The Mountain...

Il n'y a que les montagnes qui ne se rencontrent jamais.

Voices did not carry over the howl of the sea as I wove my way through the lava field’s bubbling mud pots north of Reykjavik, Iceland. Before lay the black rock cliff, jutting over the North Atlantic’s waves like an indomitable dreadnaught. The sharp icy winds and the desolation made me pull my riding coat closer as I scaled the volcanic crag. Looking back over my shoulder as the tears welled in my eyes from the biting spring wind, I could see my companion investigating the boiling sulfur springs below. A mere speck on the jagged lava plain, he hadn’t noticed my ascent, nor was he likely to catch up any time soon. This suited me, as the solitude seemed to focus my mind’s eye.

The cliff vibrated; the crash of the waves seemed to intensify as I reached the edge. The characteristic Icelandic sky, an infinity of grey hues boiled above, seeming similar to the infinite expanse of the ocean that stretched below. I lay on my chest and watched the sea spray upwards as the rocks broke its force. The oscillations reminded me of the willed contest of matter and energy in the universe, the constant interchange of primal forces vying for dominance. This ancient cliff born of Hephaestus’s forge, was once a glowing fierce moment boiling away the waves, but now was cooled and muted merely awaiting its eventual demise into black sand. Swirling chaos of the grey waves as they receded leaving only the foam as a sort of echo for the violence that had ensued. I felt almost as an interloper, stealing a glimpse of the universe from a keyhole in time.

My hands gripped deathly white onto the rock as another breaker smashed against my volcanic bastion. This last explosion had sent the gulls nesting in the cliff below to take flight; as if they believed the next shock would be too great to bear and only their defiance of gravity, their journey through the ether would save them. The gulls reminded me of life, small fragile packets scattered across the primordial interplay below. Planets of life scattered by chance in this cosmos of my mind, existing precariously; seemingly to arise from nowhere, and to nowhere return with the passage of eons. What of this fortress I clung to like the lichen around me; would it stay unchanged throughout these imagined millennium?

Of course not, the face scarred and pitted by the relentless force opposing it would eventually tear it down. My inner world seemed the same, as I likened my beliefs to this monolithic juggernaut that I depended upon for my own fragile existence. Worn and pitted by the world’s turmoil around me, they would eventually give way to new forms, new conceptions, and new habitats for my own mental gulls of creativity. I would become as the black sand, mutable, able to shift my perceptions as the world’s waves crashed over me defining new patterns, creating new folds, but never completely eroding that which may be perceived as myself. Glittering diamonded sand, an alchemic transformation into something more than myself, beyond the limited perspectives of this lumbering promontory resisting the watery forces of change.

Rising and tasting the salt on my cracked wry lips, I turned my back on this microcosm and began on my journey back down.