on the mount

i went hiking this weekend

When you live in a bay perpetually coated in fog, sunny days are gifts that must be acknowledged, engaged with, spent to their fullest. In an act of incredible serendipity, one of the nicest days of the year ended up coinciding with a plan my friends and I had to hike in Marin County, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. It was a short drive over, one that took longer because everyone else in the Bay Area had the same idea, and we embarked on a medium difficulty hike in Mount Tamalpais State Park.

In hiking up this trail, moving uphill surrounded by trees and their snaking roots twirling around my feet, I lived unlike I always live. The ground was uneven, there was little room or time to be distracted, or to desire for distraction. Each step needed to be considered, and any lapse in attention could result in tripping, rolling an ankle, sliding. It was in this concentrated state that we steadily increased our altitude, barely taking in our surroundings, too focused on each step.

We were walking in the woods until the trees parted as the clouds do, and the clear blue sky smiled upon us. The sun, free from clouds and fog for once, illuminated the rolling hills that faded into what looked like the end of the world: a hazy painting of blue that looked less like the ocean and more like the idea of it. An endless blue that seemed to dissolve into the sky, detail somehow missing from the real world.

And the grass, oh, the grass! Grown to lengths rarely seen in the cities and the suburbs, the grasses were alive with motion, like an animal, fervent, like an animal. They moved like it had forgotten that it is not water, waltzing to the invisible rhythm of the wind. The verdance was new to me, the opposite of the yellowed grasses I’d seen here last, five years prior, back when the drought choked the lands. Even the stones were green here, the serpentinite known to be emblematic of California itself.

I tried to take pictures and videos, with my phone, with my camera. We all did, our mouths agape to the magnificence before us. As I gazed down at the images that resulted, it was impossible not to feel disappointed by how poorly they captured what we were seeing. The greens are wrong, the complexities of the landscape flattened, the sun too bright, and my god, the greens are so wrong. One would need every lens, every camera, every possible way of capturing an image to get even close to representing the vision we saw. And then what, how can I let you feel the gales pushing through your hair? How can I let the exhaustion in my shoulder from my bag come through, or how seeing the tiger butterfly seemed to lighten my step?

Standing in uninterrupted nature, paralyzed by beauty, this must be where god comes from. When experiencing your own smallness, when seeing brilliance beyond comprehension, when nothing you can say or write or paint can even come close to capturing the resplendence of the vista, of the moment, you understand where the need to worship comes from. The ancient traditions all created temples to nature deities for a reason; how they dwarf us, how they’ve always towered above us. Wasn’t the whole world like this once? Before we were settlers, we were nomadic. Before we were settlers, nature was uninterrupted by our constructions.

And nature is the constant, in some form or another. In our history, nature has stayed the source of all comparisons, the basis of our art and poetry. The first known author in human history was the Sumerian priestess Enheduanna from around 2250 BCE, and even today her words breed familiarity through translation, their references to the world still relevant. In “The Hymn to Inanna,” a praise song to the goddess of love and war Inanna, she writes:

Like a charging storm

You charge,

Like a roaring storm

You roar,

You thunder in thunder,

Snort in rampaging winds.

What these words tell me: the greatness of the natural world is divine, and the divine can only be described through the natural world. These are facts that make sense when you experience a beautiful sunset, a glorious day on the beach, the crescendo of a thunderstorm, but we, as people, are incredibly talented at forgetting. We can have a deeply moving experience walking through a trail in a green way and have let the glow of natural connection dim by the time we’ve gotten home if you consume enough content fast enough. We can let our experiences with beauty slide off of us like water, but we can also let ourselves be changed by them. 

With my failures of photos and videos, I wanted to lace my fingers into the grass so it wouldn’t leave me, pull it along so I could show it to everyone that I love, but also let the beauty linger within me, continue to inspire me. I focused on the memory as strongly as I could and tried to write about it, but could never find words that could even capture a fraction of it (how embarrassing is it for a writer to fail to find words!).

I convince myself that the beautiful experience has changed me, or will change me, like a butterfly effect or dominos. Maybe seeing my smallness has given me a newfound appreciation for the world or imbued me with additional poetic sensitivity or has made it easier for me to read on the bus (in search of more beauty) instead of scrolling through my phone. Or maybe I will have to return to the mountain, the beach, the sunset over and over again, just to remember what it feels like to forget that time exists and kneel to the grandeur of this planet.

To feel divine again.

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💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• PLAYLIST - april 24 - pretty electronic heavy month for me!

• POEM - “Fragment 105(c)” by Sappho - O my mountain hyacinth