I. The Red Rocks

Joseph Campbell says: “The two, the hero and his ultimate god, the seeker and the found— are thus understood as the outside and inside of a single self-mirrored mystery, which is identical with the mystery of the manifest world. The great deed of the supreme hero is to come to the knowledge of this unity in multiplicity and then to make it known.”

What a fiery quest to come to the knowledge of this unity in multiplicity and then to make it known. A self-mirrored mystery confronts us and confounds us and informs us with its outside and its inside—a mystery identical with the mystery of the manifest world.

Consider the red rocks along the Colorado Front Range, so bold and striking as they jut out of the ground and slice the sky with their sandstone edges—who would know looking at them that 296 million years ago they were the sands of island landmasses far south of the equator. So, while we see magnificent solid monuments of stone with scooped out, weather-worn nesting places for eagles and hawks and protective caves and cloistered spaces hosting cougars and foxes and openings that support thickets of scrub oak shielding deer and rabbit from their predators—we are also looking at a dramatic storyline that includes a long journey northward and dramatic moments 60 million years ago when huge mountains rose skyward as a result of a colliding ocean and land plate.  Who knew that these monumental red rocks are what is left over after millions of years of the erosion of these once towering mountains.  So, while we see what we call the Flatirons, Roxborough Park, the Garden of the Gods, the Red Rocks Amphitheater—if the truth be known, what we are looking are the results of nature’s handiwork by way of 60 million years and her erosive, creative prowess with wind and water as she shaped and polished a now ragged shoreline against the Colorado sky. In these monuments of stone, the confounding mystery of the earth, its origins, its vast history stretching into billions of years, its connection to another place and time yet so resonant in this time.  Such beauty and life in what we can see in these clay-like outcroppings and such beauty and life hidden in their profound transformation from ancient strata to stone sanctuary.