For months now, I dream of mountains. I see their majesty and quiet charm when I close my eyes day or night. Their magnificence is burned into my mind… shadow images standing firm and powerful. I image someday something else will haunt the inner contours of my retina. But I draw from these images, with eyes closed I relax into shape and form, light and dark, it is as though I am there standing as one of them. A long forgotten memory of a long forgotten life. I dream I am a mountain.

As a mountain I have long learned patience, the providence of standing still and watching. Mountains make trees look impatient and petulant tossing this way and that, catching a high on the breeze. Anything to be set free. I am resolute, ominous, and timeless. I fear nothing, the rain can turn it’s nastiest on me crashing itself again and again along my spine and I find relief in it’s chiropractic ministrations. A pop and a crack and I breathe a deep sigh from a long closed off chamber in my interior. Now a new cavern exists within me, a space I had forgotten and closed off washed clean with the rain, now shimmers with the preciousness of king tuts tomb, sealed off with treasures untold.

Fires sweep the plains and up my back they crawl tenacious and hot clamoring for air, breathe, life…manna. I watch the world seek for life, this manna. I watch fire’s desires consume it’s very life blood. All along my peaks and valleys a long death has been brewing. Seeding itself in the pines, burrowing deep into them and eating them alive till the green growth is orange. A resonant color, aligned with what must come, that which is old and dead must be burned away, and cleared for new growth to come. I have watched for millennia this dance, life is not holding a fist tight with all fingers grasping one way but an open hand that has many ways and much space to allow. So orange pines call the fire unto them, to be set free from the deathly casings they have found themselves sick inside of and dying without the dignity of true release.

So I watch as the dry season languishes across my lands, she is not cruel but withholding. Dry and airy, she is ethereal. She comes to set the world free. In all my many years, I have never seen this….man acting as a force against nature. Cast upon the earth judging her immense dimensions with the simplicity of the knowledge of good and evil. Man fights tooth and nail for a corner of her majesty, a freckle of her wild abandon and thinks he now has dominion over her… how impervious is man to truth? One cannot own the earth, I will long out live man and I am but a mountain in a sea of mountains, in a chain of earth movements. A finger, if you will, or a freckle myself.

I beckon, and rejoice for the fires that bloom either from her sultry withholding or her passionate lightening. Blazing either way with the stave of truth… the old must be freed, so the new may come. I watch as the fires start, I see them in the distance as smoke billows and I hear a choir of relief resounding the valleys over. I will be lonely without my community though they were ready to go… man prolonged their pain for a freckles worth of pine pilings, they called home. Home. Home. Home.

I am barren and naked now. A blackened canvas. Charcoal cascades down my crest, leaving the framework and designs for future growth. It is quiet again, and in this silence the foundry of possibility is burning like the remanent coals of the desolate pines that found their freedom and now await their repurposing. Soon to be cast as new life from this black canvas. Deep in my depths, I feel a churning…change is coming… even a mountain must fall to her glory.