It is not for us to follow the trail of truth too far, since by doing so we entirely loses the directing compass of our mind

 

 

 

 

 

"Men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty billows of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, and pass themselves by."

-St. Augustine, from Confessions

 

Image: Georgia O’Keeffe, Road - Mesa with Mist, 1961

Title: adapted from Herman Melville, Pierre

What Geomancy

"For words are clumsy mountaineers and clumsy miners. Not for them to bring down treasures from the mountains’ peaks, or up from the mountains’ bowels."

-Franz Kafka, in a letter written to Selma Kohn 
[Source: Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, trans. by Richard and Clara Winston]

[Image: Thomas Moglu]

The Markawasi Stone Forest of Peru

"The river that flows nowhere, like a sea…"

-Wallace Stevens

Art: The Markawasi Stone Forest of Peru

Mountain Redux

“Between one tree and another, there is all the thirst of the earth.”
-Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop


Tell me.
Have you ever seen woods so.
Deep so.
Every tree a word does your heart stop?
-Anne Carson, excerpt from “Town on the Way through God's Woods"

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I am in the forest. Nine thousand feet high, I'm a cloud, swathed in white; I see everything. A field of purple flowers blooms only at the apex, awaying before I utter, “Ahh.” The sun rises speckled through pines, nouns and verbs shake themselves out, rearrange: the doe's hooves, the hummingbird's sip, the black ant's crawl. Has the winding mountain pass altered them? Or the air around them changed?

No where else have I seen black mountain ants like Goliath; I imagine them gracing Dillard’s Tinker Creek, Thoreau’s Walden. They march as big as my thumb and would carry off my lunch, suitcase, cabin if allowed. Did they migrate from la selva Brazilera or the Uruguayan pampas? We sweep them off the porch and they fall back into nature's hem, unaware.

Mountains smell differently. Just as my own bed, cupboards, closets exude a musk that is me, the mountains – these Cedar ones anyway – bleed pine. Pine that registers in the nose before the brain; before the brain labels it pine it is not. It is emerald unfurling, closing over my mind's mouth. And I find, strangely, I don't seek air, only to be sucked green.

-T. @ The Chocolate Chip Waffle © 2011. All rights reserved.

Photo: Man Ray