I didn’t grow up with religion.
I grew up with stones, trails, weather, and long walks where questions were allowed to stay unanswered.

My father took me hiking the way some people go to church. Not formally. Not reverently. But faithfully. Over time, nature became my sanctuary, not because anyone named it that way, but because it was where attention was practiced. He wasn’t teaching beliefs. He was teaching how to be here.

“Keep your eyes peeled,” he’d say when I missed an animal or an interesting stone.

It wasn’t a correction. It was an invitation. Out of my head. Back into my body. Back into the moment. As if being alive meant paying attention.

And just when the moment tipped toward something solemn, he’d stop walking and ask, “Did you hear that?”
The pause, then the smile, told me everything.

Suddenly we weren’t hikers anymore. We were characters in an old Western, listening for the sheriff right behind us. The spell would break. We’d laugh. Then we’d keep walking.

I remember one hill in particular, late in the day, legs burning, the kind of climb where discouragement starts whispering. We were both tired. Without warning, he planted his walking stick, grabbed it with both hands, and started chanting, “Pull. Pull.” Each word came with a dramatic lurch forward, like he was being hauled uphill by an invisible rope.

“Do you feel that?” he asked, grinning.

I grabbed my stick and joined him. “Pull. Pull.” I stumbled up the trail like a fool. Soon I was laughing so hard I forgot how tired I was. We climbed the rest of the hill like that, two grown humans pretending we were being dragged up a mountain by nothing at all.

That was my father’s gift. He could read a moment and know exactly what it needed. If seriousness would crush it, he brought play. If humor would distract, he brought focus. He met life as it was, not as it was supposed to be.

I’ve come to believe that anyone who truly understands awe can move easily between reverence and humor. My father moved between even more. Wisdom. Play. Parenting. He shifted without effort. He taught me that meaning does not require solemnity.

He was always more himself away from the artificial edges of the world. As we walked, he would scan the land the way other people read books.

“Look over there,” he’d say. “What does that grove of aspens tell you?”

“Water,” I’d answer.

“Good.”

He’d ask where I would set up camp and why. I’d explain my thinking, and we would walk there together, sometimes finding the quiet evidence of people who had stood in that same place long before us. Small flakes of obsidian or flint scattered in the dirt, remnants of arrowhead making.

It felt miraculous. Not supernatural. More intimate than that. The miracle of recognition.

I may have been the first human to touch those flakes in hundreds of years. I would hold them carefully, wondering who made them, what their hands looked like, whether they laughed with their children the way my father laughed with me. Those moments gave me my first felt sense that I belonged to something vast and ongoing. Not as a spectator, but as a participant.

That training in attention never left me. It deepened.

Over time, my fascination with stones turned into something quieter and more devoted. When I hold one in my palm, something ancient settles me. Geological time presses gently into my body. These objects, shaped by forces that never rushed or planned, carry a presence I can feel.

It is not faith. It is familiarity.

A stone that predates all living things on Earth speaks in a language older than thought. One that survived fire, ice, pressure, and patience embodies a kind of endurance my nervous system recognizes immediately. Each has a personality. One steady and dense. Another playful in its angles. They have watched the entire human story unfold without comment.

Sometimes, without realizing I am doing it, I whisper thank you.

This feels like spirituality stripped bare. The moment we pause long enough for wonder to reach us.

I need to pause now, more than ever. Modern life tends to fracture time into emergencies and noise. Faster. Louder. More. But beneath all of that, my body still remember how to slow when I am in appreciation.

When I hold an ancient stone, my thoughts soften. My worries about money, deadlines, and the future lose their urgency. I am not diminished by that perspective. I am steadied by it. Returned to scale.

After my son graduated high school, I traveled with him to Machu Picchu. The city was built around 1450 AD, recent history compared to the stones it is built from, which are hundreds of millions of years old. Standing there, I thought about the hands that shaped them. The precision. The devotion.

I looked at my son and felt time stretch backward and forward at once. I thought of my father.

Three generations standing together in geological time.

How lucky this brief life is. A blink against the mountains. A moment. And still enough to pass something essential on.

The people who built Machu Picchu felt the same stone weight I feel now. They looked at the same stars. They wondered about those who came before them. Just as I wondered about the person who knapped those obsidian flakes beside my father. Just as my son may someday remember this moment.

This is how continuity happens. Not through doctrine or certainty, but through attention. Through presence. Through gratitude.

Our bodies already know what matters. Stillness. Wonder. Contact with the real. This wisdom does not ask us to believe anything.

It asks us to notice.

My father taught me how to pay attention to what really matters.

Thank you, Dad.