Reflection on mountains and the environment: inspired by this week’s guest speaker.

A mountain keeps an echo deep inside itself. That’s how I hold your voice. — Rumi

We do not need to plan or devise a “world of the future”; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid “futurology” available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive and dabble at “the future of the human race”; we have the same pressing need that we have always had – to love, care for, and teach our children. — Wendell Berry

Songa about mountains:

Questions to consider:

  • What is your favorite mountain to climb? Why?
  • With whom do you prefer to hike and climb? What do you offer to your companions and what do they offer to you?
  • Are mountains holy to you? Where else in the land do you find holy places?
  • Or do you think holiness resides within you? Do you carry holiness within you to the places that you experience as sacred?

On Mountains

Climb the mountain not to plant your flag, but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air and behold the view. Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you. ― David McCullough Jr.

If adventure has a final and all-embracing motive, it is surely this: we go out because it is our nature to go out, to climb mountains, and to paddle rivers, to fly to the planets and plunge into the depths of the oceans… When man ceases to do these things, he is no longer man. – Wilfrid Noyce

If you are faced with a mountain, you have several options. You can climb it and cross to the other side. You can go around it. You can dig under it. You can fly over it. You can blow it up. You can ignore it and pretend it’s not there. You can turn around and go back the way you came. Or you can stay on the mountain and make it your home.— Vera Nazarian

You are not in the mountains. The mountains are in you.  — John Muir

Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more that what we could learn from books. – John Lubbock

You’re off to Great Places! Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting, so… get on your way! — Dr. Seuss

You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen.– Rene Daumal

I want that love that moved the mountains.
I want that love that split the ocean.
I want that love that made the winds tremble.
I want that love that roared like thunder.
I want that love that will raise the dead.
I want that love that lifts us to ecstasy.
I want that love that is the silence of eternity.
— Rumi

Reflection on mountains and the environment: inspired by this week’s guest speaker.
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