After the excitement of yesterday's TEDxFoCo and the satisfaction of seeing the event live up to its promise, I wanted to get away from Fort Collins and not do anything that required work (which ruled out hiking some gorgeous 8-mile-LONG out-and-back trail or, you know, driving the hour to Denver). I went to Shambhala Mountain Center, west of Livermore. I've written before about Mountain Center. I try to go there in the spring or summer and again in the fall or winter, and it always rewards a visit. Also – and you shouldn't doubt how important this is – between noon and 1 pm, Mountain Center serves the best hippy food I've ever eaten. And nowadays, getting hippy food anywhere is a challenge.

So, you can imagine my disappointment when I arrived at noon at Mountain Center and learned the Center was hosting a retreat for high-level practitioners. The Great Stupa of Dharmakaya was open, but the rest of Mountain Center – including the kitchen – was closed to anyone who wasn't participating in the retreat. I didn't get my hippy lunch.

Nonetheless, the stupa remained wonderful. I took photos of the statue of the Buddha inside, and as you can see in below, the statue presents a surprising Buddha. He's depicted as having a baby face with pouty lips and clear-blue eyes. I guess the effect conveys implacable equanimity, but it's also a bit odd, even funny. Technically, the statue shows the Buddha with western features, in the Greco-Buddhist Gandhara style, which developed after Alexander the Great established a Greek presence in Afghanistan. The Buddhas of Bamiyan were also in this style before the Taliban destroyed them. But, getting back to the Mountain Center Buddha, the statue's silly look isn't the only thing you notice. The statue has especially expressive hands. They're held at the level of the Buddha's heart, with the thumbs and index fingers forming circles. The gesture conveys teaching and is known as the Dharmachakra mudra. It's a particularly poignant reference to Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and his work in spreading the dharma. The stupa itself was constructed in Trungpa Rinpoche's honor.

After visiting the stupa, I walked up the hill and through the torii gates to visit the Daitozan Jinja – the Great Eastern Mountain Shrine, which the Shambhala community calls the Kami Shrine. I don't understand why the shrine is there (although diligent online searching produced one explanation for it), but it certainly contributes to the Mountain Center's vibe. The shrine was built in honor of Amaterasu-Omikami, the sun goddess and the principal female deity of Shintoism. The shrine includes a purification basin, and to the left of it, an interpretive sign explains: "In Shinto thinking, human beings receive their life from the sun, and human life is the temporary resting place for divine solar energy... We are fortunate to have this energy here." Amen.

The shrine is elegantly simple and contrasts with the stupa's flamboyant architecture, canonical colors and layers of symbolism. On previous visits, I've worked to comprehend the shrine. It's a built environment that's tightly integrated with its natural environment and embraces, perhaps, two hundred yards of landscape planning (or should I say "landscape acknowledgement"?). First you walk through a field and pass under a monumental torii gate. Then you discover the purification basin and walk through another torii gate. Then the field gives way to the forest, and the path veers to the right, where you find a third torii gate and approach the shrine itself. To understand all of this and become a part of it, I've found it helps to make the three bows at each torii gate. If you visit, you shouldn't feel foolish about doing so yourself.

The shrine includes a small wooden building, which is surrounded by a wooden fence and a closed gate. In front of the gate stands a wooden wall, which obstructs your view. The photos below show a lot of that. The photos also show that the forest has been cleared away from around the shrine. The cleared forest feels like a desecration of the site, except the thinning-out represents good forest management. The Mountain Center, like everywhere else in the Rockies, has been hit by the Mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) and the resulting death of pine trees. The clearing out of dead trees helps to mitigate the beetle's impact.

Perversely, now that the site is more open, the shrine's built virtues are more apparent. What before was obscured by veils of forest vegetation – and was thus implied – is now obvious. The shrine fastidiously complements its setting. Oriented at a right angle to the slope, the shrine's stone masonry creates a natural platform for the building. The building itself is the color of the landscape and suggests the presence of the forest that's no longer there. Formerly, the shrine hid in the forest; now the forest hides in the shrine.