Meditating over mountains is an exercise in peeling off multitudes… meandering around their geometries, mulling over whether to engage with the elements or take shelter from them, you look for those deep life lessons recorded over many a tome of the yore and now chopped up into bite sized, social media portions, but in vain… for you they remain tight lipped and cold… in retaliation then, you lay your own canvas upon the landscape and start to conjure…
Forests spawn trepidation, the canopy revelling in its mysteries, choosing to communicate more in sound than sight… gloomy timber and burbling brooks… the avifauna weaves its own little cacophonies strewing seeds and mammals remain reticent, either ruminating or chasing those who do… splashes of colour hither and thither punctuate spring and autumn, while winters prefer eerie silences…
In the meadows, there is unbridled youth, wallowing in a finitely infinite expanse, breathing life into whatever manages to trickle down from the cryosphere… holding their own twixt slowly grinding glaciers and wizened woods, they bask in the sun and brood with the clouds, rollick in the rain and lie patiently with the snow… malleable is what they are, meadows…
Moraines are simply exasperating… erosion begins here, be it a seemingly immutable boulder or an indefatigable hiker… with every rock and every hop there’s a wearing down, making one long for the snowline… it trudges for the most part but shoots down some fatal stones from time to time just to keep things interesting… they’re befuddling, the moraines…
Snow demands perseverance… there’s total chaos beneath its uniform exterior, deception running rife in a world of white… undulations defined by density and safe passages across determined by destiny… ‘tis a landscape where slow, consistent suffering is inevitable, and the sooner one reconciles with the fact, swifter is the escape…
Ridges are anticipation… hours spent ploughing up a hill in anticipation of what lies on the other side… there’s a sense of excitement and apprehension bundled into a thin strip of land hung high by tectonic sighs… sometimes there’s the promised land and sometimes a cul-de-sac, sometimes there’s more tribulations and sometimes an end to them… sometimes gay, sometimes sombre they lie, the ridges…
On steep slopes, there’s an inquisition of the respiratory system, and a reminder of one’s fallibility in the face of gravity… a weighing of odds, and wondering if bipedality is overrated… they demand only sitzfleisch but in healthy doses, these steep slopes, making one yearn for the downhill which in hindsight is another chore of its own…
At the top, there’s a sense of disappointment… for one, the end is usually underwhelming when one compares it to the ordeals undertaken… and the journey, filled with joie de vivre, culminates here, for the descent is just going through the motions, exit formalities if one may…
The twilight horizon is deliverance… the terrain and its travails disappearing into the magic of tangerine skies… clouds swirling and twirling away into anonymity after having dumped their load upon the wayfarer…
Thus go the reflections then, imbued into the mountain when they wouldn’t exude any…
Musing on mountains, hikes across Western Himalaya
