“Past the scale of the human, our works do not liberate us — they confine us. They cut off access to the wilderness of Creation where we must go to be reborn — to receive the awareness, at once humbling and exhilarating, grievous and joyful, that we are a part of Creation, one with all that we live from and all that, in turn, lives from us. They destroy the communal rites of passage that turn us toward the wilderness and bring us home again.” — Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America
Two eggy hikers rambled up to a lonely dirt path, addled by pain and stress. One claimed a hip was bothering him. The other her knees. They both bemoaned the traffic to get there from the city.
Neither was fully there, both were half lost in thoughts of work and home. Of unpaid bills and work emails. Both hemmed and hawed about the state of the world. Of the cost of gas and the city’s crime.
Yet, they were there nonetheless, at least in body if not in spirit. They were there to hike the towering mountain that hung like a shadow beyond the outskirts of the city in which they lived. It was the mountain they saw every day on their drives to the office. It was the mountain that stood apart from the noise and bustle and smoke rising from the city below.
They didn’t know why they were there exactly. A memory perhaps, or weekend enjoyment. They were there to consume much more than to partake.
Yet, they were there, and so they began.
Slowly, they waded through the overgrown fescue and hairgrass weeping over the entrance to the trail. Bounded by meadow on either side, they approached the forest before them, their eyes growing wider as the mountain began to take them in. And as it did, the world before them changed.
They climbed over roots and stones. All around them, a symphony of caws and chirps. The birds soaring above the foliage. The dense forest covering as far as their eyes could see.
Everything was a circus of green and blue and sage. Pine trees and conifers towering over huckleberry bushes and endlessly climbing ivy crawling their way over fallen tree branches and stumps and rocks beside the path.
There were juniper trees and blueberries. Young sprouts peaking out of the ground, barely venturing out of the soil and into the world. All around them, a swaddle of leafy shrubs and vibrant flowering stems shading the little sprouts from the sun and the wind.
Chipmunks scurried across the path, darting their way through the mulberries, past the stream, and up the pines. Mosquitoes and horse flies danced in the breeze, pestering the passersby. Grasshoppers leapt from leaf to leaf, their cacophonous click-click-clicks rising above the hum of the cicadas off beyond the hills.
This was the world they came to see, although they couldn’t quite articulate why. The world beyond their reach. The world as it should be; or rather, the world as it really is. In its purest essence, this world of life and breath was more than they could take in. It came as a shock in some ways. A jolt of electricity.
Back home, they were used to the constant affliction of digital and technological punishment. Every day in the city, it was non-stop sounds of artificial things and motorized machines. It was heat rising from asphalt and steel and bricks. It was noise and waste and life lived in a malaise of polluted air.
But here, in the mountain, as they walked through a world so wholly different, it felt like a flood was washing over them. And like every flood, it was violent. Parts of themselves were being ripped away, dashed into the oblivion of the torrential downpour. Their identities and senses of self, their worries and stress, were being crashed into the rocks. They were foreign to this world and there foreignness could not be more evident.
But, as they walked, there was nothing else to do but give in to the flood. To let themselves be washed downstream, unaware of where they were being taken. In truth, they had no other choice. From the moment they entered the mountain, they were no longer in control.
In the mountain, a mighty force, was beckoning them with a strong and commanding hand. It was this force — not their swollen hips and shaky knees — that was pulling and prodding them forward, moving them steadily along the path. Intrepid though they were, they dared not entertain the thought of rejecting its commands.
And so, they followed.
For hours, they rambled over fields of white mountain daisies, little purple speedwells, and radiant pink fireweed all mixed into a sea of clumpy bunchgrass. They wandered under thick canopies of sitka spruce and towering pines, clamoring over the mounds of thistle and fragrant acorns left below. They hopped from stone to stone across the winding stream bed gently caressing the forest floor.
They climbed the winding hillside, taking every dip and turn in stride until they reached the very tip of the mountain they had been following. There, far above the tree line, they turned and faced away from the peak, taking in the vastness below them.
All across the valley below lay an ocean of fauna, saturated in every color imaginable. Beyond the horizon, they could see the snow-covered tips of other mountains just as daunting as the one they had just climbed. The silent hum of the wind blanketed the valley in a soft chorus of reverence. A solitary black shadow glided far above the peak, its wings outstretched in perfect balance.
As if they had stepped into some long forgotten cathedral, the pair of hikers suddenly realized that they had, unbeknown to them, stepped into holy ground. But, like all holy spaces, it was only they who had forgotten its sacredness. The mountain on which they stood, the valley before them, the trees and birds and all the rest had not forgotten.
Quite the contrary, these reverential creatures knew exactly where they were and what they were meant to do. They were already partaking in the sacraments. Obediently, defiant of human will, the mountain and all its inhabitance were already prostrate, their lives a stream of prayer.
And so, in the crowd of worshippers upon the mountaintop, the hikers could only sit, listening to the voices calling them to repentance. They opened their ears and heeded the clarion call.
They put down their pain and let it all in.
And in the silence, they waited and listened. They sat and sat until, minute by minute, the city began to lose its grip, its power broken by the sounds of the mountain calling them in.
They watched and watched as the hills vibrated with life. As the clouds moved past, as the sun rejoiced in the view below, as the whitetails and bighorns scurried up the rocks and over the cliff face.
They took it all in until the scene before them began to creep into their toes and into their hands and into their hair. Until the glass between the art and the observer began to fog.
Suddenly, they realized a second thing. That they were not there to consume, but to partake. That there was no glass, no division between the observer and the observed. That the world before them was not wholly other but that there was no other but it. They were part and parcel of the life around them.
Though they came from the city, they did not belong there. That place of gravel and industry was not their home, only an aberration. A cage made of human hands.
Finally, they knew that they would not return to the city the same as before. Their worries and stresses of overly long meetings and noisy neighbors and crowded streets were not as much a bother. For they knew that there on the mountaintop was the place where they belonged.