This week, we bring you five inspiring quotes on mountains, as we think of Ladakh as a place that keeps calling travellers back without ever ceasing to amaze them.
Then how can you not advance and reach out to them as they lurk into your vision something like disturbance rising from the flat ground? How can you not lift your head up in awe and reverie as they rise and rise with every step you take towards them? How can you not, in your panting, smile at these mountains that make you struggle physically but end up undoing something deep inside you without as much as stirring?
1. “He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Existential queries or not, self-introspection or not, the mountains are the place for you to meditate with your eyes wide open. On the mountains, it is easier to abandon oneself in the act of smiling and laughing at how details of life reprioritize. It’s not that you go to the mountains to flee from something; you climb a mountain to find something.
2. “No matter how sophisticated you may be, a large granite mountain cannot be denied – it speaks in silence to the very core of your being.”
– Ansel Adams
As high as a mountain soars, so deep a silence runs within you. And this need not be for discerning, not even for conscious thinking. Let your mind float as free and as light as the clouds. Let it write new definitions for sophistication and the grandness of life in silence. Gasping and panting and bruises and exhaustion to reach the zenith of a mountain are all too sweet, because what follows is a smile of satisfaction that lingers on.
3. “Although I deeply love oceans, deserts and other wild landscapes, it is only mountains that beckon me with that sort of painful magnetic pull to walk deeper and deeper into their beauty. They keep me continuously wanting to know more, feel more, see more.”
– Victoria Erickson
This sort of greed for knowing the world better and more by allowing your senses to dig deep or to rise high matters. The massive vastnesses of things become only greater when you heed to the voice within yourself: a voice that sings a song of the self to be where it has always belonged. And the love for mountains will only propel such a journey further, farther.
4. “You’re off to Great Places!
Today is your day!
Your mountain is waiting,
So…get on your way!”
– Dr. Seuss
A verse for a day,
When the mountains have something to say,
A song that’s only merry and gay,
You might weave a poem too, make sure you write it today!
5. “When the wind calls, you know, that somewhere in the mountains, it has found the answers that you were looking for. The pull of the horizon overcomes the inertia of reason…And you just have to go.”
– Vikram Oberoi
Wind is an immediate element, grazing our skin wherever we go. But it is also an intimate affair when you are on the mountains. The idea of horizon also reforms itself in your mind, when you stare at the oblivion for hours, when indolence, too, becomes charming. This wandering is an answer to a calling that’s beyond all logic, beyond reason.
We shall return with five more quotes and redolent pictures of the alluring landscape of Ladakh next week. Until then, we hope that the mountain songs echo deep within your soul.
Part 2 of this article is here.
If you’re sufficiently inspired already to experience the magic of the mountains, join our Ladakh Photography Tour, here.
