Making Mountains Out of Soul Hills
How do you paint a mountain? In telling its story, do you tell your own?
As I approach the mountain, the mountain speaks to me.
With low tone and voice melodic, it whispers wild of harsh cliffs and wicked bluffs, hidden from my conscience and consciousness. Of long falls waiting to catch me in their wisdom nets before dropping me to uncertainty, breaking all the bones of my lifetime.
I look. I listen. I think I understand.
It is telling me what to express and how to express it. Showing me directly. Speaking its truth of how to verbalize its form, its shape, its sound, and where the pinch points are. It shimmers and glows and rumbles on the horizon, granting permissions and signaling free passage.
“I will write you,” I say, “I will honor your eminence and draw you and dance you and sing you to the world. I will not fail you, Mountain. Your story will be an easy one to tell.”
It seems easy.
Until I try.
Fumbling around in the scree field of my words, I find I cannot speak it as it has spoken to me. Not exactly. Not precisely. Not as a replication of the situation. I cannot find the words, colors, or shapes. I cannot mimic the tone—the very song I heard just minutes ago—of this mountain’s serenade.
It is at once too large, too intimidating, too alien. In telling my perceived truth of it I have created an ugliness that shames me to silence.
Seeking counsel, seeking guidance, I look back to the mountain. Perhaps it will release a sherpa from the lockbox of its memory, someone to guide and encourage me and partner with me to memorialize and sanctify the glory and the story of this mountain.
A pause, a moment, and the mountain, with sighing crust and tumbling rock, speaks to me once more. It shifts and shrugs and grumbles lowly, cracking vertebrae and stretching skin. A shapeshifter of tectonic magnificence, it moves with fluid and unfailing patience to form a new day, a new hope, and a new thought to give me.
Now, it is a hill. Approachable. Quiet. Sensual. It tells me of its gentle roll and swaying grasses. Of foxholes and rabbit runs. Of saplings reaching for glory on the hem of a gown so ancient it has forgotten its own birthday. A hill I shall climb and reach the crest of to yell and yodel and write the tale of its tremor upon the parchment of this universe. It murmurs of a shaded rise, a wooded thicket, and a trembling seep crying out its song, lamenting the passing of its mother, nourishing the flavor of the day.
“Now?” says the hill-was-once-mountain. “What about now?”
It seems easy. A story, a picture, a frame, a moment.
It seems easy. Until I try.
I scratch against the memory paper, and scribble upon the surface of my expression slate. A line and a curve, a tumbling of thought against the landscape of its guidance. Holding it up to the reality of the world, I sigh at my attempt. Bristle at my failure. Rage into the sky at my rampant incompetence.
“Speak! Speak louder! Speak your secret! More!”
Mountain again. It speaks to me of carabineers and ropes and mountain goats perched on tiptoe and straining necks to see. To see me. To see me approach the mountain. To see if I will try, and try, and try again. They are invested in my struggle now. To speak for the mountain, for them, and for all who exist in this picture.
The mountain challenges me to run my hand along its exposed rock, to lose myself in hidden caves, and to swing from the ledges of inexperience like a money-soaked client with overblown confidence.
I swing, I arc, I touch at all the faces and bluffs and lichen-covered talus, feeling for my expression. I ding my knees on sharp outcrops, itch up my legs with wild weeds, and blow at the ball of a dandelion to note each seed as it catches in the light. To describe. To notate. To document.
It seems easy. It is not easy.
The mountain laughs. A gentle laugh, packed with calm understanding but a laugh nonetheless. It indicates to other mountains, to ranges scattered in the wings. These are jutting thoughts against urgent skies.
“Look,” says Mountain. “These are the upset carpets of this world—objects that hint at their own imperfect geologies while proudly carrying on. Standing naked, they are riddled with the obvious disease of change. You are staggered by their beauty. With how they wear it. And yet…”
“No two mountains are one mountain. Knowing this, you continue to seek to make me as you see me. To replicate. To duplicate. To reflect me as I am upon that lake. No two mountains are one mountain. Your hands are your hands. Your mountain is your mountain. It is easy. It is easy when you try.”
Now it is speaking in tongues. I listen to the sing-song gibberish and squint my eyes and shiver at the music until I think I understand.
I think I understand. I try.
It sings to me of glorious chasms of understanding, waiting to be found and willing to be told. By me. As me. For you.
It tells me of its heart so deep the throb of it is breathless love, crusted from the oven of a wild creator.
It tells me of a trail ahead that I must climb, shoeless and hungry, with calloused hands gripping at a frayed rope.
Of snakes and scorpions and wild creatures with saliva that eat the very shell of my confidence.
It tells me that I must climb and skirt and drop and scurry. Move. I must keep moving.
My caution for its wisdom, my fear for its stoicism, my love for its indifference—these are my swaps. I wish to speak its message and its song and paint it on all the faces of all the canvases in all the galleries. I wish to write it exactly as it is spoken to me, but my hands are shaking, my mind’s eye is lying, filthy, and my love is smudging at the clarity of the day.
And then I let go. Of the rope. Of the plan. Of the rules.
I draw. I write. I interpret. I try.
Something happens.
My try becomes my try, and in my try, a truth. The truth of my expression.
A hill, a mountain, a peak, a valley. This is the landscape of my experience. A landscape I wish to tell you, while simultaneously exploring it for myself. I have no guide. I have no map. I am simply feeling out the terrain with stone-bruised feet. The prickles of the trail remind me of the challenge. That it’s not the climb of it, but the expression of it. It is of mine as yours is of yours.
The mountain cannot tell me—I must speak it for myself.
To try is to express. To try is to crawl in the scree and jump from the precipice. To try is to run full tilt down the grassy slope toward the creek at the bottom, risking all and loving more. The mountain is me and mine.
Mine to climb up and over and around and through. I am the mountain and the mountain is me. In front of, behind, above, and below. It is on my shoulder, leaking out my ears, falling from my fingertips. My seeking is of its wisdom, to take the earth of it, the moss and the rock, and hold it in my hand, describing to all my conquering of the sediment, the scenery, the summit.
This is what it is to try.
To be a mountain—one mountain, my mountain—part of a range that spans the whole world.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen1
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This week’s amends…
"You live your life as if it’s real... The evidence accumulates that you’re not running the show. You still have to make choices as if you were running the show, but you make your choices with the intuitive understanding that it’s unfolding as it must... And if you can relax in that...if you can even touch it, or if it asserts itself from time to time, then the invincible defeat is transcended."- Leonard Cohen
On Rotation: “Six Hills” by Lewsberg
Via BoingBoing
Via Kottke
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“Until I try.” These are the words that inspired this post.