Mountain Climbing - Tumblr Posts
Pencil drawing, approx 135mm x 107mm.
The Great Stone Chute, Sgurr Alasdair, Isle of Skye, Scotland.
It gives me chills looking at our photos taken of the Black Cuillin mountain range. A lug on the sole of P's walking boots was cleanly sheared off when he 'stone-surfed' his way down the Great Stone Chute.
ten minute write day 2 (yeah i know i took a 2 week break)
ive been trying to find a liminal space that feels like the ones from my childhood
you know, how it felt being at school at night when everyone had gone home
or how it felt to stand in the church sanctuary when everyone had left
or the elementary school playground on the weekends
and i used to feel a certain holiness in those spaces, in the places that we built for togetherness now full of emptiness and only my own voice echoing against the walls. Keeping me in. i never dreamed that the opposite: an inhuman place suddenly filled with me, would feel anything but uncomfortable and interrupted.
I climbed a mountain last weekend. It was raining on and off, so the air was still, and the birds were hiding, and it was too far up for the large, whistling, singing, strumming bugs. the fragile alpine zone, they called it. my family walked off down the slope to look over the ravine. I stayed behind.
it was so quiet. I've never been in such quiet. I could hear my breath and my heartbeat and if i had stayed still enough, for long enough, I would have heard the blood moving through my veins.
This is the opposite of what I had found in those spaces humans had built. Staring out at the pristine, preserved mountainside, i found myself feeling so tiny, and so huge at the same time. I looked down at the sweeping valley below, and down at my feet in boots that i dragged out of the darkest recesses of my closet for this, and out into the sky, shrouded with clouds that I was now standing inside.
it was so quiet. so quiet. no rushing of machinery. No hum of electricity. no one upstairs rattling around, no children down the street shouting. All things i usually find comfort in. all things i realized i might not miss.
i get it, now. why people just disappear into the mountains. that silence is addictive. that sense of peace leaves an ache in your soul the moment your family comes back around the cairns, rattling keychains and crunching boots. that is the holy silence i will be looking for forever, that is the liminal space i will stand in for as long as i am allowed.
Lake Grimsel and Brünberg in the Swiss Alps.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Nikater
Dhaulagiri mountain, Nepal.
The name comes from Sanskrit where धवल (dhawala) means dazzling, white, beautiful[3] and गिरि (giri) means mountain.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Solundir