Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God.
the leitmotif of any mountain, any protrusion that can make its surroundings feel insignificant, would unarguably be divinity… the sanctitude offered by the higher climes more often that not nudges one into the precincts of spirituality, as one sheds the undigested dregs of civilisation, not forsaken but forgotten awhile… the grass, snow and winds criss-crossing notions on the nature of existence, all across the plane of an idiosyncratic mind, and upon the tapestry of rock and river…
like rivulets, the sacredness diverges into its own explorations and interpretations, all flowing back into a single thought in the end but carving their own niche along the way… signifying a beginning or the middle or an end… a way into or out of an abyss… the path unto a summit or one furtively bypassing it… there are gods aplenty, goddesses outnumbering them by far… some approachable and some aloof… some corrigible and some corrupt — none lack in lore etching their whims and fallacies upon impressionable mortals, but to their credit, none slack in motivating (or spooking) a battered disposition across the crevasses of the past unto the pinnacle of existence…
then there are those bare constructs… shrines that are dictated more by the elements rather than masons, be it their dimension or location… shrines that subsistence and shrines that protect existence… flags flailing belligerently at the tops but swaying gently along the river, some half buried in the moist earth and some starched by the cycle of condensation and evaporation… cairns bearing directions to the port of call for the dishevelled footslogger, and cairns that are a destination unto themselves…
for divinity in the company of large massifs is conjures up two contrasting emotions — one of fear, and the other of marvel, and in between the two lies the entire kaleidoscope of human existence in the mountains…
musings on the divine nature of mountains, travels across the Himalaya…
