Holy country

Himalayas, 2021

Walking barefoot in The Himalayas invokes a sense of connection to the earth. Walking barefoot anywhere in fact feels like connecting to nature in a deeper state. I have never experienced snow, which might be drawing me next. Witnessing nature and experiencing it might often look the same. Each time I could no longer continue hiking or grasped for a breath, I remembered Kerouac’s words “Try the meditation of the trail, just walk along looking at the trail at your feet and don’t look about and just fall into a trance as the ground zips by. Trails are like that: you’re floating along in a Shakespearean Arden paradise and expect to see nymphs and fluteboys, then suddenly you’re struggling in a hot broiling sun of hell in dust and nettles and poison oak… just like life.”

That’s the idea, what we are going for I guess, wandering around in nature. Trying to find our place in it again, or not. Maybe just experiencing a union with it’s motherly warmth. Being created all over again, just by a sight.

Mountain as a mother, mountain as God, mountain as a spiritual awakening, mountain as an inseparable lover, all entails this holy country. Only two possible things can happen when you look at a mountain peak, either the spirit of the mountain passes in and through you as you see that light enveloping the peak or the spirit stays in you and lives on.

Drawing you back to it again and again. Or maybe it’s just an idea presented poetically, when in truth we are just wandering nomads finding a home everywhere or trying to belong somehow. If not fit in.