It’s the strangest thing, to look back on events years after they’ve happened with new eyes. To see the woman I was from the perspective of this woman I’m becoming. Once the mountain speaks to you nothing can ever be the same, and yet I tried, I really tried so hard to keep everything the same. Until eventually I had to understand that it’s all the same. Do you believe in predetermination? That our outcomes are already set?
Have you seen the film Sliding Doors? I think that’s perhaps one way of explaining that we do have free will, but that the final destination is already determined. As Ted Chiang writes in his brilliant story, What’s Expected of Us, ‘the implications of an immutable future sink in,’ and in this story, ‘some people, realising that their choices don’t matter, refuse to make any choices at all.’
Me? I was the opposite – determined to prove free will is everything, and that I can shape my own life regardless. These days I’m not so sure; I’m a bit wiser, I’ve got more scars, less hubris, more humility.
On thing the mountain said, ‘I am not here to do things your way, I’m here to teach how to do things my way.’ It’s a difficult thing to embrace. I wrote fragments of it down as poetry, tried to forget the bulk. Still these things visit me in dreams so that I can only follow what feels right in my heart, regardless of how this journey might appear to others.
So many teachings from the land and I was still figuring out how to share it, until the realisation hit that Life is Art, so through living and writing I am sharing it in the best way I know how.
Text reads:
awakening
she awoke to find the mountain inside her
no distance between voices
the strength of rock
the knowledge of aeons
as the mountain took over her heart
the closest a woman could come to god perhaps.
She viewed the world with old eyes
and knew the men who walked upon her and knew their hearts
and saw desire
and heard the mountain speak
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