And yet, I’ll tell you my own experience on this matter. I
have to share it with you.
The first times I remember having had contact with what I
than thought were “mountain people” I had the same feeling, which is, that they
are rough necks only willing to drink and get drunk but destroying everything
on their way to it.
But then, taking a moment to myself to admire the view, I
fell in love with the fresh air of the mountains that keeps your nose from
getting stuffed up, I fell in love with the smell of the pine-trees that are
found at higher altitudes, the smell of the broadleaf forest that mingle with a
shallow smell of mushrooms and flowers and sometimes rain. Do you ever feel the
smell of the rain? Or did you take time to observe there is a special smell
when it rains? It’s so thrilling to my heart and body to have the honor of
feeling these things, the joy of the rain falling upon everything, healing it
and refreshing our lives, the plants lives and water sources.
I decided I want to keep going to such places to feel these
blissful things again and again, I wanted to get to know nature. And that is
when I remembered that actually, my first contact with the mountains had
occured when I was a kid, when my parents took me to hike for a few hours in
the pine-tree forests of the Carpathians. These were indeed great times, but
somehow, they got hidden in my memories.
In time, I found out so many other amazing things: the
magical look of the valley under the moonlight. The thousand million stars you
can actually spot from a mountain, the Milky Way, even!
I found out it’s great to wake up in the morning and walk
outside with your bare feet on the wet grass after the morning dew. I found out
that there are animals, big and small, cute and mean that live around you while
you are there. I found out that some of them are curious about us, humans, and
want to get closer to us...and yet, they are afraid because some humans
mistreat them.
I met, while doing all these things, others who like that, I
met people that enjoy to walk the earth and admire its beauty, its wonders,
without ruining them and they actually keep reminding everyone they see to
respect nature and keep it clean, respect animals and don’t torture or kill
them for the fun of it and respect other humans because you are not the first
one to get to a point, and if it looks to you that way, how about allowing
others to feel the same when they get there? Mountain-people are friendly
people, protective people and fair people most of all; not a trace of that
badly raised dirty animal-like persons rumours talk about. Quite the opposite,
I might add.
The thing is, once you get to a forest and start to feel the
sound of it, the look of it, the history and the importance it has in this
world and then when you even get to a mountain top where you can see valleys
around, other far-away mountains and villages and cities, roads and forests,
clouds and stars that reach beyond the grasp of your mind, once you experience
all this, you can’t forget it and you can’t actually picture that you are greater
than that.
And what I would like anyone to feel is the blessing that
will be given to you by this world once you arrive on a high mountain-top and
just sit and admire the surroundings. The colors of the sky and clouds, the
shadows of the clouds falling on the plains, the trees, the birds, the cliffs
and their game of shadows upon valleys and paths, and then, there’s the
silence, that silence that can bring down walls and raise cities, climb
mountains and involve all caves of this world. It makes you know who you are
and it gives you the most magical feelings man has been allowed to feel.
Once you get to experience all this and leave, there will be
a calling in your heart that will become stronger with each morning spent away,
with each sunset in a city, with each dusty shoe you get while walking in a
supermarket, with each coffee you drink in a polluted city and each sickness
you feel from the bad environment we have created. This calling will not cease
to appear, stronger by the day and minute you spend away from nature.
You decide: is it because we’re connected to it or is it
because we’re just curious? Either way, we need it, nature, more than it needs
us. After all... it has done so well for millions of years before we got here,
only to now decay because of us.
We do not know for sure how we appeared on this Earth, we do
not know many things about our past, but there are so many legends and stories
that tell us one same thing, the same as even the Bible tells us: man was created
to take care of nature and its animals. We have been successfully doing the
opposite for the last hundred years. How about taking a break from this? Look
back and take act in changing this horrible present and dark future that awaits
us if we keep doing what we have done for the last couple of hundred years.
Nature calls for us; the mountains call for us; listen
carefully and don’t break this bond that has been there since the beginning of
time.
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