Everything We Do Today Is Beautiful And Awesome Poem by Grant House

As we begin our hike up the to Baynes Peak, Mount Maxwell Provincial Park, Salt Spring Island, British Columbia
She says,
Everything we do today is beautiful and awesome

We wander up well worn and thoughtfully marked paths winding their way through the so tall you can't see the tops second growth douglas fir forest
Wide thick bark trunks climbing to the sky and soaring up there
Some possibly first growth survivors hundreds of years old
We pass through windfall spectacles
Massive root systems torn from the earth
Those fallen sky wanderers' violent crashing down still echoing in our imaginations
Wind's fury having spoken

First Nations people hunted here
At peace with what we call nature
In balance for thousands of years
How must it have felt, I wonder, to witness their precious tree friends cut down
Felled for fleeting profit after having sustained them throughout the ages
A forest community stable and free
A sacred trust broken by another kind of furious wind

Climbing through all time and history to the top
My hiking stick keeping some kind of syncopated rhythm with our sturdy shoes carrying us along
We step up at last out of the verdant mottled sunlight sanctuary
And behold the sudden view from the edge of the cliff
Like untold numbers before us, we exclaim
Wow! and Oh my!
The Gulf Islands and the San Juans
Sparkling waterways with ferries, working craft, pleasure boats and too small to see kayaks
Distant mountains of the mainland
Mount Baker white snow covered commanding the horizon on this clear September afternoon
White clouds gliding overhead in the radiant warm late summer breeze
We stand there in awe

Having climbed up through our life mountain forest
We look out on the edge of life
Our future together unfolding before us
Everything we do today is beautiful and awesome, she said when we started
What a spectacular thing to say