Mountains above Santa Fe

I was on a regular trip to the shops — to CVS — to buy supplements. It was a late afternoon stroll, on an early winter’s day, calm and clear, an afternoon that felt as if the grime and grind of the world had fallen silent, and what was left was simply the town draped in fresh snow, and above it, the sublime body of the mountains.

Up there, in the cold afternoon, the mountains still wore their coat of white fur from last night’s storm, and now it was just the hour when they were blushing pink in the last of the sun as it shone across the plain.

By the time I came out of CVS, the pink on the mountains had deepened to a burnt orange. Then it morphed into soft, pale violet as the shadow of the earth started to take away color from the lower slopes, as if the colors were draining down into the body of the mountains, nourishing them, as if the mountains were drinking in the color, like a rich drink of supplements that would keep them well, under the pelts the forest and snow had given them.

As I walked in the cold under this incomparable spectacle, beneath this beauty being given so freely, a beauty that no amount of money could buy, that was freely given to everyone — all along there was a note ringing in me. Some kind of pain or sorrow. I’d been half ignoring it. But while “lifting up mine eyes unto the hills,” finally I could hear what it was: an enduring note of pain about the world. About the wars going on, the massacres, the slaughter of children, children who even now might be lying under piles of rubble, slowly dying. And brutal leaders who have learnt nothing from all the human centuries of slaughter, who still rile up their peoples into dehumanizing others, in order to support their atrocious wars.

“Other” families, “other” people — as if there really could be humans who are not humans, who do not fall in love, have children, devote their lives to them, and to whatever callings they follow if they can, just like we ourselves seek to do.

The idea that some humans are not humans is exactly what every dictator and demagogue over the centuries has used to inflame hate. It’s nothing new. All through the centuries and millennia empires have risen up and sent their troops in to slaughter, pillage, and raze lands. Again and again, the Assyrians, Persians, Spartans, Athenians, the Romans, the Mughals, and the Turks, the British, the French.

Surely we could have learnt something by now. Surely we understand the machinery of cruelty, how it works in a human being, in a society, across the world. Surely we know better.

And surely, somehow, these profoundly beautiful mountains have something to teach us, have something to say. The staggering, inconceivable beauty right there — the great range of mountains, like bears shambling along the skyline, each one within its snow-riddled coat, just now turning a depth of color there is no name for. Surely this immense beauty could assuage the brutality our species is liable to.

After all, this beauty is nothing but a gift. It immediately shows us something about our human soul. We can’t help but respond to it, appreciate it. That the beauty can ring and resonate in us, and meet whatever pain is also ringing and sounding in our breasts, shows us something about our make up.

And it’s given away each evening with wild profligacy.

And no army could ever conquer this beauty and own it. Or defeat it.

It doesn’t just speak of another order of life. It shows us right here and now another order of reality. Except it’s not really a different order. Because it’s right here, right in the midst of our human lives. In fact we belong to it. We are really part of it. It’s that way round.

What would it take to let the beauty in, let it speak to the shame and pain we sometimes carry, not forgetting the inherited trauma as well as moral trauma that comes down to us from the depredations of our ancestors, and start to heal them? Could it be that simply letting the mountains show us the beauty of this world might help?

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, whence cometh my help — in the seventeenth-century cadence of an English translation. The words are still true. Help is at hand. The hills are offering it. No religion, no people, no country can ever lay claim to it. It’s our human inheritance, our human gift, to be able to see this beauty, to receive it, be instructed by it, simply by letting it into our hearts.

With love and thanks,

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