The Mountain, Swiveling Like Sunflowers
Imagine what it’s like to be a mountain. Hard iron core. Deeply rooted in the earth, yet piercing the sky. Standing in one spot for millennia – never stepping just a few feet this way to dip a toe in the creek, or stepping a few feet the other way to lay down in the tall, cool grass. But, still, the mountain can see in all directions of the compass, and with a bird’s eye view. The mountain is omniscient.
Perhaps the mountain doesn’t need to step a few feet this way or a few feet that way, because whatever it may wish to experience eventually comes to it. Rain storms gather and then let loose over the mountaintop. Creeks begin to trickle. They form at the top of the mountain and find their way down to the base. Then, as the storm gathers force, the creeks begin to rush. The creek has not only come to the mountain, but has become part of the mountain itself. The water slips into its folds, soaks through its canyons, pools in its valleys.
Then, once the storm has passed, the sun emerges. Its warmth and energy and light act like the wave of a magician’s wand, and soon shoots of grass poke through the topsoil. In a matter of a few days, a blush of green first spreads south, and then east and then west and then north. What was once brown and barren is now green and fertile. The mountain now possesses its own bed of tall, cool grass. The grass has come to it.
And so on and so on. The mountain suffers fierce windstorms and hurricanes. It cycles through sunbaked drought and pelts of blue ice. Its trees fall. Its boulders tumble. Rivers of mud reshape its valleys. And yet is stands. Forever exposed, forever vulnerable. The mountain does not scramble to build a roof over its head, or skitter over to a taller, bigger mountain and hide behind its skirt. The mountain simply lets the wind rip across its body, permits the unfathomable cold to penetrate its belly, the unbearable heat to scorch its nose. And the gift of this permission – this allowance to let life howl outs its occasional violence and anger and malevolence – is the peace of the quiet mornings; the embrace of the tall, cool grass; the starfield on a clear, bright night; the gentle and life-giving energy of a single drop of water that trembles on the tip of a branch.
Weather has so many expressions. So many voices. So many ways of being. And so does life. Life is going to continue coming at us. Charging at full speed with a force that is both energizing and depleting, exciting and terrifying. Sometimes we will be lulled, sometimes we will be prodded. Sometimes we will be surrounded by a leafy canopy of abundance and well-being, other times that canopy will be shorn and stripped bare. But if we are the mountain, and trust in the cycle - trust in the return of spring and flowers and soft grass and fragrant meadows – then we will be fluid. Flexible. Able to bend in the storm. Sure to stand upright once again after the tempest has past, and turn our various blooms toward the sun. Swiveling like a field of sunflowers.