Sun, we glorify it as the centre (quite literally) of our existence and belittle it by pointing out that ‘tis infact a big fish in a small pond, for among the billions of its brethren its stature is scaled down to a ‘dwarf star’… the latter is a thought for starry nights though, for grateful is all one feels on a crispy clear mountain morn as the sun slowly scrapes the cold out of the bones… precipitation from a downpour or frost from the lack of it… there’s always some chores for the yellow star as dawn cracks over the surrounding trigonometry…

That it moves on to sculpt the travails of the day to follow is another story… snaking its way around brooding trees, battling the snow in blinding dazzles or conspiring some mischief with the clouds… the sun of the dawn and dusk is the only bit that is wholly amicable, rest of the time ‘tis a restless adolescent busy with one antic or the other…

‘Tis a harbinger of creature comforts in the high mountains, the sun, inebriating not only the animate but the elements as well… from chapped lips and splitting headaches to landslips, all indulgences elicit a payback… whipping moisture of off the land only to be overpowered by the clouds… its cycles within cycles within cycles… from vicissitudes within valleys to the churning of the cosmic… 

For the mountain sun is evangelical and evil in equal measures… for all the benedictions hummed and muttered in its praise, one eventually ends up burning in its plenitude or freezing in its paucity… Nietzsche’s brooding premises might owe their hue to a liberal sprinkling of mountain metaphors, many of them adorned by the sun in different moods… for all the apparent brightness that the sun offers, the lingering aftertaste is a sombre, sobering thought…

Musings on the mountain sun, long walks in the Himalaya