Every relationship that we have in our life -- our contact with each person, place, and event -- serves a very special, if yet to be realized, purpose: it is a mirror that reveals things to us about ourselves that can be realized in no other way. I think this is one of the reasons that so many of us love to be out and about in that great showroom of life called Mother Nature.

There is a higher relationship that has nothing to do with anything personal at all. It is the realization of the existence of strength, of majestic beauty, of power... and that realization is inseparable from the consciousness in which it appears. And that consciousness isn't personal. It belongs to what is Divine in a human being and it is a gift of the Divine.