Under a clear sun-lit sky, Oregon’s Crater Lake is a gorgeous sight. It is as beautiful a blue as any body of water I have ever seen. Check out some photos of it (www.nps.gov) if you haven’t seen it in person.
The lake sits in the crater of the old Mount Mazama, which erupted some 7,700 years ago to form the caldera that was eventually filled by precipitation to form the lake. The lake now maintains its average water level through a combination of annual precipitation and evaporation, and the lack of any outside source of water (like a river) results in its purity that may account for its magnificent color.
Actually, as I discovered with my wife and son and his fiancée when we spent the Independence Day holiday weekend there this month, the caldera in which Crater Lake rests contains a second caldera, this one within Wizard Island, which was formed from a smaller volcanic eruption within the Mazama crater. That eruption occurred sometime after the big one that blew the top off of Mount Mazama.
Of course, Mazama had been formed some 400,000 years earlier by volcanic eruptions even larger than the one that formed Crater Lake, and we can only imagine what may have been going on in the region before those events.
You get a sense when looking down at the lake, as we did after ascending to 8,000 feet above sea level in a hike to what’s called Garfield Peak, that the land mass beneath the lake is now at peace and that the lake is a permanent part of the geography of the place. Nothing, however, could be farther from the truth. The mountain, or what remains of it, is still volcanic, albeit dormant, and it is entirely conceivable, indeed, perhaps even inevitable, that Mount Mazama may one day re-form, once again being created by the massive flow of lava and magma from deep within the planet’s core.
Viewed in that sense, Crater Lake is just a moment in time in the evolution of our dear planet Earth, and that evolution is, of course, just a small speck of the ongoing evolution that is constantly in play in the universe. And, just to take the thought one step further, that universe is only what we know to exist in the vast region of space that our little solar system occupies.
It’s all a bit mind boggling when you focus your thoughts on it: the infinity of time and space, and the relative insignificance that any one body, be it a lake or a mountain or a single human being looking down on the one from the other, actually represents in those combined infinities.
These are probably not thoughts to dwell on if we seek to find meaning in our lives. I mean, viewed in the extreme, how can our single life, or any specific moment in it, be of any consequence in the vastness of all that is around us and has preceded us and will follow us? And the answer is that it can’t. Those moments, those events, those vexing things in our lives that either bedevil us or force us to strive harder to overcome them are completely lost in the history of human existence, which, after all, is but a single grain of sand in the hour glass that represents the time that the universe has existed and will exist.
From such thoughts, I am sure, beliefs in God take their root. The idea of God allows us to escape the depressing thought that we are no more consequential or significant than the mosquito I just swatted away as it buzzed around my head.
But, of course, we can, collectively, make a difference, at least on a relatively small scale, just as a swarm of mosquitoes, too many to swat away, can make a big difference in the level of discomfort we might feel if they descended on any one of us in voracious fury. And God or no God (leaving that subject for another day), human existence has certainly developed to the point that it can alter, again with relatively limited significance, the evolutionary path of our planet, if not our solar system or our universe.
But that thought still doesn’t resolve the personal perspective that one can gain from viewing Crater Lake and considering its creation and potential demise. How is each of us, individually, to account for ourselves, for our single existence, in the vast sea of infinities (spatial and temporal) that surround us?
Ah, you expect me to provide an answer here, don’t you? Sorry, but I have none. I’m completely unsettled with the idea of infinity. I find it wondrous in its magnitude and altogether depressing in its oppressiveness. I would love to feel that my life is somehow intended to mean something, to be something of lasting import. But it’s a fool’s errand to play out that thought. In the end (an end that comes all too quickly after all too short an existence) we are gone, and soon thereafter, the memory of us is gone as well. Perhaps we did some momentarily great things, created something, helped someone, loved, procreated, lived fully with the tools we had. Or perhaps we just did the best we could to survive and provide for ourselves and our little unit (family, community) that we chose to form and be a part of.
In the end, my agnosticism is my refuge, although some may call it a crutch. It helps me to accept reality as I perceive it and not to obsess on that which I cannot change or even begin to understand. It isn’t God, but it’s probably a good equivalent.
I look down at Crater Lake, and I feel blessed to be afforded the ability to feel its grandeur and its beauty. I look at my wife and my sons, and I feel blessed to have had what they have given me. I look at myself and I feel blessed to be able to feel in the here and now.
Infinity be damned.