The days start early and calm.
Watch the sun rise over the mountains from my veranda. Sip some coffee. Let the dogs test the icy grass outside for their toilet duties after keeping vigil at the fireplace through the night. No food for me or them. We both work fasted, and earn our meals for the day. I then take the boiled kettle over to my car to defrost the thick layer of ice that had formed on the windscreen through the icy night. Start the car and let it idle for a while to warm up. Today we would be tackling a whole new area and ridge line. It’s a climb, a slog, and because it’s virgin territory, I don’t yet know the easiest (if there is one) and quickest route up. This area is untouched. Apart from the local shepherds who ride up to the high ground on horseback to check on the sheep and cattle, not many people ever wander around up here. The ridges that are almost always left in the shadows of the peaks are iced up year round from the condensation that gathers there as well as from some natural springs that seep out slowly from the rocks. It always amazes me to find them iced up even in the middle of a warm day. On the drive there, the usual resident Egyptian Geese hiss at us, hurling profanities as we drive by. Nearing the ridge line we are going to work, I am still left incredulous as to the vast shadows the peaks cast on the low ground. It’s also deafeningly quiet. The kind of quiet that scares a lot of people, especially in these vast, untouched surrounds. There is a small percentage of people that thrive in this sort of silence however. This quietude. It thrusts them into crevices of thought they eagerly look towards with excitement but with respect too, as to what they will find there, what they will uncover. It’s some 90 floors climb to the ridge line where I feel we will be at an altitude where the vast majority of birds will most likely be. You’ve got to use your experience and knowledge to try and save you and your dogs some boot and pad mileage. This isn’t easy country by a long stretch, so the less you and the dogs (more importantly) have to work and trudge through, the better. I plot the ‘easiest’ route up, snaking our way to a ridge line that if we follow, we should get to the high ground, the flats, quickest. As soon as the car stops idling, the incessant thwacks on the sides of the aluminium crates start from their eager tails, more akin to rock and roll drumming than merely excited dog tails. What a privilege. I step out, take it all in and savour the calmness, the stillness for a bit more. Once the climb starts, a different sort of stillness washes over me, it’s one of meditation meeting with good old fashioned hard toil, and every few hundred metres or so, a pause to reflect and take stock as to how much we’ve conquered – and catch my breath. It’s special to think how few people walk these mountains, how few get to smell its wild herbs, and witness it’s daily theatre play out;
From the ravenous crows looking for their next easy meal to torment or scavenge, to the graceful and almost stoic gaze of the Black Eagle scouring his territory. It’s a beautiful thing to be a silent witness to. And I feel that they know that’s all the dogs and I ever are, witnesses. They know we don’t belong here on high. This is theirs, their home. We are just tourists. Passers by. But they respect us I feel, I can sense it. It’s also a quilters delight up here; shades of purples, blue hues, all sorts of different greens, browns, yellows, rust like oranges, apricot tinges, all merging and joined together by the Master Quilters Hand, forming something no machine or computer can ever replicate. There’s plenty ground water up here, as the natural springs are always seeping out crystal clear water for both the dogs and I, but I pack ample water anyway, even if it makes my climb harder. Nothing good comes easy in life, there’s always toil, a tax incurred, a cross to bear, and this is my voluntary suffering for something greater at the end. Life is real up here. I can’t quite explain it. A tensionless state isn’t real, it isn’t real life. And the quicker I adopted that mindset and accepted the fact that constant conflicts, both inner and outer are what shape man to be his greatest self, the “easier” my days became. Heraclitus said after all, “War is the father of all things. And one of those things is personal growth.” 11 weeks of this daily routine, this daily toil, this daily prayer is medicinal. There’s no other way to describe or explain it. The journey is our greatest prayer, I quite like that notion, that idea.
After 11 weeks of this I become a better person, a better man. Even if it is in tiny increments. I feel it. Resting easier accepting all of these nuances that I can never change, that I once viewed as “negative”, and slowly becoming better. Finding your meaning makes this all that much easier too I have found, it makes the suffering slightly more acceptable. Slightly more bearable. Neurosis after all, as Carl Jung put it, “as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.”
Always chasing the horizon.
Pictured: Taking a breather up at 2600m with Bianca of Ourano and a half decent backdrop.