuvenation in a glance. Later, I reflected on the impact of this moment. The cedar trees had triggered a wave of dopamine, serotonin, and adrenaline release. It was poured right down my optic nerve but I felt it through every sense. My brain was awash in in neurotransmitters and hormones producing a sense of well being and calm. You might be wondering, adrenaline? Somewhere in that trance I knew there were grizzly bears out there in the trees and beyond. I was gambling in that flow state and it makes you feel more alive. Enchanted by the duality of being hyper alert but calm simultaneously. Just Being. It's a great feeling. If you get the opportunity to travel to Avalanche lake, take it. If not plant a tree somewhere.
