Through the eyes of the uninitiated, the ritual of summer can regain a luster since tarnished with the passing of time. Sharing an experience with someone for the first time is akin to taking someone on their first ride on singletrack....we can all identify with the newer perspective, and appreciate the finer details of what it means to be transformed all over again.
The cycle that propels us around once more, moving us in an elliptical orbit, provides enough eccentricity to keep us focused on the changes within, however slow they may occur.....
Riding on the path of old takes on a new hue, when shared with someone who is visiting for the first time. The same old fields of Rocky Mountain Iris on the Cabin Loop become new and enchanting once again....however, I'll always be partial to this sentinel of early summer....
Sitting in the coolness of a shady spot, my old friend, the spotted coral root orchid exists in a symbiosis....not with the sun through photosynthesis, but with the fungus within the soil....feeding from a different source to produce it's beauty.
As the water trickles out of the spring, draining from gently tilted beds of sandstone, we sit in enjoyment...gaining from the coolness of the spring, the sound of the water....the reflections that mirror the sky....a world beyond reach.
....but inside the pane of reflection, we find more transformation. The stone caddis draws an arc in the sediment as it crawls around, feeding from the microscopic organisms within the pool....growing, until one day it will leave its protective rocky tube, formed from grains of sand, and float up to the pane of reflection where it will linger for a bit, only to fly away forever.......unencumbered by its protector of old, weighing it down at the bottom.....
Perhaps on its flight....it will stop to appreciate the colors of the coral root and their shared transformation....then again, it's just a caddis fly and it knows nothing of the symbiotic nature of things.....that's left to a few lucky mountain bikers who just stopped for a bite to eat.
Turning our attention to more novel thoughts....a mantle piece for my new cabin's fireplace comes into reality...the start of something new, rising from the old....
Along the way, we bridged over the reflections, the transformations and the epiphanies, and in spite of our complex selves......
.....we rode in simple enjoyment....bikes on singletrack in the pines of early summer.
