Moraines are the price one pays for cashing in on the luxury of strolling upon velvety meadows… an accumulation of the gradual geologies of glaciers, rocks piling up in a slow brood, grinding each other to dust… progenitors of all that is animate, these are the realms where the inanimate fiercely guard their privacy…

‘Tis almost oceanic, this seeming infinity of glacial debris, a precursor to another ocean of ice and snow lying or the comfort of rolling meadows… water hatches here, drop by drop to coalesce into raging torrents a few miles downstream… the flora is humble and the fauna sheepish… only the winds are boisterous, emboldened the cold bestowed upon them by the mountain…

Nothing is rushed about the moraines, even rockfalls and landslides feel like tumbling down in a slow motion… there’s deep time everywhere, a melange of igneous and sedimentary… moving, one is absorbed by the tricks of the trail, trying to weave a safe passage… resting, the realization of insignificance overawes…

For moraines are a place for intense ponders, for one cannot afford to take the eyes off the ground and the vista is a mixture of bedazzlement and foreboding… there’s the meander of life encapsulated in a day’s grind, and a haven on the horizon… the symmetry of chaos, linear in the present, no rights or wrongs, a lilting elegy to those weathered, a carol for those in genesis…

They are a joy to view and a pain to traverse, the moraines… and in between these contrasting emotions, nature flows… the azoic assiduously laying the foundations for life to bloom… there’s provenance in these environs, steeped in a silence that is stoic yet playful… sore feet but a disposition unbridled… a Faustian bargain, one muses, letting out an expletive as another loose gets the better of you…

Mulling over moraines, hikes across western Himalaya