For life in these wild mountains.

"Just a glimpse, Moses: a clift in the rock here, a mountaintop there, and the rest is denial and longing.  You have to stalk everything.  Everything scatters and gathers; everything comes and goes like fish under a bridge.  You have to stalk the spirit, too.  You can wait forgetful anywhere, for anywhere is the way of his fleet passage, and hope to catch him by the tail and shout something in his ear before he wrests away.  Or you can pursue him wherever you dare, risking the shrunken sinew in the hollow of the thigh; you can bang at the door all night until the innkeeper relents, if he ever relents; and you can wait till you're hoarse or worse the cry for incarnation always in John Knoepfle's poem: 'and Christ is red rover... and the children are calling/come over come over.'  I sit on a bridge as on Pisgah or Sinai, and I am both waiting becalmed in a clift of the rock and banging with all my will, calling like a child beating on a door: Come on out! I know you're there.

And then occasionally the mountains part.  The tree with the lights in it appears, the mockingbird falls, and time unfurls across space like an oriflamme....  I wait on the bridges and stalk along banks for those moments I cannot predict, when a wave begins to surge under the water, and ripples strengthen and pulse high across the creek and back again in a texture that throbs.  It is like the surfacing of an impulse, like the materialization of fish, this rising, this coming to a head, like the ripening of nutmeats still in their husks, ready to split open like buckeyes in a field, shining with newness.  'Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not.'  The fleeting shreds I see, the back parts, are a gift, an abundance.

Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have 'not gone up into the gaps.'  The gaps are the thing.  The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound.  The gaps are the clifts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery.  Go up into the gaps.

I go on my way, and my left foot says 'Glory,' and my right foot says 'Amen': in and out of Shadow Creek, upstream and down, in a daze, dancing, to the twin silver trumpets of praise."

(from Annie Dillard's A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)