There are no coincidences

"Mt. Shuksan stands a mile above the Mt. Baker Highway." (Photo: University of Washington Libraries)

Annie Dillard is best known for writing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, in which she explores the intersection of human, divine and nature in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia's Roanoke Valley.

This morning, two weeks after returning from the Pacific Northwest, I unwittingly discovered this passage from another of her writings:

"I came here to study hard things -- rock mountain and salt sea -- and to temper my spirit on their edges. ' Teach me thy ways, O Lord ' is, like all prayers, a rash one, and one I cannot but recommend. These mountains -- Mount Baker and the Sisters and Shuksan, the Canadian Coastal Range and the Olympics on the peninsula -- are surely the edge of the known and comprehended world ... That they bear their own unimaginable masses and weathers aloft, holding them up in the sky for anyone to see plain, makes them, as Chesterton said of the Eucharist, only the more mysterious by their very visibility and absence of secrecy."

(Taken from A Spiritual Field Guide: Meditations for the Outdoors, by Bernard Brady and Mark Neuzil.)