Posted yesterday at 10:00 a.m.
This summer, far from our confined lives, the pleasure of reconciling with our holiday traditions is undeniable. It’s good to find our habits, when, year after year, we returned to a place that we had made ours. For me, it’s the mountain. As far back as I can remember, it was with great loyalty that my family left Montreal on construction holidays to gain a little altitude.
As a young adult, I shunned this custom, too busy asserting my independence, traveling, seeing the country. I reconnected with this tradition when my own family was born. The desire to introduce this love of the mountains to my children had surpassed the attraction of novelty. I had this need for sharing, the desire to ensure that they experience them, these mountains, as I had experienced them.
There are places that satisfy us just to know that they exist. The way they preserve the memory of ourselves, a little piece of our history. Places where there is nothing else to do but exist. And which nourish us by the simple fact of being there.
Maybe that’s what the mountain inspires me. She is. It embodies. It forces me to contemplate.
For many, the mountain is active. It is synonymous with hiking, effort, summits, surpassing oneself. For me, the mountain is above all contemplative. When I find myself in front of her, I no longer need to aspire to anything. I no longer have to act or accomplish. She reminds me of the naivety of our existence.
It brings me back to a simple and profound well-being. The complexity of life disappears, humility imposes itself and the mountain leads me naturally to introspection.
His impassivity clashes with our inner turmoil, while in our lives, everything is moving, everything is scrolling at high speed. Here, in the mountains, there is respite. The world stops, it becomes motionless. And yet, the mountains can offer, to those who look up, such a diversity of changing landscapes… In an instant, the light can be disrupted by a cloud, by the reflections of the sun, by lengthening shadows.
I love above all when the day rises quietly behind the peaks, then still plunged into shadow. Those mornings that I always feel are unique and that sky turning blue as the sun comes out.
I also like when the clouds form in the bottom of the valley and give us the impression of being above a world. I love those stormy evenings when you feel all that strength, those bad weather that just pass.
I like the end of the day just as much when the fading light colors the landscape. From white, to blue, to pink; all these nuances which often announce the good weather of the next day… I like the night when the stars allow us to guess these sleeping motionless masses.
To admire the mountain is to belong to the world above for a short moment, as if we were disconnected from the world of mortals, as if we had access, for a moment, to a little piece of paradise. Because that’s what the mountain is for me, a little piece of paradise…
And yet, there is nothing more earthly than the mountain. Meadows, large larches, small streams. Higher up, these large expanses without trees, these large rocky slopes, these heaps of stones, small winding paths… A disarming simplicity, but which draws a timeless immensity.
The mountain brings me back to the raw state of things. Fullness. The presence. Strength. The mountain fills me. As much as I am in love with urbanity, the mountains give me inner calm. While the mountain could be perceived as a barrier, an obstacle, for me it is an opening, a space of freedom.
I don’t know if, when I was young, the mountains spoke to me so much. Did I feel the benefits without understanding the depth? Trying to describe this feeling of euphoria and grandeur that these landscapes give me makes me realize how much the mountain nourishes me.
And I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it calms me down. It gives me the impression of watching over me and, in these troubled times that have us navigating between pandemic, war, inflation, polarization and climate crisis, the mountain brings me back to basics.
In a few days, we will all return to our hectic lives: work, back to school, meetings, extracurricular activities, business evenings. This intense rhythm, this incessant whirlwind. I love this frenzy, I confess. But I promise myself to keep in me a little of this silence, this immobility, this peace of mind that lived in me for a few weeks this summer.
I promise myself not to forget the wisdom of the mountain.