Spotting a wisp of romanticism, or the divine, in the cold gust of a glacial wind takes a sarcastic imbecile, or the blessed benign… the rest have the customary defence of mumbling cuss words through the parched parchment of a throat… despite the kaleidoscopic nature of human dispositions, the elements — when in an insistent mood — try to coalesce all into a singular, scalar, way of being… which brings us near the mountaintops then, and the man clasping on to their vision…

Why is the man trying to get to the top… ignited by the evolutionary spark of curiosity, or instigated by biophilia… driven by adrenalin, or consumed by the slough of despond… burying fears, or confronting demons… seeking answers, or digging up new questions… 

…for the rivulets brood in an icy linger, the scree is anything but cooperative, the moraines are as always moody, and the spirit of adventure is having a rather heated debate with the department of biomechanics…

Who is the man inching towards the top… an explorer, or an escapist… a consumer, or a consummation… a preacher, or an atheist… a poet, or a poetaster… a modern day pragmatist, or a rather apologetic procrastinator… a recluse, or the refuse of societal fabric… 

…countless metaphors might be ascribed to the spires staring into the face of the their mighty massifs, yet trudging up along their contours leaves one longing only for air…

What is the man on the top… a trepidation, or a triumph… an idol, or an idiosyncrasy… a live wire, or the dregs of some lividity… a signature of the tree line, or an elegy of the crevasse… a hedonist, or a hermit… an opportunist having tricked the weather, or a strategist having carefully laid his siege… 

…all in all, after all the fiddling and juggling with these word clouds… the man on the mountain seems to be an experience, one that resembles a tree… expanding like a root at the base, gathering nutrition, and some resolve… the route is the trunk — uniform, monotonous, rigid and hard… leading up to that zenith, a zillion thoughts shooting out like branches, fruiting into that sense of achievement, or the despair of the return route… it is but a sum of parts, the disposition and its dissents… seeking reasons for the circuitous nature of being from the mountain…

musings on passes and summits across the Himalaya…