01012021

Ice on the mountain...

I hiked in the rain. Just below freezing. Near the mountain's summit the windward limbs were slicked with ice, which broke off and scattered in the breeze almost as quickly as it could form, littering the understory with glassy fragments.

Up on the bald, where the bedrock tears out from the mountain like a toddler cutting a tooth, the moss and lichen hug the stone in a strange proliferation of forms: starry, fuzzy, branching, globular, fractal. It reminded me of a coral reef. Why such diversity?

"Because no one is in charge here," nature says. "Just the wind and the stone and the ice. Certainly no god of men would heap such love upon the waste."

But it is love all the same, I think. Just not from above, but deep deep below.