Mount LeConte and US

 

The Wholeness Calls

I love to find myself

at the top of mountains,

particularly in the Great Smokies,

here the Sun sets and rises

behind undulating ripples of ridges,

just as it has, seemingly unchanged, for over 10,000 years,

after the Great Ice retreated and humans found this area,

the stone and the forest have been constant,

Spruce-Fir Forest on top of mountain

though blight and logging have worked upon the woods,

the contagion of humans has transformed the valleys

with bulldozer and asphalt, concrete and structures,

up near 6000 feet in a Lodge carefully tucked into the mountain top,

at night human presence twinkles below us,

like fireflies on the ground and in the air looking for each other,

I love to witness sunset and sunrise high on this mountain top

Sunset, Cliff Top

Sunrise, from just beyond shelter cabin

and surrender my self to realities more toward the eternal

than are our politics, and the self-indulgence 

with which we surround ourselves,

as the light fades, or just before it returns,

it can be easy to slip into the world as a waking shadow,

a part of the gray between night and day, one with it,

the flashlight to me shouts of our need to control the world,

to see what is closest to us clearly,

and to let that beyond be forgotten,

ourselves at the center of the lit world,

I use a flashlight when I have to,

I fear the flashlight, though,

for it symbolizes how much we cannot let ourselves

just be still and receptive,

all of us challenged by quiet,

the Sun this morning slowly rose,

and the folks near me gave in to their need

to fill the quiet stillness with words,

just as earlier, the flashlight gave the illusion of control,

for me, a Mt. LeConte sunset and sunrise

remind me of the greatness from which we come,

what many of us feel to be that of God,

what all of us can feel to be the wholeness

we can too easily abandon.

Mt. LeConte, from Gatlinburg Bypass, 11/5/20

by Henry H. Walker

November 5, ‘20