MOUNTAIN VIEW: On beauty

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.
—John Muir

Each season I’m struck, lag-jawed and still, by the beauty of mountains.
I began to say “our” mountains, but realized that even if we live here, maybe have a piece of paper affixing our name onto whole hunks of landscape, these ancient rock formations are not our mountains. We are their people, and just for a minimal blink of time.
Growing up on a hill-slope at the knee of “Yellow Mountain” in Roanoke, I didn’t think it strange that land would be lifted vertical into the sky, held up on display for us to look at, face to face.
I didn’t think about mountains at all, but as I sat on a railroad-tie step, staring quietly into the evening shadows that deepened the moss-green, ancient mountain with folds of blue, the mountain thought its way through me—some kind of call and kinship I could feel tug at my 10-year-old bones with some beckoning mystery and yearning.
Beauty has just this kind of mystical, soulful, divine quality that calls us. No one has quite been able to name it, yet the intoxicating, wild experience of beauty is why we try. Children, who perhaps have the fewest tools of articulation, feel it profoundly in their silence, with no labels to affix on that mystery.
And most adults, if they have not grown cramped and jaded by fear, cynicism, or some other habit of self-preservation, can still recognize and experience beauty, and feel a corresponding stir of awe and aliveness within themselves.  By mid-life, most people have learned better to discern real beauty from its plastic substitutes, and aliveness from deadness.
But even those whose innate sensibilities have been dulled by our culture’s constant training to prefer money above any other value, will be moved, at some deep level, by a sudden stab of wildness and beauty. Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” can evoke it among those who have felt it in the land, and Frederic Delius’s “Appalachia” will pour it through one’s veins like a wild mountain tonic.
We need such tonics today, not just from music and art, but direct experience of the ancient immensity of wild places. We need their restorative powers to counter the depressing, deadening hellscapes humankind seems bent on creating: Row on row of flat, shadeless, identical homes, filling tamed, lawn-mown acres where a wildness and deep mystery once exuded life. Denuded creeks glinting in sun, funneled through sluiceways of rip-rap. Acres of barren, glistening blacktop slathering former fields, around generic big box superstores, empty trash and heat blowing across the broiling griddle of dead land. Floodlights there that obliterate the lovely ancient stars and inspiring constellations from the night sky. The acrid diesel fumes that curdle the sweet smells of rivers and forest and fields.
When I consider these “landscapes,” I wonder if we have gone insane or merely too depressed to care. Perhaps it would be too painful to stay conscious of what we are losing.
But we should at least remain conscious of what beauty still lives around us, before it too is lost from undervaluation. And the main refuge of this beauty, in the Eastern USA, lies in the ancient Appalachian chain, its beauty, diversity, wildness, and spiritual solace.
These mountains still exist, free of housing units and garish lights, lawnmowers and chain-link fences and domestication, for two main reasons. Early development took place in the easier, more accessible valleys and “flatlands.”
And Teddy Roosevelt, about a century ago, bought up vast swatches of this mountain range after timber companies had scraped it raw, into disastrous, muddy walls of flooding erosion. He did so mainly to restore and preserve water quality, meanwhile protecting sanctuaries of beauty, wildness and life.
Today, these Appalachians are living museums of wildlife and woods, many species of which live nowhere else in the world. But as John Muir said, these mountain woods are also living cathedrals, a refuge for what is holy and wild and alive in the human soul.
John O’Donohue, Irish theologian and poet, writes “You can go to places in the limestone mountains where you are above the modern world; you see nothing from the twenty centuries…only the subtle sculpture that rain and wind have indented on the stone. When the light comes out, the stone turns white, and you remember that this is a living stone from the floor of an ancient ocean.”
The mountains O’Donohue writes of exist in Ireland, but they are only separated from our own mountains by that very ocean. Both mountain chains were once part of the same Caledonian range created when Africa bumped—slowly—into the European land mass. More eons of change split Ireland and Wales from the continent we call America today—but the native mountains remained similar in their biota, their geology, their intoxicating tea leaves of humus and dank fragrance, and their evocation to the emigrants who recognized them at a bone-deep level. They were home.
Even today, a climb into our mountains is a return home, to where the human spirit can be healed and inspired. My teenage students—many of whom, remarkably, have never been taken up into their own mountain crags and woods—inevitably experience this “return” to an ancient beauty, outside them and within, upon climbing a nearby mountain. They feel inspired, peaceful, awake and free.
No Friday night on the flood-lit Wal-Mart asphalt, no amount of Web-surfing or TV thrillers can meet the deepest longings of the soul, as can these mountains. Nothing can so restore our own native wildness, or wake up our aliveness as these untamed, rugged, mysterious landscapes.
Perhaps this is the greatest value, then, of the Eastern mountain chain in our time and culture. In a world where sanity itself has become rare, perhaps endangered, along with the ancient beauty that has always fed the human soul, it’s clear that the outer human landscape will reflect the inner. Noticing the mountains around us, we can remember the vastness within ourselves and use it to honor and protect an ancient world that should live on.