soliloquies in the outdoors
There’s stasis on the face of it as one looks at the panorama from a mountaintop on a clear morning… all the snow-covered peaks and glaciers spewing out of their cold slopes brooding deep till the sun warms them up into frothing rivers down below… somewhere between the transition of ice into water, the elements …
Nelong valley, like many of its militarized brethren, lies glum… twixt blasts of dynamite scraping roads out of brittle rocks and some rounds fired hither and thither, there’s an eerie silence, uncharacteristic of mountains that can conjure music out of almost everything, animate or inanimate… but these are the ways modern societies define assertiveness and …
Clouds have this dichotomy of sorts, they can choose to dump their wares upon a hapless wayfarer and be at the receiving end of his million curses, or they can just prefer to hang out harmlessly, keeping him guessing… on higher climes, ‘tis more often than not a race against the clouds than time in …
Flycatchers often seem bound by invisible tethers… zeroing in on a branch and launching rapid sallies from there again and again to pluck food out of the air, all in a theatrical lasting a few minutes at the most… always fidgety, their restive disposition making the onlooker feel the same after a while… they are …
Twilight – one part of it is hope, the other is resignation… a submission to the forces around and beyond… impatience giving way to forbearance as the last of the light tucks itself into a lunar solace… a time of the day when thoughts become atmospheric, sacrificing their precision, anesthetized by a sense of nostalgia… …
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… …
Twilight is by all means a magical time of the day… crepuscular congregations in full swing as the skies grapple with those sudden transient spurts of colour fading into the dusk or the day as soon as they appeared… twilight is when the sun really gives a few glimpses of it’s true artistic potential, for …
Mountains make their own weather… they also, perhaps less acknowledged, make their own time… where durations are defined by degrees of experience rather than dances of gravity… there, more often than not, time is intensity, be it physical or sensory… mountains make their own time, I’m pretty sure, whether plodding through fresh snows or getting …
For a country holding one of the world’s oldest civilizations, and mummies, within its bosom, ‘twas a rather cruel irony to be holed up in a swanky resort town… freshly paved sidewalks, functional fountains and free shuttles… busy doling out rhetoric in another quintessentially exasperating environmental conference proclaiming to be humanity’s (and the planet’s) last …
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 …