Is This Heaven?

I often find myself daydreaming. About this or that, and most everything else. Of far off horizons and snow covered mountain peaks, of running rivers and of swaying aspens. In fact, I wonder if there is a more peace inducing sight and sound than the collective motion of wind moving gracefully, quickly, and so convincingly joyfully through a thick grove of quaking aspens.  Whenever I go to that idyllic place in my mind, that only exists really in the annals of thought and fantasy, there are always swaying, tinkling aspen trees.  The glittering green set against a brilliant blue that lazy, puffy clouds float through.  In the distance there are stands of pines, thick and dark, skirting wide mountain meadows…

I wonder if heaven is personalized.

When I cross that veil what will I see?  Hallways and rooms and busy people rushing back and forth between ‘arrival’ desks, like a train station?  Or will it be, as it is so often portrayed in film and television, an engulfing white mass where a path of people seem to wander aimlessly into the unseen distance?  I don’t know.  But I like to believe that there will be an element of personality, that is, of my personality, on that other side.  I hope to see a stand of aspen trees rocking gently in the breeze. A flowing stream of icy run-off and in the distance, jagged snowy peaks stretching…heavenward?

I’ve often thought about what Bill Corliss experienced on that haunting spring day.  He died so fast, so instantly.  I hope that he was able to keep pedaling, seamlessly and effortlessly on a road of smooth glass and with a gentle tailwind and on into the eternities. Certainly, in order to qualify as heaven, heaven ought to have those elements of earth that made life so rich, so full, so worth living? I think so. I hope so. But I don’t intend to find out for many more years.

After all, there are still trails here on earth that have yet to wear my tread.