Deep Peace at Crater Lake National Park
Crater Lake National Park is a place of serene majesty. It formed from a massive volcanic eruption 7,700 years ago and millennia of rain and snow filled the crater with pristine waters. The water is such a pure and still mirror that is difficult to tell where the sky ends and the water begins. There is no separation. What is above is also reflected below. Standing there, I couldn’t help but wonder how often we create separations that don’t truly exist. We search outside of ourselves for wisdom, peace, or even the divine, forgetting that perhaps what we see has been with us all along.
There is a palpable sense of standing in a place where the heavens and the Earth meet. The crater opens deep into the Earth at 1,943 feet (making it the deepest lake in the USA), while the tallest point on the rim is at a 1,978 foot elevation above the lake. It creates the remarkable feeling of being among the clouds but connected with the Earth’s deepest layers at the same time. To stand at Crater Lake is to stand in an ancient volcano in the sky. It feels like a grounding ascension. In my experience, we can’t truly ascend without being deeply grounded in our human experience at the same time.
As I connected with the energy of Crater Lake, what emerged felt like a Deep Peace. There is an expansive quiet that is so loud one can’t help but feel peaceful there. Usually quiet is the absence of sound. That was not the case here. The quiet had a presence of its own that I have not felt anywhere else. It took my breath away.
The stillness moved through me like a wave despite the lack of any current in the waters below. The water was so still that it reflected everything above it. Standing there, I found myself thinking about what happens when we become still enough to do the same. In our busy lives, there is so much noise that it can be difficult to hear what we already know. Sometimes the knowing that we need is already there. We just need enough stillness to recognize it.
There was something about Crater Lake that made all of this feel incredibly simple. The sky above, the Earth below, and that impossibly still water between them. Nothing felt separate. In that stillness, I was reminded that perhaps peace is not always something we have to find. Sometimes we simply have to become quiet enough to feel what was already there
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