In a sense, mountains are essentially ruins… tectonic crash and bangs that leave undulations big and small in their wake… lofty spires, breathing ice and snow… rock and water locked in a tussle, one trying to remain in stasis, the other insistent on making everything flow… tucked in between these geological forces are millennia… of slow, unceasing erosion… epoch after epoch documented in rock and ice…
They are also a study of contrast, in contrasts… how the seemingly mundane, monochromatic elements, kidnapped by their frigid surrounds, burst into a riot of colours as soon as they manage to find an escape… slipping into the water or catching the wind…
Journeying into their recesses makes one border on nihilism, treading the fine line between sheer foolhardiness and those fabled transcendental awakenings… Nietzsche’s Amor Fati trying to pursue, and eschew at the same time, risk and recklessness…
In between their myriad geometrical forms lie pockets of habitation subsisting in an elixir of elements… regions where the Anthropocene is yet to establish its stranglehold… they suffer with the seasons and revel in them… living in an everlasting awe of their landscape and hoping to ascend over its apex once dead…
They are panoramas from afar, chilblains in proximity… visual harvests, and physical tribulations… a collection of metaphors on life, a random scattering of waypoints… they make their own weather, and challenge us to make our way through it… hanging on them for dear life to seek a meaning that might not even exist after all…
Mosaics is what they are, these mountains… where human life is still woven deep into the natural tapestry… etching out legumes from soils oozing minerals and driving their herds from one meadow to the next… steeped in glutton when it comes to fuelwood and its succouring warmth… beaming with a nuanced naivety that relishes co-existence over connivance…
Notes on mountains, hiking in Western Himalaya…
