I remember John Denver singing about a Rocky Mountain high, and never really thought much about it. Then I spent last week in the Rocky Mountains and boy do I get it. I wake up every morning and want to go take a hike or a drive to some fine vista by a lake or a river or a meadow. I want to sit outside and drink coffee in the cool clear air. I want to see a mountain in the distance. I think it will take a couple of days to flush that desire from my system because I’m jonesing hard.

Of course, the big thing I took home was another dose of my newfound love of geology which bit me in Big Bend this year. As I looked at the mountains in Colorado, I thought of the Chisos, the Ouachita in Marathon, subducting continental plates, orogenies, inland seas, volcanoes, and erosion. This time, however, I got to add in glaciers, because at one point the entire rocky mountain area was covered in ice. Think about that for a minute. I thought about it for way more than a minute. In fact, I’m still thinking about it.

I think my pleasure in geology is the story you can tell when you start viewing the seemingly static earth beneath your feet as a slow moving giant that’s on the prowl. Because when I did, I saw my place in the universe and realized how relatively insignificant I am in the grand scheme of things. And that no matter how slow I go, I can never go as slow as the earth while I’m alive. It will take my passing to put me fully in sync. But It also helped me understand what it meant to just be, which a friend of mine wrote a song about and you should listen to, because it seems a good way to ease a troubled mind.

John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver's Tale