Aug 11, 2023

I am the Mountain

Mountains are not the most remarkable things we conquer, but ourselves.

Today is a Mountain Day, or Yama no Hi (山の日), in Japan. It's the country's newest public holiday enacted in 2016 to provide the Japanese people to get familiar with, and appreciate blessings from the country's mountains (which total number is somewhere between 16,667 and 18,032!)

And today also marks the first anniversary of launching this website, it was today last year that I took the plunge; set up a website, and began posting my first article. It took me years, many books and other sources I read, and many notebooks to journal my thoughts before I came to face my fear, and have enough courage to show up and be seen.

This is synchronicity.

Mountains hold a very special place in my heart. There's something majestic about them that inspires and gives me remarkable strength every time I visit, or pass by for just a glimpse of them.

Mountains symbolize a concept so deep, meaningful, and very personal that words cannot describe the awe I feel about them. To be in the mountain is like I enter into a realm that is so profoundly sacred, it inspires me to contemplate life and its wisdom. To see an image of them evokes a sense of harmonious balance between the earth and the vast open sky and reminds me of the interconnectedness of all existence– everything in the universe is intricately woven together.

How the mountain form is a fascinating process. And this may be the reason for my deepest love for them as they remind me very much of how I formed to be myself– the person I am so proud of today.

Through geological processes that involve the movement of tectonic plates and the forces of uplift, folding, subducting, and erosion; the mountain is formed. Imagine these outer shells of the earth like giant jigsaw puzzle pieces that fit together, then some of these plates push against each other, they create mountains.

So, mountains are like nature's building blocks, shaped by the Earth's powerful forces and weather over millions of years. Applying force over time, we get work.

I believe that the ultimate goal of us human beings is to grow, to actualize our highest potential, the peak of the summit of our human-ness. Like the mountain, formation is a complex and ongoing process that occurs over geological timescales, and so is our self-actualizing process. Through forces of life; ups and downs, eroding, and colliding; both conscious and unconscious we form our mountains– our Selves.

It will take time, for my mountain to ascent towards the higher consciousness, transcendence, and enlightenment– but there's nothing in life that we can't achieve if the heart and the soul are all in it.

Last year, my fear and my courage collided with an immense pressure called faith. They buckled and they folded, leading to the formation of the work I'm proud of; this work you're reading now, and the higher Self of me.

Sir Edmund Hillary, the first mountaineer (him and his Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay) to reach the summit of Mt. Everest in 1953) famously said;