Can we share something beautiful we've noticed while sober?

I just spent 5 days on a solo backpacking trip in Algonquin Park, I hiked 32 KM. It was suppose to be a 7 day trip but I was good after 5.

I stared deeply into the night sky most nights when conditions presented themselves, identifying constellations, planets, galaxies as best I could, watching the milky way come into focus which becomes brighter and brighter as the night wanes on, catching glimpses of shooting stars streaking across the horizon, watching man made satellites zip by at high rates of speeds that looked like very fast moving stars, and the icing on the cake was my second last night when I was actually looking long enough with no light pollution in sight, I could only describe it as being able to see that the planet I was on was actually moving in it's orbit based on the millions of objects that was in my view and how some of them slowly disappeared from my horizon after a time. The planet I was on was moving, and I saw it.

While doing this I was totally in the moment of the environment I was in I was in the wilderness, left my worries at home while sharing this space with wolf's howl I heard the first night early in the morning, the call of loons on another that went on for hours, the soaring eagle I saw flying over a swamp to only disappear from view behind a cliff face headed into the forest, the chirps and yipping of coyotes, the angry beaver with my presence at one site who made it known by swimming back and forth slapping its tail on the water, the four foot rate snake that I stop to stare at for a good five minutes and it stared back at me while basking on a trail, the playful chipmunk city I spent a night in another site whose constant chirping and scurrying around the underbrush at my site made me feel like a tolerated visitor in their home as long as I left food behind, and I did. A moose calling out for mate at dusk, and a wild turkey that woke me early yesterday morning whose call made me laugh as it walked through the forest and seem to go on for ever as it walked off.

This trip made me realized how lucky not just us humans are but how all creatures are to be alive, all because of a cosmic experiment or process that decided to turn on the consciousness that was linked to my body 42 years ago. The odds of that given the size of the universe is amazing in itself.

I realized how beautiful, precious and short life is.

It's not your life. It's Life. Life is bigger than you. Life isn't something you possess. It's something you take part in, and you witness. Louis CK

/r/stopdrinking Thread