Blessing of the Mountains

"The true blessing of the mountains is not that they provide a challenge or a contest, something to be overcome and dominated (although this is how many people have approached them). It is that they offer something gentler and infinitely more powerful: they make us ready to credit marvels - whether it is the dark swirl which water makes beneath a plate of ice, or the feel of the soft pelts of moss which form on the lee sides of boulders and trees. Being in the mountains reignites our astonishment at the simplest transactions of the physical world: a snowflake a millionth of an ounce in weight falling on to one's outstretched palm, water patiently carving a runnel in a face of granite, the apparently motiveless shift of a stone in a scree-filled gully. To put a hand down and feel the ridges and score in a rock where a glaciers has passed, to hear how a hillside comes alive with moving water after a rain shower, to see late summer light filling miles of landscape like an inexhaustible liquid - none of these is a trivial experience. Mountains returns to us priceless capacity for wonder which can so insensibly be leached away by modern existence, and they urge us to apply that wonder to our own everyday lives."

- Robert Macfarlane (1976 - )

Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination

Relationship to Existence

"If a man begins to take life as work, then his whole relationship to existence begins to change, because the meaning of life changes for him. He sees life in another light, not as an end but as a means, and this enables him….to take what happens in life so that he learns from life and all that happens in life and in this way life becomes his teacher."

- Maurice Nicholl (1884 - 1953)

Field of the Finite, Quality of the Infinite

“The field of the finite is all that we can see, hear, touch, remember and describe. This field is basically that which is manifest, or tangible. The essential quality of the infinite, by contrast, is its subtlety, its intangibility. This quality is conveyed in the word spirit, whose root meaning is “wind or breath.” This suggests an invisible but pervasive energy to which the manifest world of the finite responds. This energy, or spirit, infuses all living beings, and without it any organism must fall apart into its constituent elements. That which is truly alive in the living being is the energy of spirit, and this is never born and never dies.”

- David Bohm (1917 - 1992)

Sense of Unity

"I think nothing can be compared to the Hills for the elevation of spirit, and peace of mind...All aspects of nature lead to elevation and knowledge when you once have an idea. The commonplace growth of weeds beneath a pile of refuse appear to shine with the divine light when you know the meaning of the world and sense of unity of all things. In a great city the buildings, the machinery, the works of art, everything produced by man, are naught but the material expression of ideas. We look on lines and forms and masses of what we call matter, and we know these things existed in the mind of man in the form of ideas before they were expressed in the physical world in the form of matter. I look on the lines and forms of the mountains and all other aspects of nature as if they were but the vast expression of ideas within the Cosmic Mind, if such it can be called. Without that outlook, I am assured there is nothing in the Universe that is not the expression of mind or of life. The sense of unity is enormously increased."

- Ansel Adams (1902 - 1984)

Letter to Virginia Best, Sep 22, 1925
Ansel Adams: Letters, 1916 - 1984

Hardly Noticeable

"If you will stay close to nature,

to its simplicity,

to the small things hardly noticeable,

those things can unexpectedly

become great and immeasurable."

- Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)
Letters to a Young Poet

Perpetual Stream of Energy

"Living forms are not in being,

they are happening,

they are the expression of

a perpetual stream of

matter and energy which

passes through the organism

and at the same time

constitutes it."

- Ludwig Von Bertalanffy (1901 - 1972)

A Mysterious Cocoon

"The isolation spins its mysterious cocoon, focusing the mind on one place, one time, one rhythm - the turning of the light. The island knows no other human voices, no other footprints. On the offshore lights you can live any story you want to tell yourself, and no one will say you're wrong: not the seagulls, not the prisms, not the wind."

- M. L. Stedman
The Light Between Oceans

Speaking of Greater Forces

"Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction - so easy to lapse into - that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us."

-  Robert Macfarlane (1976 - )

Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit

Breathed on by Light

"It was the hour in which objects lose the consistency of shadow that accompanies them during the night and gradually reacquire colors, but seem to cross meanwhile an uncertain limbo, faintly touched, just breathed on by light; the hour in which one is least certain of the world's existence."

- Italo Calvino (1923 - 1985)

The Nonexistent Knight & The Cloven Viscount

Mountains Simply Exist

"The secret of the mountain is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no "meaning," they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day."

- Peter Matthiessen (1927 - 2014)

The Snow Leopard

Essential Unity of the World

"We try to realize the

essential unity of the world

with the conscious soul of man;

we learn to perceive

the unity held together

by the one Eternal Spirit,

whose power creates the earth,

the sky, and the stars,

and at the same time

irradiates our mind."

- Rabindranath Tagore (1861 - 1941)

Interior of the Soul

"There is one spectacle grander than the sea,

that is the sky;

there is one spectacle

grander than the sky,

that is the interior of the soul"

- Victor Hugo (1802 - 1885)

Skye: Secret Eyes

"In a few moments he came into the core of himself, where he was alone, and felt strangely companioned, not by anyone or anything, but by himself. The rejected self found refuge here, not a cowed refuge, but somehow a wandering ease; as if it were indestructible, and had its own final pride, its own secret eyes.

That's the way it went...the way. No one could see the end of the way, but of the way itself, in insight, in understanding, there could be no doubt. For man could experience that, and know its relief, and know its strange extended gladness. That was the beginning... if the lure of transcendence, of timeless or immortal implication, came around, pay no great attention, but move from one step to the next, and look at this face and stay with that... and let what would happen in the place where happenings and boundaries were."

- Neil M Gunn (1891-1973)

Postscript: Although I rarely include people in my photographs (I can echo Ansel Adams' retort to the criticism that he never took pictures of people: "Well, that's not my style!"), I have a fondness for capturing my wife in Friedrich-like poses whenever we travel. In this instance, while I was bent over my tripod looking for something interesting to shoot at my feet on a beach somewhere on Skye, I noticed how my wife's small solitary figure dwarfed - yet mysteriously, somehow also perfectly balanced - the spectacularly expansive and desolate, landscape we were immersed in. Micro and macro, momentarily fused into a state of perfect boundary-less clarity.

Skye: Grandeur of Quiraing

"When I consider the multitude of associated forces which are diffused through nature — when I think of that calm balancing of their energies which enables those most powerful in themselves, most destructive to the world's creatures and economy, to dwell associated together and be made subservient to the wants of creation, I rise from the contemplation more than ever impressed with the wisdom, the beneficence, and grandeur, beyond our language to express, of the Great Disposer of us all."

- Michael Faraday
(1791 - 1867)

Postscript: this shot was taken not too far from the parking area for The Quiraing on the Isle-of-Skye's Trotternish peninsula’s east coast. It is a spectacularly vibrant symphony of majestic - and labyrinthian - cliffs and grassy valleys. It is also arguably the largest landslide on earth.

Scotland, Skye, and Schueler

"I wasn't sure if it was a place or a mood or what it was, but there was something I was looking for .... As I approached the sea near Mallaig and the Sound of Sleat I could see these massive forms like the Isle of Eigg and the southern tip of Skye and Rhum, and I could see these things sort of glowering in this kind of wild light that took place that day and the Geiger counter just went berserk. I'll never forget the excitement."

- Jon Schueler (1916 - 1992)

The Sound of Sleat: A Painter's Life

Those were words written down by abstract artist Jon Schueler after arriving in the remote fishing village of Mallaig in western Scotland in 1957, overlooking the Sound of Sleat and toward the isle of Skye. Except for the time and specific place (in my case, in 2009 during my wife's and my first trip to Kyleakin, Skye, and, more recently, last month, as our whole family arrived in tow to Trumpan, Skye - the northern part of Skye's "second finger" - including our two teenage boys), I could use Schueler's words to describe my own reaction to the preternatural splendor of Skye's landscapes and skies. It is a wondrous place that somehow exists both inside and outside of time; where shapes, textures, and colors appear, and disappear, fleetingly and constantly, that one swears have never before appeared anywhere else on earth; where so much Wagnerian-scale drama unfolds in its undulating land, sea, and cloudscapes during even that ephemeral instant between involuntary blinks of an eye, that one's aesthetic senses are delighted and overwhelmed. Oh, but what a magnificent symphony!

Over the next few weeks, I will be posting images as I "develop" them, and that I somehow (inexplicably) managed to capture in between slack-jawed exclamations of "Ooh!" and "Ahhh" and the occasional, "Just extraordinary!"; as Skye sporadically allowed hints of its ineffable mystery and beauty to enter my camera's lens and viewfinder.

Again, I cannot improve upon Shueler's own words:

"When I speak of nature, I speak of the sky, because the sky has become all of nature to me. And when I think of the sky, I think of the Scottish sky over Mallaig. It isn't that I think of it that nationally, really, but that I studied the Mallaig sky so intently, and I found its convulsive movement and change and drama such a concentration of activity that it became all skies and even the idea of all nature to me. It's as if one could see from day to day the drama of all skies and of all nature in all times speeded up and compressed. I knew that the whole thing was there. Time was there and motion was there - lands forming, seas disappearing, worlds fragmenting, colors emerging or giving birth to burning shapes, mountain snows showing emerald green; or paused solid still when gales stopped suddenly and the skies were clear again after long days of howling sound and rain or snow beating horizontal from the sky."

Perhaps Skye's deepest mystery, is how - despite the incessant drama of all of its basic forms, and unending froth of light and shadow - there is a deep, deep, spiritually infused fantastical quiet that envelops the senses (when the moment is right and Skye has chosen to briefly reveal that side of herself).

Geological Time

"The formation in geological time of the human body by the laws of physics (or any other laws of similar nature), starting from a random distribution of elementary particles and the field is as unlikely as the separation of the atmosphere into its components. The complexity of the living things has to be present within the material [from which they are derived] or in the laws [governing their formation]."

- Kurt Godel (1906 - 1978)

Profound Repose

“I have visited, a great many years ago, the Sandwich Islands-that peaceful land, that beautiful land, that far-off home of profound repose, and soft indolence, and dreamy solitude, where life is one long slumbrous Sabbath, the climate one long delicious summer day, and the good that die experience no change, for they but fall asleep in one heaven and wake up in another."

- Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

Letters from Hawaii

Hanalei Bay

"Fall after fall of shining water hastens down green, abrupt slopes and across brief shore lands to the sea held within the broad curving arms of Hanalei bay. To the south of this green valley of Waioli stand its three peaks. Namolokama at the center, flanked on the west by Mamalahoa, on the east by Hihimanu. eastward still further, wandering in the wide bends of the sea, lies the more open valley of Hanalei, largest river of all the islands and drawing its source direct from Waialeale's summit lake."

- Ethel Damon (1883–1965)

Koamalu: A Story of Pioneers on Kauai and

of What They Built in That Island Garden, 1931

Kauaian Verdure

"Here nature has wrought with bold hands and on a large scale, gouging profound valleys out of massive mountains, scoring them deep with gorges and buttressing them thick with ridges, and then throwing them over them a veil of tropic verdure that half reveals and half conceals and wonderfully softens, the bold hard features of the geologic. Nature has contributed the magnificent semi-circular bay with its fine beach and swimming, a succession of splendid cliffs and broad fertile valley, bounded by mountain walls down whose sides leap numberless thread-like waterfalls which now and again lose themselves in the foliage."

- J. M. Lydgate (1854 - 1922)

The Wreck of the Saginaw: Notes of Halford Interview

Memories ... regarding the wreck of the ship

“Saginaw” off the coast of Hanalei (Kauai, Hawaii)

Matter is Spirit

"Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen."

- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

(1881 - 1955)