Geological Erotics

(Ansel Adams)

“Think like a mountain,” instructs the famous ecologist and philosopher Aldo Leopold in his book The Sand County Almanac. The essay documents Leopold’s realization that human scale can never truly apprehend or predict the complex, intertangled animacy of an ecosystem. When we kill off one animal or invasive species, we set off a cascade of unintended consequences. As Leopold notes, “Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf”. Only the assemblage of beings – the stones and streams and insects and fluidity of weather – can properly assess what attunements and shifts are necessary. Leopold’s exercise in holistic consciousness became a building block in modern ecological preservation and restoration. We must always admit that our human desires are insufficient in understanding complex systems. Still, it is important to try to imagine at larger scales, and to constantly be formulating ecology as an interrogative practice. What does the ecosystem want? What are the tides of weeds and pests and migrating animals telling us?

I grew up in the shadow of mountains. I slept in ancient rock shelters, lichen-licked, water filtered through mineralized time anointing my brow, blowing on embers in ashen bluestone bowls where the Lenape, hundreds of years prior, kept their own fires safe from the rain. I read weather in relationship to mountains. Thunderstorms purple as wood violets split at the summit like water forking around a stone in whitewater. Rain was sweeter, scattered, increasingly swept horizontal, the higher you climbed. Sometimes, I thought, my body only existed in resistance and relationship to the gradient up the flanks of Guardian Mountain. Suddenly, sweat budding along my spine, I could feel myself inhabiting my skin, straining to understand the texture and scent of a being so big I had to enter her to understand her. Often, by the time I reached the lookout, I had done that thing that fellow mountain lover Nan Shepherd describes in her eco-memoir The Living Mountain, “Walking thus, hour after hour, the senses keyed, one walks the flesh transparent. But no metaphor, transparent, or light as air, is adequate. The body is not made negligible, but paramount. Flesh is not annihilated but fulfilled. One is not bodiless, but essential body.” My breath, my sweat, my sighs and exclamations, my sight, refracted photons from my irises, had all poured out of me into the birches, the firs, the glacial erratics impervious to my flesh, but tenderly supporting me, shaping me nonetheless.

(Nan Shepherd and her mountains)

“Mountains’ walking is just like human walking,” the 13th century Zen master Dōgen instructs in his enigmatic Mountains and Waters Sutra. When, barely fifteen, I first encountered this Zen sermon, I recognized a logic large enough for mountains, and wholly incomprehensible to human beings. “Because green mountains walk, they are permanent,” writes Dōgen. “Green mountains are neither sentient nor insentient. You are neither sentient nor insentient.” Mind is of very little consequence in the sutra. Being, feeling, and interrelationship are given spiritual primacy. The syllogisms abound, until the reader is fully disoriented. And then, they are obliterated by simplicity: “Mountains belong to the people who love them.”

Many years later, reading Nan Shepherd, I once again found words that fit my experience of mountains more so than Leopold’s philosophical imperative. Shepherd muses, “So, simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence…” This is, as she describes it, to“discover most nearly what it is to be. I have walked out of the body and into the mountain.”

Hiking the mountain, I think of the term “orogeny” which means the process, or birth, by which mountains are formed. The earth’s crust folds and constricts, grinds and buckles up to form the humps we worship with the soles our feet, the symbol of perspective, the only vantage point where landscape as an idea becomes visual, the slant and matter that summons the kinetic flutter of our bodies. Or, like the mountains I live beside, they are born through death, through subtraction. They are stone melted, triturated down, sculpted by glaciers. When is a mountain done being born? When it dies? When does a mountain die? Every storm blows sediment away from its shape, flakes away its cliffs and deepens its gullies. Because green mountains walk, they are permanent, Dōgen explains. Because they change, they are strung like a string between birth and death, constantly sending an animate wave between the two poles that are neither destination nor origin. The music of the mountain is sedimented, time solidified, but still walking. Changefully permanent. It walks through your feet. Feet that slowly, hike by hike, palm pressed into a limestone slab again and again, begin to give birth, or death, to the mountain. The mountain walks me back into my body, and as I walk and change the shape of the mountain, I walk into its birth process, and its death process.

Thinking the mountain still feels tied to a Cartesian dualism that does not live in my body. I love the mountain too much to think like it. I want to feel like it. What does it feel like to be ice’s sculpture, to be crowned by a thousand rattlesnake bodies? What does it feel like to unslip stone from stone, rising into the sky only to recede and erode under the cloud’s constant tongue lick of moisture and monsoon and snow? Is it delicious to feel the roots of aspens and birches and pines and rhododendrons and mountain laurel questioning your shale skin? Do you desire with your swarming fungi and bacteria? Do you ride the plurality of their appetites for dead wood and leaves, enjoying your vastness, occasionally condensed into the pinprick intensity of a mycorrhizal hyphae?

(The Catskill Mountains)

Dawn, stratums of strawberry and iris-blue, I sit on Overlook Mountain and find I have walked the body translucent. I can’t remember where my skin ends and the mountain begins. Looking out at the wall of Manitou, the blue valley, summer vibrating inside a snakeskin sheath of green leaves, I realize that I can really feel it. Every mote of dust. My desire doesn’t need another person. It doesn’t even need me. It wants to be poured into the world. It wants to feel itself as a wave of matter, a crescendo of stone, poised, summiting, ecstatically and erotically strung between life and death.

Further Reading:

Moon in a Dewdrop: The Writings of Zen Master Dōgen,

The Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold,

and The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd

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