Staring At Mt. Lemmon

I keep looking and staring at Mt. Lemmon as it is alive with flames and cabbage head smoke blown by the winds to one side. If I could grasp what I see, I imagine I could see everything else. I feel as I see life through cataracts. One word runs through my mind as a telling description of what I would hope to attain: — congruency. I’d love to experience a congruency between my inner and outer selves, between myself and the external world, to be at one. i believe it is more than Ram Dass’ Be Here Now. After all, what do mountains want? They have retired; they no longer run; they are enjoying life with monumental reserve. In their stolidness they are one. So maybe I should become a mountain. “Dad, what should I be in this world?” “Become a mountain, my son. You don”t have to remember and you won’t ask nagging questions about fire?”

“Is that all there is to it, to become a mountain?”

“A mountain is grantie fire. Get what it is and you might emulate it in your own life.”

What is a mountain?

I do not know.

What’s a mountain?

I don’t know.

Hillary had it wrong. He climbed Everest because it was “there,” implying a challenge, a dare to human spirit and courage. There is much more than “there” to Everest’s “thereness.” It is an imposition on what we observe and we are asked to grapple with all the questions it poses: what am I? man or mountain? what is it you really are ascending? why can’t you leave me be and ascend within yourself? Don’t you realize you conquer nothing when you ambush me? I am here, I am also not here. Greater heights than me are within you, but that is another issue.

I met a stuck man. Recovering from a gross operation last year, all he could talk about was this clearly transfiguring event. It changed his body, his ways, perhaps his attitude toward life. He kept coming back to the operation; I met him again and right off he is on his hobbyhorse. Clearly traumatized, he can’t go beyond obsessing; he doesn’t ask for consolation. Apparently he just wants to retell his experience. I don’t feel that the telling of it repeatedly is in anyway cathartic. He is stuck in his agony. I hope he moves on, but what is salient is that his life is on hold. He is frozen in time. He doesn’t hear or listen well, for he would come to understand that others might tire of his Job-like complaints. That’s not fair. He does not complain. He just remembers, remembering without purpose, like a stylus stuck in a groove on an old 78.