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If it wasn't the beauty of the rock, nor its scale that were doing this too me, then what was? I think it was the effortless and original nature of the mountain. To produce a view with the beauty of the mountain, I would have to think long and hard, on it, and I would still be building on the memories of mountains I had seen. I would have to work harder and longer to try and capture my mental image on canvas. If I had wished to scope and physical nature of the rock, how much more work would it require? How many dollars, how many years, how many lives would it cost to make something to rival what stood before me? And yet the mountain stood before me. Not one finger had been lifted, not one pebble had been consciously moved to create what I saw now. Such beauty had arisen, for all intents and purposes, by accident. More amazingly, it had not arisen once, but an all but uncountable number of times in this small corner of the universe we all inhabit.
Natural laws and simple atoms, guided only by blind, mindless fate, had moved me so. I thought of God. A being of eternity, which had birthed the universe so many billions of years ago and imbuing in it the laws of nature which produced both sights to wonder at, sentient beings which could wonder at these vistas, all without the slightest interference or guidance. Allah akbar, praise be to God, the Power and the Glory, no phrase or praise I've ever heard from any religion has ever truly captured the wonder I felt at the moment, and I find myself still unable to find the words to concisely shout to myself, to convey my amazement when I think of a God whose creation can generate such wonders by the laws of chance and nature alone.
Reproduced here with the permission of Warren Miller the author.
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