Those Who Talk With Mountains

The mountain is a face turned to the sky. I watch her each morning and imagine that she gazes into the unfathomable universe hoping for a glimpse of God. I watch and wait with her, lifting my eyes. A flock of sparrows swirl into my field of vision from the right, over by the sea-glass tree, and draw my gaze down  as they alight on the grass beneath it. The grass turned green last week in that sudden summer when the jet stream blew the February cold into Canada and left us with the illusion that it might be June. I planted wildflower seeds beneath my kitchen window.

The mountain is alive. She whispers words to me that seep through my imagination and flow out my fingers. Her words come slowly, though, as do all the words of earth, and particularly those formed of stone. What if I wrote only one word a day? I think this as I gaze at that face, that rock face contemplating sky. What if one word, any word, looked at long enough, silently enough, has in itself all there is to know?

Twenty-one years ago I was visited by a man they called "The Man Who Talked With Mountains." He'd been a prisoner at Auschwitz, and he showed me the tattoo on his arm. After his liberation from the camp, he couldn't return to normal social life; it was too loud. Instead he climbed into the Swiss Alps to walk among the stones and be healed by the silence. It was the stones spoke to him first. Slow words, just the other side of the silence he imagined that he sought. He set his walking stick against a boulder and closed his eyes to listen. For a year he listened to the stones. His hearing became acute. Then he began to make out the language of the boulders, and finally, after years, of the mountains themselves. When he could hear that deep voice of the mountains, he felt whole enough again to rejoin a peopled world.

My mountain's face turns towards the sky. I can hear her stones whispering.