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The Mountain

An inclusive description of a mountain might include the antonyms related to impossible, or possibly its aggressive nature and overall resemblance to the word death; the literal embodiment of what is and isn’t possible for the human body to endure is laughing at you. 

With eyes of fire and a wicked core, that would be the mountain, deep within the soul of it and rumbling over its tectonic spine, curling its deteriorated digit. To the Greeks it was the seat of the Gods; a lever of power and home to Ares riding the bare back of a flaming horse still wet with the blood of pagans. Claiming the souls of the brave, what’s one more attempt? The soul remains. The rivers and streams still meander to their base like berserks beating their drums, howling like invaders, waiting to be wed with the flora and wash away the fauna. If time were no obstacle, if time and space were not woven together so synergetic-like, most people would let the stream run high above their ankles, and let the grass grow high all around them, before ever ascending to its peak. Cities would be built at its base, ziggurats erected in its name. Children would grow old and die and men’s beards would grow white. Forever a cycle, turning while never reaching the top. And in seeing this, the mountain would grow old too, and in its wisdom, knowing that not only would the climb devastate you, but in doing so, making you more alive than it. So much so that the feat is considered to most the inescapable pleasure so little get to mate with and while looking down atop the tips of towering pines and rubble of old cities, the waves would continue to break in faraway shores, as if nothing had changed. It would still be my greatest protest, to look down upon not the heads of the pines, nor the oldest of cities, nor the breaks of faraway waves, or the bones of old men, but a thickened and malleable piece of material, bowed at both ends, pressed beneath my feet, as if my body were protruding from the earth itself and face the descent. The seat of the gods would carry new meaning, and the mountain, in all its impossibility, would either award me with death or the greatest, most intense, stimulation a human can receive. I’d willingly carve into its surface, edge for edge, until all of bones were frozen through or the rumbling spirit of the mountain shook upon me its pounds of snow and debris, until all that was left was a valley so barren that for the next traveler who looked upon it would know defeat and begin the climb once more. That Those who declined the mountains invitation, would never get to realize they were the mountain, and within it was joy, yet never to be seen, and so the mountain would be once more myself; I am the mountain.

original image source: Gipfelbuch.ch 

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