I shall lift up my eyes to the hills, says psalmist. Amen, say I. I always have and hope I always will.

From the front yard of my family's home in Oregon, we gazed westward to the Cascade Range, to seven mountain peaks that were snow-capped all year round: Mount Bachelor, standing slightly apart from the Three Sisters; Mounts Washington and Jefferson; jagged old Three-Fingered Jack; with beautiful Mount Hood majestic to the north.

I moved far away to attend college, to a different range of mountains: the Appalachians of East Tennessee. Years later, driving from New Jersey back through southwestern Virginia, I felt my spirits lifting for no apparent reason. Then I realized: I was back in the mountains!

David Whyte has a poem about a Welsh hill farm that "four hundred years at least [has] clung tenacious to the weathered slope." In it, Whyte says,  

... The farm

passed down but never possessed lives father to son,

life after life, feeding the sheep with grass,

the people with sheep and memory with years

lived looking at mountains.*

Mountains, whether they be the Ozarks or the Alps, are for me places of wonder and exhilaration. Whenever life goes flat, I need only look to the mountains for my spirit to be lifted along with my eyes.

And if mountains are in short supply (as they are here in South Texas)? No worries. As Whyte says, I have memories fed with years lived looking at mountains, reminders of the grandeur and mystery of life.

- by Bill

*"Tan-Y-Garth," in River Flow, 2007, 314-315.