"The mountains where you have not been yet..."

One Russian poet, actor, singer and song-writer  asked a question in one of his songs: "What is better than the mountains?" and answered: "The mountains where you haven't been yet". The song being so well-known, the lyrics haven't struck me until now when I actually started to go to the mountains.
Every week I climb one mountain with a group of people in a small icy island in the North Atlantic, the mountain can be small and gentle or high and steep, sometimes we enjoy good weather, but often we are in a blinding blizzard. No matter how different the walks are, the end point is always the same - it is breathtaking, magnificent and worth going.
Walking gives you all the time in the world to go down to your thoughts, here I tried to jot down some of them. On mountains.

on the photo: Kerhólakambur on the 22nd of February 2014

Early Sunday morning is difficult enough: alarm-clock sharply cuts through the consciousness, you open the eyes - the time has come - you are about to be born. Mercilessly. Irreversibly. By that very moment I am dissolved completely in the agonizing empathy of the pure and innate emotion of a new born, halting with all my civilized nature a deep animal howl. Steps are feeble and shaky, sight is impaired by a blinding light of a sudden bathroom light-bulb, cold is wrapping limbs, stomach gets in a knot with a realization of inevitability of the following events; a splash of cold water in the face - there, I am ready to burst out crying, the world has to hear my voice and it suddenly gets easier.
Reviving gulps of coffee evoke the primate memory of a mother´s pacifying breasts - life gradually gets its true colours. Birth is finished, life (a mountain) waits ahead.
(setja te á brúsa og fara á fjöll...)

It is not by chance that I employed a metaphor of life here - to me climbing a mountain is similar to a living a life in a miniature: half of the way you struggle to get up, lose all your strength, leave aspirations behind, forget why you had to do that, get exhausted, and then, before you know, after a small glimpse of joy, you suddenly start to slide over the hill so fast you never believe you had been there. Sounds familiar? Yeah, and it´s called "a mountain".

A mountain itself is a powerful positive concept for many things in our life, primarily something difficult, demanding (whether an experience, relationship, or work) but, eventually, worth going through. The proof to this is numerous poems, songs, quotations, images and metaphors in all creative art, both verbal and non-verbal.

The great book of the mankind utilized this image at best - all the meaningful episodes happen closer to God, therefore, on the mountain. Among those are: The Mount Sinai, where Moses received the gift of Law, the Ten Commandments; Moses and Elijah encounter God on the mountain top in the Old Testament. In the New Testament Jesus appoints His twelve disciples on the mountain, delivers His sermon on Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount, there happen His final discourse and Transfiguration - some of what I remember.
In the Quran mountains are portrayed as stabilizers, as fixers of the earthly life: "Have We not made the earth as a wide expanse, And the mountains as pegs?". And lets not forget the powerful Four Sacred Mountains of Buddhism (Taoism). It is just obvious that such a meaningful and distinct landmark could not simply been overlooked by a man.

The religious connotations of the mountains being so strong, even in the twenties century literature one of my favourite writers - Aldous Huxley - endows mountains with a sacred meaning: "My father considered the walk among the mountains as the equivalent to the churchgoing" - which we all, after all do, together on a good Sunday morning.

Besides divine, there is a lot of earthly and insignificant matters, of course. Like the life itself, a walk up the mountain is overly romanticized, mostly by the highly metaphoric, hence poetic nature of the latter. For many people the attraction components are the ones which comprise the life yet again:

Nature: The only thing you actually watch most of the time is the exact distance between the feet and butt of the person who walks in front of you. The direction of the stare is most often dictated by the weather conditions (unless there´s something specifically interesting to look at): the better the weather the higher the stare is fixed, which also gives a possibility to employ the side vision and actually to see some natural beauties (snow) on a good day. But mostly, as I said, you just look down into the footsteps of the front person.

Fun: Most of the walk is difficult in this or that way: if it´s not the blizzard which gets behind the eyelids and hits the face (must get the seal fat next time I am in the ocean), it can be the path itself - going straight up or sloping abruptly down. There can be a lot of tricky ice under the fresh snow or sharp lava pieces, which heighten the chances of twisting the old joints; it can be small round stones, which primary purpose of being is only to take you downhill with a German motorbahn speed. It can be anything. It can be anything unexpected.

People: As in real life there are people around you - coworkers, neighbours, acquaintances, maybe friends and relatives, all walking with you - same time, same path, same destination. Mostly we walk silently with our thoughts. Once I imagined, what if we were thinking out loud, or if there was a person who could read our thoughts, how soon that person would go crazy? We all carry our burdens with us, everywhere, every time. And we take them with us up the mountain. Exactly as in the real life, most of the time each of us is alone there, and what is more difficult, alone with oneself.

Purpose: Often I was thinking why do we go there? Apart that it is a good physical exercise (still, running on a good day is much nicer, my moderately handsome husband says), it is (at least to me) a rather difficult task to complete every weekend. Edmund Hillary answered: "Because it is there". Gunnlaugur Júlíusson said: "Because I can". Why do we live then? What´s the purpose of life? "42"? No, wait, isn´t it "52" now?

Excitement: If someone thinks that going up the mountain is only about excitement, fun and new impressions, you are as far from the truth as you can be - climbing the mountain, even the smallest mountain is actually hard work with a varying degree of difficulty, but always work. But the result is always rewarding. The harder it takes, the more fulfilling it gets, which makes it an exact illustration to my favourite proverb: "nothing in this life which is worth having comes easy" (remember an analogy with life?).

In this respect a question "why are you climbing the mountains?" is as absurd as "why do you live?" - because it is small life. But unlike the real life, here every time you get to experience a strong feeling of completion, yet another test being passed. And what makes it much more valuable - it is a victory over something so grandeur and impressive, so meaningful and potent in the whole history of the mankind, that it becomes close to a cleansing experience.

And me - a woman from a faraway country - for the last years I have been trying to make peace, if not friends, with this strong, cold and independent Iceland. And every time I take one of your mountains, I get closer to you despite that you seem not to care. After first ten you looked at me with interest, I know. We all carry our lunch in the bag pack and coffee in the flask, we all go up for our different reasons, but on a good Sunday morning we are all united by a small victory, most important on ourselves.

At the end of the day, as William Blake said: "Great things are done when men and mountains meet; This is not done by jostling in the street".

So, it´s life. It hard and wonderful. Suck it up.

An Always Within Never

"Thinking back on it, this evening, with my heart and my stomach all like jelly, I have finally concluded, maybe that´s what life is about: there´s a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is no longer the same. It´s as if those strains of music created a sort of interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that had come to us, an always within never. 
Yes, that´s it, an always within never." 

(Muriel Barbery "The Elegance of the Hedgehog")


Have you ever stopped completely absorbed by the moment? It could have been anything: a purity of nature, a breathtaking landscape, a stunning sunset, a pale sunrise, a piece of music, a line of a poem, a frailty of a flower, a tenderness of a bird´s singing, anything? As if, in this particular moment, we get the revelation of life, if only we could read through it...

Have you ever been able to almost physically feel the bliss of a perfection, a unity of the nature and a human, a state when everything around you and inside you come together despite the most disturbing circumstances, states, dispositions, griefs, sorrows, concerns - everything gets washed away leaving you cleansed and pure, ready to absorb this momentarily gift of the universe - the gift of being.   

...by its definition to make a day perfect something special should designate a senseless 24-hour existence or even a better definition would suit a chain of desirable events (to cover a 24-hour senseless existence) in such a way so that by the time one is ready to hit the pillow and send oneself into the oblivion one actually feels (for once) accomplishment and a positive attitude which justifies the meaningless dwelling and fulfills unyielding all-human existential Angst (at least until a warm encounter with a cup of coffee, appeasing with the harsh reality of the following morning).

My perfect day started at 5:30 am, with the sun still enjoying the nap, and my own daughter slapping me by my own pillow into my own face. As the weekend morning are primarily my duty to wake up before dawn with our smiling early bird, with the angels still sleeping, I greeted my usual 5 am friend, the devil, who was already dancing in my head, running shivers through my body and with a tender whisper tempting me to run away and join the circus (until it's too late and everyone wakes up).

I took the smiling happy angel out of our bed and let my lucky bastard moderately handsome husband watch his I-am-using-my-laser-to-kill-all-aliens-in-space dreams (I, quite groundlessly and naively, still choose to believe it is only scenario that is running under the warm cuddling blanket in the sweetness of early mornings since his age of fourteen).

At 5:30 am I went out of a warm bedroom into the coldness of an abandoned living room to face the unbearable brightness of being in the five electric lights with the demon of electricity (seriously, what is this thing?) snapped out into the human world by a switch.

And that was still long before God created coffee that day...
Or roosters had finished with the demons for the third time that lonely September morning...

Holding the thought of the roosters, demons and a protective happy baby in the arms I have proceeded to open the balcony door to see... an Eden - a quiet, completely calm, warm September morning - air standing still, motionless; thin salty smell of the ocean layering the gray transparent air, like the jasper seaweed curls gently threading through the solid waters of the ocean; and all was peaceful, still: houses, trees, posts. Grass, roofs, tarmac saturated their colours with the sprinkles of mildew and turned up ever so bright and sharp in the dullness of the air. Beauty.

I packed my angel into the overalls and we went out. We walked to the playground in the complete silence of being. While the little one was quietly exhilarating herself on the swings, tuned into the common mood of the nature and the city around (babies are strangely sensitive to the nature talking), I looked at the damp jade thickness of the shrubs circling the quiet playground and sheltering our bliss. Time stopped. We were in a parallel universe, standing in our quiet transparent world in the middle of the noisy and loud playground, children running, shouting, mothers chatting with an occasional yell for a bully to stop or a toddler's cry after falling on the ground - and at the same time - only me and my daughter, in the silence and tranquility of the damp morning, and a raven cawed harshly three times, flying pass by above our heads, pronouncing our fates, and us, blessed in our ignorance, incapable of knowing...

When we came back home I had my morning coffee. Many things happened through that ordinary September Sunday, none of them would seem obviously special. But the perfection lies in simplicity, and the beauty in the eye of the beholder, doesn´t it?

It is just about a beautiful morning, a smiling baby-daughter, a loyal husband, safe home, and a good coffee. And once, an always within never.


Copyright © 2013 by Olga Johannesson

On Beauty, Poetry and Autumn

A purely Icelandic summer evening in the late August can be very romance-inducing - wind putting feeble, scarce trees to the ground, howling above all limits of sanity, washing out any thought of opening the door, let alone going out. Rain (or, wait, was it snow) is beating the windows with the rage unknown in the rest of the world, slapping and stamping the last leaves on the sleek wet transparent surface, forcing them down to the bricked unyielding uncaring cold wall. No one is behind the windows, no one exists in the world, we are stuck inside.
 

And this is the perfect evening to go down with some "roistering, drunken and doomed poet" with some good whiskey (if I could ever drink any).  

Today it has been two years since I arrived at this proud little island.  

        ...O may my heart's truth 

                Still be sung

On this high hill in a year's turning. 

______

Poem in October

By Dylan Thomas

It was my thirtieth year to heaven

Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood

        And the mussel pooled and the heron

                       Priested shore

                   The morning beckon

With water praying and call of seagull and rook

And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall

                    Myself to set foot

                        That second

       In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-

Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name

       Above the farms and the white horses

                         And I rose

                     In rainy autumn

And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.

High tide and the heron dived when I took the road

                    Over the border

                       And the gates

         Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling

Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling

          Blackbirds and the sun of October

                      Summery

              On the hill's shoulder,

Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly

Come in the morning where I wandered and listened

                  To the rain wringing

                    Wind blow cold

          In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour

And over the sea wet church the size of a snail

          With its horns through mist and the castle

                    Brown as owls

                But all the gardens

Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales

Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.

              There could I marvel

                     My birthday

         Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country

And down the other air and the blue altered sky

          Streamed again a wonder of summer

                   With apples

              Pears and red currants

And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's

Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother

                 Through the parables

                       Of sun light

         And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy

That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.

         These were the woods the river and sea

                      Where a boy

                  In the listening

Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy

To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.

                   And the mystery

                         Sang alive

          Still in the water and singingbirds.

And there could I marvel my birthday

Away but the weather turned around. And the true

           Joy of the long dead child sang burning

                        In the sun.

                It was my thirtieth

Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon

Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.

              O may my heart's truth

                        Still be sung

            On this high hill in a year's turning.