Mountain Gods

We watch him again, alone in his room, the stifling heat from a closed window makes my ears sweat. It is like watching a tower of isolation collapsing from within. He argues with himself, seeing his own shadows wandering over the white walls. Which one is real? The flakes? The fakes? The snowflakes. The shadows don’t respond, but he screams as always into the whiteness, into a flurry of pure ice.

Those mountain gods sure can be nasty kings! Down with them !!! Just a bunch of fakes anyway ... A bunch of flakes anyway, snowflakes, swirling round the peaks.

Once they were rivers winding through low valleys, then they were vapors like ghosts rising from lakes taking the forms of clouds, then once more shifting into a solid form, delicate and complex, many individuals drifting anonymously together, as alone as only snowflakes can be. Silent voyagers, taking many shapes, undergoing various transformations before at last becoming king and crown of the lofty peaks.

Down. Down you drift to take your place again at the primal beginning, always a subject of the thaw. Always returning to the river, but never the same river.

He imagines he can hear the pale one, the dark one, the one without eyes. The ones with twenty arms. They all say something different. The shadows lash out, sending persimmons to the ground, pomegranates burst open and send their ripe seeds across the sky, creating other worlds with red, glowing stars.

It's hard to bring down a mountain. Falling down, coming down. Hard to fall off a mountain, hard to bring it down, down, down. There is a timeless energy and spirit that lives in the trees, that holds the rocks like glue. Beings that suck from the pollen of pines.

The mountain can drive mortals away with wind and cold, it’s height that peaks only before the clouds. Life comes out of its wet top, the sprout covered in a forest of trees, they come from the soil, they go and remain timeless.

Shiva had his consort mounted on rocks and ragged cliff sides. Shiva had his consort buried deep in pine cones and floating like snowflakes on drifting clouds. Wise mountain gods know how to come down on their own.

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. The whole of the law. The whole of the law. The hole in the thaw. The thaw, dripping breaking, dissolving from solid to liquid, from rigid to free and flowing. The will like DNA, a silent pilot guiding it’s ship, up, up, up into the mountain, down, down, down into the valley below.