"And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." The Christian Bible is among dozens of traditions around the world in which humans were formed out of clay, rising out of the dirt with the inception of a soul. It's a beautiful metaphor that literally roots us in the earth from which we came, and an important reminder of how far we've drifted from our origins. We may forever reach for the stars, but we are of the earth, and part of it, and inseparable from it.
For this photo, Katlyn and I climbed 3400 feet in four miles to a mountain peak in Mount Rainier National Park in 2019 to capture the last light against a brilliant September sky.