…she learned words that rolled from her tongue when no one was listening. Firns and striations. Cirques and moraines. Adulation. Sublimation. She fell asleep to their music, and she woke to it. Chatter marks, eskers, and drumlins. Truncated spurs. Corries and tarns. Kames. Eolian loess. Katabatic winds…
Moraines are what one gets as a retribution for not respecting snow it seems… try to skimp a bit too frivolously across those white carpets and karma might even deal you some scree… the higher echelons of erosion seem to take themselves a bit too seriously at times… the massif blowing cold mist out of the nose while wearing that indelible brood… for ’tis only in the grass and the brooks that these climes seem to smile in… the rest appears content to revel in a haughty, ungiving demeanour…
For this congregation of rocks is no less than a mirage… an apparent patch of grass at the fag end, interspersed with a few boulders can (and mostly does) at proximity turn into a scenario that is quite the opposite… or that moment when one feels enough momentum to be skipping stones all the way through across the uneven, jagged tapestry only to have a corrugation too deep halt the traffic…
There are a few that mortals do not give in easily to the feeling of drudgery when negotiating the morainal circumstances, trying to figure out golden ratios or some pattern in this jamboree of stones… yet even mathematics can fail to eke a way out of the unfading monotony of treading each step with caution, except maybe when one is scrambling and the adrenaline induced by the use of all fours on a steep incline shakes off the drowse…
Yet they are not cruel by intention, these scapes, one chews over the fact as the wind beats down mercilessly upon their defenceless facade… and the agony starts inviting mild shades of empathy, punctuated with some sharp bits poking at the ankle bone… the sonority of each step starts filling in, some xylophonic, others a less soothing form of the percussive…
In essence, a moraine teaches one to let go of control, balancing self-doubt with aplomb, and trepidation with tranquility…
