Welcome back to our regular Monday newsletter. As I write this, I am sitting on the porch of a cabin I have rented for the week in Western North Carolina, not far from the Tennessee border. Below me I can hear the river rushing, water brown with mud from this week’s rainfalls. In front of me lies the mountains, dotted with trees and a sea of green. It is midsummer. Up here, I am as tall at the peaks of the mountains; they lie in my direct line of sight. Sometimes the clouds break between them, the stone slicing through. The mountains— especially here, in the Blue Ridge, deep and vast and sprawling— are impenetrable. They hold stories that I can never imagine. They have been here for far longer than I ever will.
In a landscape like this, there are so many peaks. The mountains have them, rising and falling over the horizon, but the trees do too. The tops of the pines, pointed and spindly, each leaf that curves out and meets at the tip. There’s the roofs of the barns, tin and triangular, and the sharp edges of the rocks. I have a peak. My body rises to the top of my head, and hits its own limit. Each thing that grows hits its peak; it could be a season, a harvest, or something more physical. A time of ripening. Sometimes that peak falls to withering and decay; other times, like the mountains, it becomes a limit, a force, a new way of being.
At this point in time, I am in what many people would say are two of life’s peaks. One, it is summer, what is often proclaimed as the greatest, most spontaneous time of the year. Summer allows for longer days, more freedom. When I leave work now, I walk through the woods and to the river, watching the sun set on the edge of the creek. I feel sometimes, doing this, that I am impossibly happy, so much so that it will never be able to be contained and will simply burst out of me, flowing like water into the world. Two, I am young, mid-twenties, and am often told this will be the greatest time of my life. That once this is over, I will never again live this way. Life, they say, will hit. So I might as well enjoy it now.
I think it all comes down to periods of life. I have often heard the same thing said about high school, college. Seasons of experience. For me, I had one summer, a few years ago now, that will shape my experience for the rest of my life, everything a back comparison to it. This idea of enjoyment— this peak— seems to depend on everything else falling below it. The view at the top of the mountain is the best, it seems to imply, and perhaps that is true, but I wish to counter with the idea that sometimes, at the bottom, there are the valleys and the lakes, the sprawling meadows, the roads dotted with flowers. This is all metaphoric, of course, but I think the message comes through clear enough: the peak is not finality. It is not all there is. I think that I would like to be not a mountain but a range. That I would like my life to be full of many vistas, and to not be so hard as it seems at times to be to reach the peak.
I have often been told in my life that I am difficult. That I am independent, and tough, and strong-willed, and that that can be a lot for people to handle. If I am a mountain, I’m unscalable, or at least unsavory, something most people aren’t willing to make the trek for. But I do not want to be difficult, nor do I want to feel that, if I am difficult, my peak must be so great that it will make the trek worth it. That pressure feels suffocating at times, for myself and others, and I like to think that we can all learn better to live in multiplicity. My difficulty does not owe itself to grandeur, to success, nor should it imply that only a certain few will come to love me in life the way we all deeply wish to be. Furthermore, this binary of difficult vs. simplistic, of challenging vs. easy, does no one justice. I can only be what I am, and, like everything, I am ever-changing. I am no mountain; I do not have to have a stable peak.
Yes, I do realize how hard I am stretching this metaphor here. But it feels important to do so, because it’s a realization I still consistently struggle with. There is something in me that seems to settle the minute I cross the highway into this region, something about it that has always felt like home, and I think I am growing closer to the essential truth of the matter: I know who I am here, perhaps more than anywhere else. It might be the one place in the world I do not have to be in flux, the place where, as a child and teenager, I had the freedom to grow, explore, and land on some stable sense of self. And beyond that, it might be the only place in the world I have never felt like I had to pretend, or put on, or hide myself in any kind of way. In the trees I can disappear; in the trees I can become whole.
But I cannot live here forever, and in fact, I do not even live here at all. I might be in the same state now, but I am still at least four hours of a drive away. Somehow, I’m still running from stability, and even if I do not know how or why, I know that I am not yet ready to settle. I am trying to grow comfortable with flux, with having no plan. With waking up and simply seeing where the day takes me. I am lucky to have this place of stability, but more than a place, I wish to cultivate it within myself, so that I can gather those peaks and bury them into the crevices of my spine, carrying them with me wherever I go. I appreciate being young, just as I know that I will not be young forever. And I know that this cannot— and will not— be the peak of my life. There are so many years left to go.
Your prompt this week is to envision yourself as a mountain. In poetry or in prose, describe yourself. Where in the world is your mountain? It does not have to be natural; it could be a mountain of cars piled up in a yard, a skyscraper that stretches tall into the clouds. Be creative. What does your mountain look like? What season is it? Are you paved with trails, or overgrown? Do you feel at home here?
If anyone needs me, my workday is now coming to a close, so you’ll be able to find me down at the river. Don’t text.
See y’all Friday,
Spencer
This week’s song is Down by the River by Neil Young and Crazy Horse. A, it’s a great song, and B, if I did not already stress this enough, I am down by the river!