Mountain Top

A supple breeze caressed my face and I finally awoke.

For how long I’d been asleep I did not know and my sense of place was confused.

At first I had no memory of my surrounds, none that I could draw from in my minds eye.

I was acutely aware that I knew not how I got where I was or how even.

But slowly as it always does, thoughts of landmarks, jumbled and distant, poured into my mind and with time I began to recognise and place them where they now stood.

It was difficult but soon I was overcome with nostalgic thoughts of times long past, and also, who I was.

I am a mountain.

Solid and often impassable, a mountain, standing tall through time.

Though the world, as I discovered it, was different from one the I left behind - again.

It didn’t matter, as what lay before me was more than I could possible envisage - another of mother nature’s grand culminations.

At first I couldn’t fathom it, the vast natural beauty that unfurled beneath my very feet.

The tropics I noted.

The wet heat was a give away but the dense leafy fleece draping my side was all the more convincing.

And the cerulean ocean sheet that lapped and twisted below, a bounty of fish and sea creature and reef.

A welcome change.

I was glad to see it and yet I was disheartened.

Too easy I fall asleep, and to my detriment.

For too long I had shied away, dormant, afraid on what next I might discover.

But every time I finally wake, by chance, I learn that the wait was worth it.

Maybe once or twice throughout my life I’d seen such an expanse of lush wild green.

But not like this.

The vine griped trees below me danced in the high winds brushing their foliage in a manner of the serpentine.

And sung so sweetly to the cacophonous tune of the many critters and birds that lived there.

As a mountain its endearing and a pleasure insurmountable to be adorned with such marks of life.

Beauty of this magnitude takes time, so much time, and, at times, so easily undone.

A lordly eagle appeared with a few twigs for the makings of a new nest.

It perched itself and propped them between a knot of black ropey scars, up high upon of my face.

A braid of pointed rock twisted in a path down toward the edge of the forest.

Recognition sparked within me from remembrance of darkened stone.

Then my innards churned and a great pressure built within me.

It occurred to me in that moment the reason why I sleep and the reason why I wake.

For that many long years my innards had been brewing, for I am no mountain, I am molten.

I was imminent, I could feel it, and could only weep.

For although that world was lost, its beauty will be measured in time and rebirth.