Driving through the Pyrenees is always (for me) a high and uplifting experience. The roads are good, almost always three lanes (one each way for normal driving, and one for passing on hills), and the drivers are polite and aware.
But the uplifting part is what you're driving *through*. These are not old, worn-down-by-time pussy mountains like the Appalachians. These are *serious* mountains, often craggy and jutting up from the valley floor in sheer rock walls thousands of feet high. These are gnarly mountains, postcard-worthy mountains. And the weather. It changes constantly. On the Spanish side it was still hot and sunny, not a cloud in the sky. But crest the pass and suddenly we were driving through a raging thunder and lightning storm, followed within minutes by driving through light rain and clouds that had decided to come down from the heavens to play. The clouds just picked a mountain and then cuddled up next to it for a while, and we got to drive through the cloud as it cuddled. Think the mountain vistas from The Lord Of The Rings movies, but in a more serious mountain range. So the scenery alone is uplifting. But for me, there is something about the Pyrenees that makes them far more interesting. There are not very many people here. By "not very many" I mean "almost none." The Pyrenees are one of the least populous places on planet Earth. In satellite scans that measure the impact of human habita- tion by showing the lights of cities and towns, the Pyrenees show up as almost a solid mass of black between France and Spain. The "light spatter" is on the same level of sparsity as it is in Tibet. What that means (for me) is a simply stunning level of *silence*. It's like walking with an enlightened saint walking beside you, both of you inside his or her aura. There is just no "static" here. Think of humans as radio transmitters and our brains as the receivers. In my view, everyone is psychic, whether they admit to it or not. They are picking up (usually subconsciously) on all of the thoughts and all of the emotions of ALL of the people who surround them. Because most people haven't ever been taught how to "parse" and "filter" this constant bombardment of thoughts and emo- tions, they tend to mistake the thoughts and emotions of others for their own, and thus over time come to believe that *their* minds are this noisy. That's what I mean by "static." Here there is no static. Driving, yesterday, I noticed that unless one of my passengers said something to me, there was not a thought in my mind. <insert obligatory snide crack from the Peanut Gallery here> Not one. Not the "running commentary" of background thoughts one gets used to in the city -- your own and others people's. Not yer normal Road Trip train of thoughts. Nada. Rien. Nichevo. Nothing. Bupkus. No thoughts at all. Just silence. Now imagine meditating here...
