Embracing Impermanence
Many of the recent pandemic images are disturbing. Some are soul destroying. Health care workers verbally abused outside hospitals; dozens of caskets in deep pits, half covered by earth with bulldozer efficiency; trucks spewing disinfectant across wide roads, folks ignoring the advice of health professionals. I make a mental imprint of these computer screen images then cast my eye upward to a nearby framed photograph hanging on the wall. These screen images appear violently incongruent with the hanging picture. But I can also see they share a theme.
The picture is of an ice serpent taken during the approach hike of a mountaineering trip. I’d deliberately strayed off the designated hiking trail to follow the lake shoreline. A wall of scrub alpine willow offered seclusion. At some point, the drifting creature caught my unbelieving eye. A breeze coaxed it nearer to shore. I spilled the contents of my backpack onto hummocks of reed and fescue, assembled my camera gear, and waded in, boots on.
I worked the camera for fifteen minutes. My legs progressively lost feeling in the cold and became unresponsive, so that I was forced to wobble back to shore. The ice serpent twisted, revealing new features that beckoned me back into the water. Uncontrolled shivering signalled the need to recirculate my non-reptilian blood. This was done by thrashing through the willows back to the trail. After marching 400 meters, the shivering subsided but I was unable to suppress the urge to return. I needed to see the serpent again and document its evolution. With my boots alternately sucking in air then squelching it out, I returned to the scene.
But there I saw nothing. No evidence of the ice serpent remained. No recoiled body, no neck, no horned nose, no maw. Just the vastness of silent undulating glacial melt against a stygian background.
Today the ice serpent exists as a one dimensional relic on my wall, powerfully communicating the notion of impermanence.
I try to convince myself that many of the unsavoury pandemic images caught on my computer screen, particularly ones projecting intolerance, ignorance and selfishness, also reflect impermanence.
The hope and belief of that kind of impermanence moves me forward, shaking but deliberate, back to the chosen trail of current life.
Do you have a moment of mountain impermanence that stuck with you?
Please share your stories in the comments section below. — ACC