Something about the Mountains
Black mountains and dark, concealed behind clouds and forests grown, strange and magical things hidden within, without and within those brazen massifs, those hulking, sleeping monsters of stone and sand and water and trees. They sit on a fault-line, an imaginary or created timeline, a marking of their past and future movements, those postulated projections of personal growth and peripheral destruction, they sit there and we wait, but not them. They don’t feel their strainings, the forces that are pushing them up and away from their sisters or brothers on the other side of the valley plain. They are just there, full of themselves and heedless of what we think or imagine of them.
And they are ours…
November 14, 2011 at 7:34 pm
Yes, they are, Nut Balls…yes they are. 🙂
November 14, 2011 at 10:31 pm
You write beautifully
November 15, 2011 at 10:55 am
Thank you, Orel…and you have some beautiful photographs on your blog, as well. Thank you for visiting. I will have to check-in with you again to see more of your travels.
November 15, 2011 at 12:03 pm
Your post, for some reason, reminded me of Anatoli Bukreev’s famous quote:
“Mountains are not stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they
are the cathedrals where I practice my religion…I go to them as
humans go to worship. From their lofty summits I view my past, dream of
the future and, with an unusual acuity, am allowed to experience the
present moment…my vision cleared, my strength renewed. In the
mountains I celebrate creation. On each journey I am reborn.”
I dont think they are ours. It’s likely the other way around. We are theirs. And they allow us to a small piece of their grace, each time they let us visit them.
November 24, 2011 at 3:48 am
How absolutely beautiful…what incredible words! I have tried to express my thoughts similarly in another post from this past March…the post is titled: I don’t know what it’s called. And I do agree with you, as much as we want to possess them, to have them literally be ours, “My Mountains,” we are of such nothingness compared to them that we couldn’t possibly.
Thank you for the quote by Bukreev…it was such a beatiful addition to the post. I might have to use it as the opening for another photo essay of “my” beloved mountains. 🙂
November 24, 2011 at 7:00 am
I read your other post and i believe that you honestly express what everyone of our “tribe” is mostly experiencing emotionally while being out there. But allow me to give you another quote that hit me reading that other post of yours and I’m sure you will agree that this will be a better match than the Bukreev’s one.
“When I consider… the small space I occupy, which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here?” (Pascal)
November 24, 2011 at 8:07 am
You have started an avalanche of philosophical wondering and thought, Nikos…and it’s still rather early in the morning! You are right, too, this Pascal quote does fit this post better than the Bukreev quote…incredible, too. It’s nice to know that others of our “tribe” feel the same way out there, marveling in what surrounds us. Thank you for visiting again and for your beautiful addition to the post.
November 24, 2011 at 8:22 am