The Mountain

The mountain’s face is just the face it shows me. The side I see. It plays at getting bigger and then smaller again, depending on where I am. Sometimes I drive from Cove Road down Grandview Road to Burnt Mountain Road just so I can see the mountain rise up over me. A gentle ancestor, a season. It’s never the same twice and yet there’s a stubborn consistency about the textures of its winds and shadows. The light loves to turn colors I’ve never seen before as it passes across the forested spire. I make up names for these colors sometimes. Thornblue, roselaurel, greyling. Earlyglow. Threshold. Silverhaunt. Pantherdark. Woodsmoke. Skywild. The mountain often seems to mandate silence, or at least suggest it, sternly but with what I think of as love. Mircea Eliade wrote, “In several traditions the Cosmos is shaped like a mountain whose peak touches heaven; above, where the heavens and the earth are reunited, is the center of the world. This cosmic mountain may be identified with a real mountain, or it can be mythic, but it is always placed at the center of the world.” For me this cord is genetic, I think sometimes, and I wonder if my mother and grandparents, and others, felt this visceral sense of kinship with the mountain. I listen to the music of the mountain as I drive past it and it calms me. The music shifts but it always shares a soul with itself. The songlines, I thought once, driving along into the rise of the road one day in late December, watching the mountain get bigger as I got closer. It often does that in winter. I have thought that it should be the other way round, that the mountain’s bareness should make it seem smaller, but the bones of its slopes rise up into a shared space with the revelation of treetrunks in the small light of a January afternoon in a way that enlarges the mountain’s presence. Years ago, reading Joyce, I ran across the word “omphalos” and, looking it up, realized that the mountain carries that cord of energy for me. It is a portal, a thin place, a threshold, a liminal space where sky and earth come together and promise me that everything here---sky, earth, hawk, tree, coyote, rock, bear, creekwater, pinecone, bobcat---is my relative. That the tapestry of ancestors is not linear but curved and always present, always speaking to me in the silent shapes and shadows of wind and cloud across the cove as night comes on. 

©Laura Sorrells 2013
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