Big Si and Little Si, the original Twin Peaks. Snoqualmie, WA.
It struck me how quiet the woods seemed. The eerie silence of the dense forest was broken only by the gentle lapping of the waves breaking on the shoreline below and the occasional, jarring crack of a tree borne down by the wind. Fir trees and giant Western Red Cedars towered overhead and formed a natural cathedral of bark and limb. Their branches snapped and splintered around us as if they were toothpicks.
Deception Pass
I stared over the vast rocky outcroppings of Deception Pass, the narrow strait connecting the southern tip of Fidalgo Island with the larger Whidbey Island, shielding my face from the biting wind. In a moment, it rushed over me. I was seeing the Pacific Ocean — in all its grandeur — for the very first time. The sight took the wind from my lungs. Raw and rough and untamed, it chilled my bones and filled me with dread and awe.
Deception Pass at sunset.
Here I was standing on the last defiant tongue of America spitting out into the Salish Sea. The northernmost arrow pointing into a vast ocean that separates us from the envy of less happier lands. The place feels absolutely ancient, and it is beautiful in its remoteness. Dense, prehistoric forests cling to rocky crags and cliffs chipped and worn into grooved monoliths by the relentless pounding of the sea. In the distance, the snowcapped Olympic mountain range arches up like the exposed spine of some antediluvian god to touch the soft amber sky.
The inclement weather for which the region is so famous coats these rainforests in slick blankets of misty evergreen. The effect is absolutely hypnotic. It is no wonder that the Pacific Northwest produces so many renowned artists, authors, and musicians. The snowy peaks, dense forests, inclement weather, and icy waters of the Puget Sound have served as inspiration for two centuries of North American literature, film, art, and music.
Woods near Deception Pass
In 1990, acclaimed director David Lynch set his groundbreaking television show Twin Peaks in the small town of Snoqualmie, Washington, just forty-five minutes from downtown Seattle. Its innovative combination of drama, humor, mystery and mysticism caused Americans to fall in love with the mysterious environs of the Pacific Northwest and continues to inspire a new generation of viewers more than 27 years later.
Snoqualmie Falls outside the Salish Lodge and Spa (a.k.a the Great Northern Hotel). Famous for the opening credits of David Lynch's Twin Peaks.
In 1954, Annie Dillard retreated to this same remote archipelago in the Puget Sound to find answers. She needed to know if God existed, and if so, why the world was so strange and sad. In her slim, beautiful volume Holy The Firm, Dillard describes her emerging view of God as “scarcely different from pantheism.” Her realization: “that the world is immanation, that God is in the thing, and eternally present here, if nowhere else.”
The theme of immanation — the idea of the Divine Love as the energizing force and secret fate of all life — is a silver thread spun by Pythagoras that winds its way through the writings of Plato, Plotinus, Boethius, Dante, Newton, and Dostoevsky. Perhaps Dante described the Divine Nature of God best in Paradiso when he writes that God is simply “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.”
Double Bluff Beach, Whidbey Island
Immanation, or Panentheism, posits the interconnectedness of all things brimming from a single, unitary Divine principle. The source and end of all things. It acknowledges the fundamental beauty of the sublime and the ridiculous and sees the Divine in all manifestations of this beauty. God is not simply Truth, He is Beauty itself. In the opinion of Dostoevsky, when truth and goodness fail us, “beauty will save the world.”
Keechelus Lakebed, near Snoqualmie Pass.
“Man can live without science, he can live without bread, but without beauty he could no longer live, because there would no longer be anything to do to the world. The whole secret is here, the whole of history is here”
The hypnotic beauty of Snoqualmie Falls, the inclement paradise of the Puget Sound and the harsh, evergreen isolation of Whidbey Island are more than just pleasant tourists destinations. They are the muses that will continue to teach and inspire generations of poets and playwrights, tragedians and troubadours for years to come.
Through the darkness of future past
The magician longs to see
One chance out between two worlds:
Fire walk with me