Kundalini and the Art of Being ... 11start of a new day. It felt just as it had the previous day when we’d
arrived: gray, silent, tranquil, and subtly disturbing.
We ate breakfast, and spent the rest of the morning sitting in the
silence for a while; then we did some exploring up one of the wide
valleys, just to look around. As morning turned to afternoon, we de-
cided we had better get going, so we could catch the last evening bus
out of the park. We took down the tent, packed up, and then hiked
slowly back up the valley alongside the babbling stream to the gravel
park road. We sat quietly on our packs beside the road until eventu-
ally a bus came rolling along to break the silence of nature and deliver
us back to civilization.
I felt a sense of completion as I finished my last day of work at the
end of September. Although I’d enjoyed tramping around the park,
as well as saving up some money, I was looking forward to getting
focused on my inner work. I had called the folks at Ananda Village a
few weeks earlier and been relieved to hear that they had an opening
for me to do work exchange. They were expecting me in mid-Octo-
ber.
Chris was planning to drive most of the way back through Canada
down to the “Lower 4” and he invited me to join him, along with
another friend from work, Tamara. Since it was the end of the sum-
mer season, we were some of the last people to leave the park.
Autumn comes and goes quickly in the far north. The deciduous
trees in the lower elevations were now bare. Strong winds blew
through the resort as we packed up the Jeep. We sensed that snow
would be falling on the ground any day, to stay there until April. The
hotel would soon be transformed into another world, very different
from that of the bustling tourist season of the past several months.
Moose would be strolling through the snow-covered parking lots,
and the Northern Lights would be radiating down from above in
their multi-colored display.
We left Denali Park and headed north first to Fairbanks, east from
there through Tok, across the Canadian border, and then south back