In praise of mountain time

Good morning,

I am back from my time on the mountain and my road trips to get there and back. Today’s poem is one that came to me as I drove back to colorado on the ‘“loneliest highway in america” on which I didn’t feel alone at all. The mountains were good company.

driving diagonally across nevada

it’s just me and the mountains for five hundred miles

out here it looks the same as it has

for the last ten thousand years at least

for most of human history

it was just these mountains, these soft rolling plains

with varying degrees of moisture and life upon them

but it has all looked sort of like this for longer than I can fathom

now beside the road I see the first sign of civilization in hours

it’s a banner proclaiming 250 years of this country

250 years of the name that lays claim to such spaces as this

but do the nearly eternal mountains know they belong to america

how can a mountain belong to anything

but the earth and the wide sky and itself

a mountain doesn’t need to belong to anything

and certainly doesn’t to something only 250 years old

to a mountain a quarter of a millennium is barely a blink

it’s like a child writing his name in crooked crayon letters

upon a great tree and saying it’s his

all the land that we call ours scarcely knows we exist

soon our anniversary banners

and all else we think stakes our claim on eternity

will fray in ceaseless wind or fire

and the mountains will still stand

as they did before us

as they will long after

two hundred and fifty years

is just a faint puff of dust

Alexander

This week beyond the paywall: discussion on all that we can learn from sitting in front of these teachers who loom on the horizon and how to access these teachings.