mountains

June 15 – mountain time

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“I wanted a good place to settle.
Cold Mountain would be safe.
Light wind in a hidden pine ―
Listen close ― the sound gets better.
Under it a grey-haired man
Mumbles along reading Huang and Lao.
For ten years I haven’t gone back home
I’ve even forgotten the way by which I came.”

— Han Shan (Cold Mountain) tr. Gary Snyder


Just as contemplating the vastness of space can make us realise that we are, in the great scheme of things, insignificant.  So, in a similar way, can thinking about time on a scale of geology rather than of human existence, using the chronology of the formation of mountains and continents which begins far before even the earliest glimmer of primate mammals on this planet.

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February 17 – mind mountains

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“The birds have vanished down the sky.
Now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.”

— Li Bai (701–762)

“Going to the mountains
Is like going home“

— John Muir (1838-1914)


Once I lived near mountains.  Coming-in to land at Zurich Airport, you could often see the tips of the Alps breaking through the clouds, in what feels like some kind of dream landscape.

At the end of Lake Zurich, the Alps are also there and walking to work in the morning, I crossed a bridge which gave me a view over the water onto the mountains behind.  Regardless of how many times I saw this, it was still stunning.

A couple of months before I became ill we had a work trip to climb mountains in the Bernese Oberland near Chur and I remember breathlessly trying to catch up with my 40 year old Swiss boss (I was 25 and pretty fit) as he strode ahead of me up a gully of snow.  By February of the next year (1996) I would struggle to walk to the bathroom and, in a well-worn metaphor, the stairs in my parent’s house would feel as hard to climb as those alpine slopes.

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