Last night I opened my book Breast Strokes to a day when I was walking with 3 year old Zach who informed me he was an airplane. His arms spread, he flew over a speed bump, and said, “Look at that cloud.”

I sit with that now, knowing we can be or do anything. 

A friend sent me the website of an amazing photographer Jay Tamang who is from Nepal and works at the Mill Valley Whole Foods as a shining light.

I’m struck by his words accompanying a photo from the Merced River, Yosemite.

The moment I arrive in Yosemite, something shifts inside me. It is not just the sight of it — it is the feeling. Like the valley itself reaches out and says: you are home. I don’t rush here. I settle quietly by the bank of the Merced River, where the water runs cold and clear and ancient, and I let the stillness take over.

My mind begins to travel — not forward, but back. Back through centuries, back through the very story of this earth.

I look at the granite walls rising around me and I wonder: what did this place look like when the first Native Americans walked this valley? They were not here by accident. They were called here — the way all seekers are called to places greater than themselves. They understood what took me years of photography to learn: that nature does not belong to us. We belong to it.

I go back further still. I imagine this valley buried beneath a mile of glacial ice, the great granite domes pressing upward with unstoppable force. El Capitan. Half Dome. The Cathedral Rocks. They were not built. They were revealed. The mountain always knew what it was. It only needed time to show the world.

Sitting by the Merced, I feel the smallness of my own life — and I am grateful for it. Here, I feel more alive than anywhere else on earth. More at peace. More certain that everything is unfolding exactly as it should.

We are all, like the granite, still being revealed.

You can view his work here: tamangphotography.com