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“Leave the road, take the trails.”
(Pythagoras)

Paradise… the word invokes an image of heaven, perfection, a place of play, the baseball diamond from Field of Dreams, the Happy Living House on Lake Norman, a tropical island, a place of halting beauty gifting moments of magic and peace and clarity.  

For my friend, Shari, and I—a couple wandering, thirty-something souls—a five-hour hike along the Pacific Crest Trail from Castle Peak through classic Sierra Nevada wilds led us to our place, Paradise Lake, a place Zeus himself would not have balked to call home, an intimate, fingered, islanded collection of alpine water bordered by granite walls and an infinite sky.

With every step away from town’s noise and toward wilderness songs, we moved in tune as we trekked on and climbed the Happy Living Pyramid.

pyramid

Our Mental Fitness was honed through the thinking and not thinking of putting one foot in front of the other, the journey that is the ultimate destination clearing our minds of clutter and replacing it with stillness.

Through twenty-plus miles of hiking, inclines and declines and boulder hops and stream-crossings—all with 25-pound packs on our shoulders—our Physical Fitness scored high, not that it was so much a competition as simply a fun game of “Get Outside and Go!”

Our Financial Fitness was highly profitable—our food cheap and our lodging free, our water straight from the stream, our firewood gathered, and our entertainment provided not by Universal Studios but by the Universe’s Perseid Meteor Shower.

And because what’s already been stated and because birdsongs and waterfalls and meditating and talking about immortality and banality and everything in between, Shari and I’s Spiritual Fitness felt the river chapter from Herman Hesse’ Siddhartha.

This led us to the Love and Adventure bred from being out in the wild and not knowing what lay around the next corner. (Or underneath the next boulder, as we found out with our friend, the fat and cute and curious marmot with the happy presence.) The mosquitos didn’t kill us and our blisters will heal. And the memory of finding paradise will remain because Shari and I were doing things we love in a place we loved with a person we loved—and it was a significant trek, a significant few days, a few days of profound peace and perfect Happy.

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