Sitting like a mountain

A mountain can be read like the Torah by a geologist. Each layer has meaning and the meaning builds upon the layer below it or speaks to the layer above and provides it countenance and relationship.  When everything feels too loose and nothing seems to be sustained by the eminence of its own weight or presence, think mountain.  The mountain in us that is still but storied. It speaks through its layers the way we do through our kin and kidding, our stretches and triumphs and the everyday, small journeys we accomplish in a world that notes everything except the quiet, difficult challenges we face moving from one place to another within.

What does it mean to be a mountain? Is it always about strength or about what remains after the great forces of the ground beneath shifted and shaped the land? The mountain rests on its legs, folded but not crossed, arms forming the strong sides but ready to move or roll or toss a tree down the side or create a river from new rain.

There’s times I’ve seen a mountain in me and times I’ve known that there’s no mountain within at all, just the scree is left or the place where the river washed out a path going down the mountain faster than it came out of the sky.  I don’t know why I don’t just accept these times as easily as I do the others; bow my head and be grateful for being safe and loved. There’s a struggle to feel like a mountain but that is a mythical mountain and not the real ones you see as the land rises toward the sky. Real mountains, no matter how they might be touched and worked by time and hands, have stories of strength; but also stories of enduring, of letting go, of washing out, of being frozen or broken or holy.

Today, feeling a bit afraid, not at all like I’d expect, I realize that there is comfort, if I let it come, in sitting like a mountain. There are no expectations, there is just the fact of it and that is enough for now.