Clouds of witnesses

Hey, here's something funny! Seven years ago, as I was teaching my sacred mountains class (called "Not to Scale"), I had some scruples about my suitability to teaching that material quite similar to those I find myself expressing about trees! (I stumbled on the post because I was looking for my favorite line from Elisée Reclus, inspired by the view of storm clouds massing over mountains near manmade Lake Henshaw yesterday.)

Am I child of the mountains? Especially because my "Sacred Mountains" class follows in the footsteps of a course taught by a Sherpa, I've been acutely aware of my distance from mountains. I tell people - and have been telling myself - that mountains are for me things that you need to go out of your way to encounter or even see. I grew up facing the ocean, I say ...

I was never living in the mountains, in the not insignificant part of the world where everything is mountain, so the language of mountain is too broad. I never had the experience one of my students says her mother grew up with in Colombia, where "mountains and people weren't separate" even in thought, and every day began with checking the mood of the mountain. From the flatlander perspective I've too quickly assumed, mountains are exceptions, jutting from - breaking hierophanically through! - a presumably flat world. They're paradigmatically solitary. It even makes sense to think of them as having come from above, from the sky, from outer space. ...

The post describes a conversation with a friend who helped me realize

that there's been a cloud of mountain witnesses attending me all my life, content to let me think they were at my beck and call. Not a mountain child, no. But not just a beach bum either. The time of mountains is one I've sensed...

I suppose I do enjoy playing the Southern Californian naif, the mountain and forest-deprived child of the coastal desert, more at home with the geological than the biological, tempted by the "flatlander" perspective in which every vertical thing is a hierophany - though also aware that everything changes. The Reclus: 

A l’esprit qui contemple la montagne pendant la durée des âges, elle apparait flottante, aussi incertaine que l’onde de la mer chassée par la tempète: c’est un flot, une vapeur; quand elle aura disparu, ce ne sera plus qu’un rève.

Meanwhile, the rain came to Lake Henshaw just as we did.

Embassy of Taishan

These mountain spirits are among 100s of plaster figures attending the various "departments" of the Daoist temple complex Dongyue 东岳庙. The entire cast of the Eastern Sacred Mountain Taishan is represented, though only five of the statues are originals that survived the Cultural Revolution.

8:02pm, 14th St at Union Square

Official last day of the academic year (makeup for the two Tuesday snow days). Since my "Sacred Mountains" class had plenty of extracurricular activities, we didn't need it. Farewell, AY 2016-17, a year in which I taught quite the range of courses in quite the range of formats: an upper level and an introductory religious studies seminar (Theorizing Religion and Not To Scale: On Sacred Mountains), a university lecture course (Who New? A History of The New School, with my friend J), a seminar-turned-independent study (Exploring Religious Ethics: Confucianism in Dialogue), an advising tutorial (Buddhism as a Liberal Art), a conference tutorial (Mountains and Sacred Landscapes) and the Dean's Honor Symposium. Whew!

Outside the box

Actually this captures the end of "Not to scale: On sacred mountains" rather well. (I took the picture after all had left the classroom for the last time.) I rather cheekily borrowed the mountain-themed tissue box from the Associate Dean's Office, even shaped it like a mountain. While it was used, it couldn't compete with the call of the wild, of nature, represented by the courtyard trees out the window, and the true object of my students' yearning.

Feel the mountain

The Sacred Mountains class has come to a sweet end. I'll share more of the students' final syntheses soon, but here's one. A "Nan Shepherd Mountain" - you can look at it from any angle. It came together with a "Bernbaum mountain" with a conventionally shaped white peak against a bland blue sky and skirts of green - the same yarns, but woven, we learned, with more stress and less joy. It's soft, a joy to touch and hold.

帰日

Yesterday's classes both ended in Japan! (So did today's stroll through the BBG where we saw the last sakura and the first tree peonies.)

In the sacred mountains class, Japan came as the end of a trifecta. We first watched the final half hour of Zhang Yang's documentary "Kang Rinpoche," witnessing the arrival at Mt. Kailas of a group of Tibetan villagers who'd started their 1200 km full body prostrating pilgrimage a year beforehand. Then we discussed Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s last sermon. And finally it was Dogen's "Mountains and Waters Sutra," a piece of which we'd encountered before. What all three had in common was movement. The Mangkang villagers show the effort of pilgrimage. Dr. King chronicles the progress he's seen, progress which has taken him to the"mountaintop" from which he can see the road that has brought them so far, and the Promised Land. And Zen Master Dogen tells us that mountains walk - and don't say they don't! To doubt the walking of the mountains means that one does not yet know one's own walking.

In the Confucian ethics class it was, by coincidence, the person most responsible for anyone beyond the Soto School of Zen's knowing about Dogen, Watsuji Tetsuro. I've spent a lot of time in Watsuji's company over the years, going back to my year at Tokyo University in 1992-93, but this was the first time I'd approached his Rinrigaku from the perspective of Confucianism. It makes more sense than the Buddhist- or Heidegger-focused readings common in the West would lead you to expect. The 倫 rin of Watsuji's ethics (倫理学 rinrigaku), template for his famous 間柄 aidagara, are Mencius' five relations! And his attention to everyday interactions has a Confucian feel to it, too. But then he was the son of a Confucian scholar, a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine! The Western and Buddhist legacies are there, too, of course, and Watsuji's (he would say distinctively Japanese) appreciation of cultural plurality. But it makes a nice denouement for our course on Confucianism's prospects beyond the Middle Kingdom.

The courses continue for another week. Teams of students will give reports on assorted sacred mounts, from Nanda Devi to Shasta (but not Fuji). And our Confucian book club will return to the Analects.

Contact! Contact!

This mountain has knocked on my door three times in a week. At the very first panel I attended of the ISSRNC Mountains and Sacred Landscapes conference someone mentioned that Henry David Thoreau, otherwise so sanguine about living in harmony with nature, had had a "meltdown" on a mountain in Maine called Katahdin. Six days later, at our Spring Roundtable on "Literary Journalism and Religion," a colleague read passages from writings excerpted in the collection he uses as a text for his class, Jeff Sharlet's Radiant Truths: Essential Dispatches, Reports, Confessions, and Other Essays on American Belief. One was from Thoreau's account of that encounter in The Maine Woods (1864).

At length I entered within the skirts of the cloud which seemed forever drifting over the summit, and yet would never be gone, but was generated out of that pure air as fast as it flowed away; and when, a quarter of a mile farther, I reached the summit of the ridge, which those who have seen in clearer weather say is about five miles long, and contains a thousand acres of table-land, I was deep within the hostile ranks of clouds, and all objects were obscured by them. Now the wind would blow me out a yard of clear sunlight, wherein I stood; then a gray, dawning light was all it could accomplish, the cloud-line ever rising and falling with the wind's intensity. Sometimes it seemed as if the summit would be cleared in a few moments, and smile in sunshine: but what was gained on one side was lost on another. It was like sitting in a chimney and waiting for the smoke to blow away. It was, in fact, a cloud-factory, — these were the cloud-works, and the wind turned them off done from the cool, bare rocks. Occasionally, when the windy columns broke in to me, I caught sight of a dark, damp crag to the right or left; the mist driving ceaselessly between it and me. It reminded me of the creations of the old epic and dramatic poets, of Atlas, Vulcan, the Cyclops, and Prometheus. Such was Caucasus and the rock where Prometheus was bound. Æschylus had no doubt visited such scenery as this. It was vast, Titanic, and such as man never inhabits. Some part of the beholder, even some vital part, seems to escape through the loose grating of his ribs as he ascends. He is more lone than you can imagine. There is less of substantial thought and fair understanding in him, than in the plains where men inhabit. His reason is dispersed and shadowy, more thin and subtile, like the air. Vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature has got him at disadvantage, caught him alone, and pilfers him of some of his divine faculty. [5.8]

And then Friday night we went to see "Marsden Hartley's Maine" at the Met Breuer, and found these paintings of the same mountain, which Hartley had apparently decided was to be his Mont Sainte-Victoire.

Like Thoreau, Hartley referred to it as Ktaadn. I don't know if Hartley was familiar with Thoreau's Maine Woods. His Ktaadns are about distance where Thoreau's are about something more intimate:

This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made for ever and ever, — to be the dwelling of man, we say, — so Nature made it, and man may use it if he can. Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific, — not his Mother Earth that we have heard of, not for him to tread on, or be buried in, — no, it were being too familiar even to let his bones lie there, — the home, this, of Necessity and Fate. There was there felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites, — to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we. We walked over it with a certain awe, stopping, from time to time, to pick the blueberries which grew there, and had a smart and spicy taste. Perchance where our wild pines stand, and leaves lie on their forest floor, in Concord, there were once reapers, and husbandmen planted grain; but here not even the surface had been scarred by man, but it was a specimen of what God saw fit to make this world. What is it to be admitted to a museum, to see a myriad of particular things, compared with being shown some star's surface, some hard matter in its home! I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one, — that my body might, — but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! — Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we? [6.1]

Repent

The Sacred Mountains class found itself in this strange place today. It was a bit of a gamble but I think it paid off. The picture is of an old forest cemetery (the hillock at upper left) which is now perched on an island in an Appalachian landscape transformed by mountaintop removal (MTR) mining. (We started by watching this conflicted depiction of the monstrosity of MTR, and then this footage of a "Blesssing of the Mountain," one asserting the value of seeing things from above, the other demonstrating the power of being there on the ground.)

Our reading was from Andrew R. H. Thompson's Sacred Mountains: A Christian Ethical Approach to Mountaintop Removal (University Press of Kentucky, 2015) - our only text explicitly Christian or concerned with ethics - and it's not easy going for people unfamiliar with that field. Predictably and understandably my students were put off by Thompson's assumption that his readers were fellow members of "the church." Most also couldn't fathom his argument for a "theocentric ethics" (based in the ideas of H. Richard Niebuhr), and for how it could prevent the "absolutization" of relative values which bedevils discussions of problems such as MTR. They assumed "theocentric" must mean claiming God for one's own position, rather than the decentering humility of accepting and trusting a God of all whose values one did not claim to understand. It being Holy Week I quite enjoyed laying out the idea that human "imaginations" even of values like justice and inclusion inevitably have blind spots, the pursuit of one's value inevitably bringing "disvalue" to some other; the only alternative is to own one's fallibility (I didn't use the s-word), to repent the disvalues one wittingly and unwittingly does and countenances, ideally in the presence of all affected: church as the matrix for a different kind of sociality. (I didn't get into christology.)

But what about MTR? Thompson gives few concrete suggestions (or rather, he thinks action should arise out of actual engagement in a locality, not reading about it) but it was fun to think with him what "mountain reclamation for God" might look like. We've often argued that mountains should be left alone, or returned to a presumed pristineness, then bellyached over the what and the how, the who and the why. Thompson's argument allows one to think beyond the artificial islands of "sacred mountains," just as it offers a transcendent reframing of relative values. For a moment it seemed like the consequence of setting aside a few special places for preservation, conservation - as sacred heritage - was not qualitatively different from leveling most of the mountains around Kayford, West Virginia but keeping Stover's Cemetery.

Feel the love

In class today, the four students who were able to come to Overlook Mountain on Saturday reported on their experience. It was somewhat different from mine! Where I experienced the forest's gentle molting as a crystal miracle, they described feeling "challenged" by the mountain. "As the ice was melting it came pelting down," said one poetically. Another was hit in the head by a piece of ice. "It felt personal," the first added. Not that they weren't glad to have gone! It was still "another world,"

a taste of "sacrality." Yet what moved them turns out not to have been the mountain but the monastery and the winsome monk who showed us around and led an introduction to meditation. They were charmed (as was I) by his challenging us to stop breathing, an uncomfortable blockage; feeling that pain we could appreciate that our usual regular breathing loves us - defined as saving another from pain. Love!

It fell to me to remind them the lesson extended to the mountain. The monk spoke of the mountain as the source of water (one has a view of one of the city's feeder reservoirs) and air (the trees purify it) for New York, and of the work of prayer flags which, moved by the wind, scatter words of healing not only toward the monastery but toward the animals of the forest. Love is all around, an example for us to follow. It's natural - and as powerful - as the breathing of humans and mountains.

Crystal rain

I had a magical experience today. Talking to the director of the India China Institute about the Sacred Mountains course a few weeks ago, I'd said we were doing pretty well considering there were no mountains to hand. What about that mountain above Woodstock, he asked? It even has a Buddhist monastery on it! That's where we were today, though only four of my students made it (another dozen India China Center-related people happily joined). Driving up the steep hillside to the monastery - the bus driver wondered aloud if it was a road that had been build from the bottom or the top, a profound question - the cute hippie village gave way to woods, then snow, then a range of tree-covered mountains half-shrouded in mist. It's not a big mountain but our ears popped! As we arrived at the monastery (the center of the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism in America) it started to sprinkle snow. As we alit from the bus, we noticed that we were exactly at the frost line. The tops of the trees growing around us, and all those up the mountainsides around us, were a gauzy white with hoarfrost.

We went into the monastery for a few hours of lunch, a tour and a talk on meditation, and when we emerged the frost line had risen a lot. We walked toward the summit for a bit (it was too far to go all the way) and I was depressed to observe that the hoarfrost had all melted. But then, as we ascended, strange things began to happen. In the bootprints in the sludgy snow of the path I started to notice tiny glassy ice cylinders - recently fallen from twigs and branches overhead. It sounded like a light rain was dripping on the snow around us. As we went further, it seemed a light big-dropped rain was falling, but it was all ice from the trees. Before we had to turn back we arrived at the magical place. When you stopped to listen, the woods sounded like we were in a rainstorm, even as the light around us showed a brightening afternoon of clearing clouds. A few high branches still glistened like crystal overhead but we'd caught up with the frost line charging up the mountain. I remembered a scene in "The Matrix" where reality crumbles into a rush of digits, but the woods were still there. It felt like something one might be blessed to witness once in a lifetime, but I suppose it happens daily.

Cairngorm see-er

If I teach the Sacred Mountains class again, Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain will be the reading after the essay assignment on the the perils and advantages of seeing mountain from a distance. Shepherd never went "up" but always "into" her beloved Cairngorms.

[C]hanging of focus in the eye, moving the eye itself when looking at things that do not move, deepens one's sense of outer reality. Then static things may be caught in the very act of becoming. By so simple a matter, too, as altering the position of one's head, a different kind of world may be made to appear. Lay the head down, or better still, face away from what you look at, and bend with straddled legs till you see your world upside down. How new it has become! From the close-by sprigs of heather to the most distant fold of the land, each detail stands erect in its own validity. In no other way have I seen of my own unaided sight that the earth is round. As I watch, it arches it back, and each layer of landscape bristles - though bristles is a word of too much commotion for it. Details are no longer part of a grouping in a picture of which I am the focal point, the focal point is everywhere. Nothing has reference to me, the looker. This is how the earth must see itself.

How sweet a riposte to the hubris of "To see the greatness of a mountain one must keep one's distance from it" is this:

No one knows the mountain completely who has not slept on it.

Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain (Edinburgh and London: Canongate,
2011 [1977, but actually written 30 years before that]), 11, 90

Purple mountain majesties

Ruskin is a wonder. Just read his account of the colors mountains give us - the "grave tenderness" of purple, violet, deep ultramarine blue. He sees purples nestled in flatland trees and fields too (impressionists would see them), but they can't compare to the hues of the hills.

Don't look down

I hadn't noticed that the two most significant mountain experiences of Jesus' ministry are celebrated so close to each other, and just as we move into Lent. (I'm not saying the Sermon on the Mount isn't important, or Golgotha; elevated places are where the sacred happens in biblical traditions.) One is the Transfiguration, celebrated the last Sunday before Lent, and the other is the temptation of Christ in the wilderness, marking the first Sunday of Lent, which culminates in a high place often figured as a mountain. (Images from the website of the RCL)

These episodes are not contiguous in Scripture, the former appearing at the end of Jesus' ministry, the latter at its start. (This year it's Matthew 17:1-9 and 4:1-11; in Year B it's Mark 9:2-9, 1:9-15; in Year C Luke 9:28-36[, 37-43a]), 4:1-13.) The Temptation's a suitable text for the start of Lent, but is there something to be learned from the juxtaposition of mountains with the Transfiguration? In the former, the disciples Jesus takes with himself are looking upward; if there's a view down, it's not important. The latter is all about the view down, and the devilish temptation to assume mastery over all one oversees. The mountain is a place the sacred manifests itself, where the human - or a few, select humans - can see the divine. However it's also a place where the human is tempted (by the "God's eye view" above the plane of the plain) to think itself divine. Perhaps that's why Jesus, in the Transfiguration story, shuts down Peter's idea of building structures on the mountain. Even if devoted to the human encounter with the divine, they tempt the human to forget that we are not rendered divine by that encounter.

On Tuesday, my colleague F came to the Sacred Mountains class and told us why the physical location of Sinai - if indeed there ever was a Mount Sinai - doesn't matter to Jews. Certainly it was the place where a decisive encounter between Yahweh and his people happened (though not by the people's ascending the mountain; had they even touched its perimeter they would die). But the encounter is manifested not in the mountain but in the Torah which Yahweh used Sinai to send down to his people. The Israelites take the Teachings with them, and while they remember them as having been sent down a mountain, they move on into time, leaving the mountain behind. F's diagram, skilfully assembled piece by piece over the course of the class, ended with the line along the bottom, an arrow from the past (in Egypt, from which the Israelites emerged like a newborn) to the future. Mountains, like the sacred, are places where time is frozen, she suggested, not a place for living.

[Update, March 12th: Transfiguration is celebrated on the eve of Lent in the traditions using the Revised Common Lectionary, not the Catholic, who hear the story today, the second Sunday of Lent.]

Pruitt's world

In class Thursday we looked a little at this image, too, also in New York - well, at the Brooklyn Museum: Alfred Bierstadt's Storm over the Rocky Mountains, Mt, Rosalie. I told the class it was far grander in reality than any projected image could be, and that there was another reason to see it in situ: in the same room is a new work taking apart its grandeur. ("Fallen Bierstadt" by Jennifer Hagerty.) Students were intrigued. Let's see if anyone goes to check them out!

Resisting the temptation of distance

The sacred mountains class became an extended infomercial for museums today. From the Met to the Rubin, Roerich Museum to Brooklyn Museum, I kept find myself telling students to go look at artworks on display around us. I even commended an exhibition I didn't find particularly inspiring when I saw it, the Met's new show "The Mysterious Landscapes of Hercules Segers," where I saw the print above. I put the image up as students discussed their first papers, in which I'd asked them to reflect on a claim taken (out of context) from Lama Anagarika Govinda, "To see the greatness of a mountain, one must be at a distance from it" - provocative in a course condemned to distance!

The papers were creative and resourceful, really impressive. While several protested that the toil of the trek or the vastness of a summig view are irreplaceable, many students found ways to agree with the assertion, considering temporal and emotional as well as physical distance. Isn't the greatness apprehended after the encounter? Does it perhaps prove itself only in the effect it has on someone's life? Some went so far as to say that it's better not to be in the presence of a mountain, let alone slogging up its tiring paths, seeing only what's right in front of you; to appreciate it as a mountain it's better to be coolly absorbing the reports and images of others' mountain experiences. Segers' landscapes are fascinating in part because he never left his flat Dutch home, faithfully reproduced at the center of his craggy capriccio.

Our reading for today was chapters 4 and 5 of Veronica della Dora's entirely wonderful Mountain: Nature and Culture, "Mountains and Vision" and "Mountains and Time." The latter helps historicize our sense of mountains as ancient ruins, formed over geological deep time, rather than as, say, the rubble produced by the Flood, temporary until "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low" (Isa. 40:4). The former occupied most of our discussion, though, as it offers instruction in "premodern topographic ways of seeing."

We had an amazing discussion of her two representations of the temptation of Christ (above), painted 500 years apart. In the former, by Duccio, organized like an icon, sizes and relations aren't "realistic" but true; Christ is bigger than the mountain to which Satan takes him, and bigger than the cities seen from it. Everything is seen from his vantage point, including the viewer. In the latter, by a William Raphael Smith, all the figures - including Christ's - are dwarfed by a broad landscape; more, the vantage is that of the viewer surveying all, including Christ.

Talk about temptation!

And then it was time for Chinese landscape. della Dora includes a reproduction of Guo Xi's "Early Spring," but the book is small and the picture even smaller, so I brought my poster of Wang Meng's "East Morning Thatched Cottage View" and we spread it out on the table between us. (Images of both, above.) It wasn't ideal, but it worked. Students quickly found themselves drawn into details, discovering tiny figures in various places, paths, streams and peaks appearing and disappearing. Without any relevant experience nobody'd remarked what della Dora said. Now, when I read it aloud, everyone got it: Chinese landscape painting offers a different way of seeing. While Western perspectival painting (and later mechanized photography) requires a fixed viewer gazing down from an elevated vantage point, Chinese landscape painting emphasizes the necessity of moving through the landscape, of wandering through the mountains. (134) Not "wandering through the painted mountains."

As we wandered Wang Meng's mountains in our classroom the question of distance collapsed under its own airless weight. Bernbaum's triangulations seemed empty, while Dogen came back with the force of the obvious: There are mountains hidden in marshes, mountains hidden in the sky; there are mountains hidden in mountains. There is a study of mountains hidden in hiddenness.

To end I read the whole passage by Govinda from which I'd poached the essay prompt. (It's easy to find online, and I'm a little disappointed only one student did, though several found the same clipping on websites of "great quotes.")

To see the greatness of a mountain, one must be at a distance from it; to understand its form, one must move around it; to experience its moods, one must see it at sunrise and sunset, at noon and at midnight, in sun and in rain, in snow and in storm, in summer and winter, and in spring and autumn. He who can see the mountain in this manner comes near to the life of the mountain, which is as intense as that of a human being. Mountains grow and decay, they breathe and pulsate with life, They attract and collect invisible energies from their surroundings: the energies of the air, of the water, of electricity and magnetism; they create winds, clouds, thunder-storms, rains, waterfalls, and rivers. They fill their surroundings with life and give shelter and food to innumerable living things. Such is the greatness of a mountain.

Lama Anagarika Govinda, “Foreword: Sacred Mountains,” in W. Y. Evans-Wentz,

Cuchama and Sacred Mountains (Athens: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1981), xxx

We're in a good place to continue our wandering. We've named the problems - and the temptations - of distance. We've also tasted the ways in which, even in the absence of mountains, we can yet acknowledge and even sense their life.

Ruffled

Am I child of the mountains? Especially because my "Sacred Mountains" class follows in the footsteps of a course taught by a Sherpa, I've been acutely aware of my distance from mountains. I tell people - and have been telling myself - that mountains are for me things that you need to go out of your way to encounter or even see. I grew up facing the ocean, I say, sometimes adding that there are two islands one can very occasionally see bobbing on the horizon from the place I grew up, the mountain "hierophanies" of my youth - and to the strains of "Bali Ha'i." Since learning about Evans- Wentz' California Kailash I sometimes add that there was perhaps a sacred mountain behind my back, as it were, as I gazed out to sea. Maybe it was radiating mountain mana?

But this is all not quite true. While certainly not a mountain child, they have been part of my life from the start. I was born in Switzerland, after all, and one of the first trips my parents took me on was to meet favorite relations who live in the Wallis/Valais, the Alpine valley where the Rhône begins. We returned to that valley many times for hikes, some overlooking the magnificent, now shrinking, Aletschgletscher. Adalbert Stifter still moves me to tears. Once we moved to California, the Sierras were regular destinations, both for hiking and skiing. At fourteen I even made it to the top of Mt. Whitney, highest peak of the contiguous US. At later points in my life, I've been (part way) up Mount Fuji several times, circumambulated Uluru and, of course, twice circumambulated Kailash. I spent a few weeks in Flims and Interlaken not long ago. Mont Blanc, Kangchenjunga and Annapurna revealed themselves to me. In China I got to Wutai, Hengshan and Laoshan. And did you know that New York City itself sits atop an ancient mountain range, ground down by the ages?

Still, I had to go all those places. I was never living in the mountains, in the not insignificant part of the world where everything is mountain, so the language of mountain is too broad. I never had the experience one of my students says her mother grew up with in Colombia, where "mountains and people weren't separate" even in thought, and every day began with checking the mood of the mountain. From the flatlander perspective I've too quickly assumed, mountains are exceptions, jutting from - breaking hierophanically through! - a presumably flat world. They're paradigmatically solitary. It even makes sense to think of them as having come from above, from the sky, from outer space. It's easy to think that mountains fly, walk, go over water, flow. My favorite mountain line, from Elisée Reclus

A l’esprit qui contemple la montagne pendant la durée des âges, elle apparait flottante, aussi incertaine que l’onde de la mer chassée par la tempète: c’est un flot, une vapeur; quand elle aura disparu, ce ne sera plus qu’un rève. 

 Histoire d’une montagne (1875-6)

imagines the world as a surface ruffled - fleetingly - by mountains. They only seem solid if you take the human view of them, but the whole point of mountains is to challenge us to transcend that limited view!

These thoughts are coalescing now because I've asked students to write a paper about studying mountains from a distance, and we've started wrestling with the variously mystifying and clarifying accounts of sacred mountains of Edwin Bernbaum and Veronica della Dora. But it's also because I got together this afternoon with my old friend L, one of the most spiritually open people I know, and she asked me not if I was qualified to be teaching a course on sacred mountains, but rather how mountains had prepared me for this task. Do I, perhaps, protest too much? The first part of the course has been all about phenomenology, which I've described as helping us becoming cognizant of experiences we're already having without fully realizing it. Talking to L, I suddenly felt that there's been a cloud of mountain witnesses attending me all my life, content to let me think they were at my beck and call. Not a mountain child, no. But not just a beach bum either. The time of mountains is one I've sensed...