MAJESTIC FACES OF CROATIAN MOUNTAIN VELEBIT

I adore mountain Velebit with deep passion. Velebit is also in love with me. Autumn there is gorgeous, magical, abundance of colours seduce the eyes and soul of everyone who walks lovely, romantic and challenging paths of this mountain. Breathtaking views change every few steps, one feels honored to see nature in its pure, untouched beauty and wilderness.

It is world of dreams which human love and desire started to create once upon of time, innocent and powerful. Nature is our imagined paradise, our fairy tale, our true connection with Mother Earth, our support and real source of inner strength.

Our souls are still creating such sparkling, wild untamed world, where we can let our spirit fly freely together with hawks through the deep blue sky.

We need to respect nature, love it, preserve it, honored it, enjoy its perfection, learn from it. There is no such wisdom and power in whole our artificial civilisation, like is in nature with all its balance and unknown number of lifeforms, which are all pure perfection. We are children of nature, Mother Earth is song of our soul, path to our divinity.

I spent last three weekends on Velebit, hiking, singing, laughing with friends, meditating, sweating and walking through the majestic miracles of nature...and want to share parts of this experience with dear people on Hubpages, through these words and these pictures.

I took these photos while hiking on the charming rocky hills which surround and hug Big Paklenica river.

Imagine warm sunny days, tender wind, birds singing and leaves whispering the secrets of the soul. Nothing but amazing beauty of indescribable creativity: pure essence of life is expressing itself in endless forms, sounds, fragrances, colours.

One just knows that Divine is here...everywhere... all-loving and all-mighty.

You know that everything is in perfect order in this universe, and that goodness must prevail.

In the human tradition, mountains have been always sacred, mystical, innocent, celebrated as home of gods, angels and Divine beings. Mountains are everywhere known as places where one can purify the soul, connect with inner wisdom, get healed, in the wilderness and distance from the civilisation.

Hiking also has very strong spiritual component: it is symbol of your present life situation, because you walk up the challenging paths towards the desired goal. Mountain paths represent your life path, challenges on the path represent the problems or challenges you meet in your everyday life, the ways you face the challenges represent how do you cope with everyday situations, top of your hill represents desired goal. When you hike you change little by little, because you have to change to rich the top as easy as possible. Afterwards you are able to apply gained knowledge in everyday life as well.

If one is passionate hiker, has to learn many lessons of life wisdom:

1. You learn how to gain focus, actually you have to learn it, because without focus, you can hurt yourself very easily, or miss the way. Concentration is necessary.

2.You learn that you never can predict everything, there are always surprises on the way to the top, or on the way back. Life also cannot be completely under our control, we create it, but our inner wisdom makes divine puzzle game of our wishes and dreams, and creates most interesting living mosaic of it, some situations come suddenly in order to surprise us, just in the right moment. We are multidimensional light beings, our life is here to teach us, to fulfill us, to entertain us, always gives us opportunity to develop some talent or inner quality.

3.You learn how to adjust yourself to the every circumstance on the way, sunny day, rain, big fallen tree, ruined shoes, too havy baggage, not enough water, path much more challenging then expected, lack of necessary comfort in the shelter, pain in the body... Learning the lesson of adjustment, you also learn that you cannot expect that desired path changes itself completely just because of you. Sometimes you can avoid challenge, but most often you simply have to adjust and transform it into the worthy experience.

4.Path without challenges would be very boring: our souls create challenges in order to gain experience, self-confidence, in order to developed and become stronger. But when you are really tired, you prefer soft and flat path, or beautiful peaceful meadow where you can enjoy and just exist in pure happiness.

5.You learn that there are always many choices: you can choose different path or different goal...you can change your mind and go back, but after riching certain point there is no going back, you have to walk to the end.

6.You can choose to walk slowly or quickly run to the desired top/goal, but if you run, you do not see beauty of the nature and you do not enjoy your path. The most important is too look around and connect yourself with all life and creativity around you. If you do that, you see that all these miracles are part of you... then you enjoy your path, and enjoy hiking to the top. Top is never so important as precious world of other living beings around you.

7.You can reach the top only if you have PASSION, LOVE for hiking and nature, you also need to TRUST IN YOURSELF. There is no place for imagined fears: fears create only troubles, or you stay at home because of them. You cannot hike or be fully alive, while trembling from the fear. Only love, passion and self-confidence lead you to the top. Right tempo as well.

8.Some paths you can walk completely alone: great experience for learning how to protect and love yourself. You learn how to rely on yourself, what is extremely important knowledge. But for more difficult paths and goals, you need the company, and adjust yourself to that company, and your company has to adjust to your rhytm as well.

Most important lesson which this mighty mountain gave me last year was: NEVER GIVE UP, NO MATTER WHAT CIRCUMSTANCES ARE .

Explanation: 2/3 of 6 hours hiking on the hill Stap (South Velebit) I suffered from heavy food poisoning, and went up without water, dehydrated, on very warm day, through the difficult rocky goat paths. My hiking colleague created military training from that trip, instead of being tender, majority of the time he left me to walk alone, although I was ill and completely exhausted. There was nobody that day around on that part of the mountain, we were there completely alone. 20 minutes before the shelter, I founded nice flat rock and decided to spend the night there, because my body did not listen me any more, but my friend command me to carry on with walking. I succeeded because I got angry with him, so my adrenalin went up and gave me enough force to walk. In the shelter I recuperated completely after drinking fresh water in 30 minutes, and was great the rest of the time. Although my friend`s behaviour seemed to be very non-compassionate that day from the my point of view, my soul created such challenge in order to learn the most important lesson in my life: IF THE GOAL IS SACRED AND WORTHY, NEVER GIVE UP - NO MATTER WHAT CIRCUMSTANCES ARE: THERE IS ALWAYS HELP FROM INNER SOURCE AND OUTSIDE WORLD. Because I was able to hike despite all conditions, and came up almost alone (at least to my flat rock) I realized that everything else in my life is just easy game, and that I have no need to be afraid of anything any more.

I am more then grateful and full of deepest unconditional love for my friend and spirit of nature, who taught me that lesson intentionally, learning it was relief and blessing. It passed few months which I needed to fully integrate the deep meaning of that happening...

Everything is Divine in our life, difficult conditions are not there to punish us, or frighten us: they happen just to teach us what we need to correct in our attitude in order to become more balanced and stronger, the consciousness seeks challenges to develop and become wiser and more compassionate.

Life is sacred and always worthy to be lived, and always is the most interesting novel, most exciting dream, most passionate artistic work. As soon as you make and effort to perceive it on that way, you start to see the bliss, which is always in us from the beginning of the time.

National Park Paklenica consists of two canyons and rivers, both the canyons and creeks are called Big and Small Paklenica (Velika Paklenica and Mala Paklenica), Big Paklenica Canyon is approximately 14 KM long, whilst Small Paklenica canyon is 12 KM, both of these canyons get deeper and deeper over time as the river help to erode the limestone walls of the mountain. These beautiful two canyons are surrounded by romantic rocky hills, among them are the highest peaks of the Velebit Mountains (Vaganski Vrh at approximately 1757 meters and Sveto Brdo at approximately 1753 meters).

The total size of the park is 96 square KM.

The park has 70 explored caves, the only one that is open to the pubic is Manita Peć.

The park has an abundance of flora and fauna some of which are unique to the park and the mountain, there are over 800 species of flora and a huge variety of fauna.

There are 12 types of snakes in the park, some of the snakes include the Balkan whip snake, leopard snake, aesculapian snake, nose-horned viper and the Orsini's viper, there are 97 species of birds, some the birds include the rock nuthatch, blue rock thrush and the Griffon vulture, there is also a large variety of mammals in the park some of which include the Roe deer, red deer, chamois, wild boar, brown bear, wolfs and lynx.

If someone loves hiking or mountain climbing, Paklenica has it all on offer:

For the hikers there are more than 150KM of very interesting hiking tracks available. Paklenica National Park has some of Europe's best climbing areas and is the most frequented by Croatian climbers, one of the attractions of this area is due to its location, which is next to the coast.