Something Worth Staying For

There’s something off about the way we go looking for wonder.

We travel for it. Photograph it. Post it. Stand for five minutes at overlooks and say, “Wow,” as if the point is to catch something fleeting before it disappears. In northern New Mexico, there’s a mountain called Hermit’s Peak. You can see its dramatic granite face for just a few minutes while driving north on interstate 25. But the wonder of the mountain doesn’t just flash in a moment. It waits.

The Mountain That Doesn’t Try to Impress

Standing on this mountain, you don’t only get the polished drama of postcard landscapes. You get something older.

The exposed rock of Hermit’s Peak—ancient granite, pushed upward and worn back down over geologic time—doesn’t announce itself. It’s not trying to be anything. It simply is. Beneath your feet, the mountain holds a story that geologists say stretches back 1.4 billion years, long before forests, long before us.

And yet, here it is, steady. Unmoved by whatever we are currently calling catastrophe.

Even the forests that cloak these slopes—ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, spruce and bristle cone pine on the very top—don’t rush their growth. They lean into time differently. A good year is a thin ring. A hard year is a thinner one. They carry drought and fire and broken branches not as interruptions, but as part of the journey.

What Lives Here

If you walk slowly enough, this place starts to give itself away.

Crush a leaf of sage between your fingers, and suddenly the air changes—sharp, resinous, alive. But if you pass by without contact, it keeps its secret.

The bark of a ponderosa pine smells faintly of butterscotch when warmed by the sun. The sweetness is there all along, but it doesn’t travel far unless you draw near.

Bees move from flower to flower, pulling something almost invisible—nectar so fine it has to be transformed before we can taste it. Blue fungus beetles creep quietly through the understory, carrying an entire life just out of sight.

Nothing here is in a hurry to reveal itself. But nothing here is empty, either.

After the Fire

In 2022, the Hermits Peak Calf Canyon Fire burned through this watershed.

It’s easy to stand in the aftermath and see the loss. Blackened trunks. Open hillsides. Crumbling rock exposed to the sky.

But if you stay long enough—if you come back the next season, and the next—you will notice more.

Wildflowers abound. Brittle weeds slowly give way to dense green grasses in response to the monsoon rains. Aspen shoots push up where the fire cleared space. Water finds new paths. The land reorganizes itself, not by going backward, but by becoming something new.

The surface looks unstable. But something underneath is remarkably trustworthy.

Not safe in the way we often mean it. Not controlled. But deeply, stubbornly alive.

The Kind of Wonder We Miss

We’ve trained ourselves to look for wonder out there—in the dramatic, the visible, the social media shareable.

But this place keeps insisting on a different kind of attention.

Wonder isn’t just what you see at a distance.

It’s what reveals itself when you draw near.

When you touch it.

When you stay.

And the personal part is this: the same pattern seems to hold within us.

We are quick to admire the beauty of a landscape, but hesitant to believe there is anything like that inside our own lives. We assume that whatever is hidden in us is either empty or broken or not worth uncovering.

But what if that’s just because we haven’t stayed long enough?

What if, beneath the protective layers—the busyness, the grief, the guardedness—there are deep currents moving? Dense sweetness forming? Something dependably alive that has not been–indeed cannot be–undone by what has happened on the surface?

Learning to Trust What Is Hidden

The mountain doesn’t rush to prove itself.

The forest doesn’t panic when it burns.

The watershed doesn’t forget how to recover.

There is a kind of peace here that isn’t visible at first glance. It doesn’t prevent terror. It holds through it.

And maybe that’s the invitation.

Not to chase wonder.

Not to manufacture it.

But to trust that it is already here—quiet, hidden, waiting for our attention.

Asking, “Will you stay?”

To press gently into our own lives the way you might press a sage leaf between your fingers.

To linger long enough for the scent to rise.

To believe that beneath whatever has hardened or burned over, something deeper has not been lost.

Something steady.

Something alive.

Something worth staying for.

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Find yourself in the story.