Something about time with ancient trees and shimmering waters, time under star-salted skies and by sunlit horizons, takes us as far beyond ourselves as we can go in this world and at the same time returns us to ourselves clarified, magnified, more awake to the native poetry of reality between the bookends of life and death - perhaps because time in nature resets the brain's Default Mode Network that ordinarily trammels our thinking, or perhaps simply because we are nature and it is amid the rest of the natural world that we most openly commune with ourselves, with the "cosmic consciousness" of which ours is but a fractal and contact with which is our readiest portal to transcendence.