A mountain can be a great teacher because it stands apart, at once elusive and magisterial.

"A mountain can be a great teacher . . . because it stands apart, at once elusive and magisterial.  Walking up the mountain today, its imposing and indifferent presence reminds me yet again that things in and of themselves remain beyond us, even after the most exhaustive and accurate scientific or philosophical account, the most compelling mythology, or the most concise and penetrating poem . . . It was this insight that drew ancient China's intellectuals to mountains . . . The West's dualistic thinking devalues 'nature' because its linguistic silence allows for no meaning, no inner reality or spirit, and this devaluation has facilitated catastrophic environmental destruction, for it reduces earth to nothing more than a collection of resources for our use, or the stage upon which we play out our human drama during a brief exile from our true spirit-home.  But for the ancients, the elemental silence of things is the perfect wisdom that we, as linguistic beings, have lost."

David Hinton

"Hunger Mountain"

Photo: Last light glazes Long's Peak and Keyboard of the Winds above Mills Lake; Rocky Mountain National Park, CO; January 4, 2013