On the Mountains of Truth

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“On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.”
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-- Nietzsche.

Cold Mountain Poem #12

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In my first thirty years of life
I roamed hundreds and thousands of miles.
Walked by rivers through deep green grass
Entered cities of boiling red dust.
Tried drugs, but couldn't make Immortal;
Read books and wrote poems on history.
Today I'm back at Cold Mountain:
I'll sleep by the creek and purify my ears.
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~Han Shan (8th century Chinese Ch'an/Zen/Taoist mountain lunatic/poet)

The Men That Don’t Fit In

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“There’s a race of men who don’t fit in,
A race that can’t stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.
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“They range the field and they rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain’s crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsies' blood,
And they don’t know how to rest.”
...
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~Robert Service.

Wanderer's Night Song

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“Over all the summits
it is calm.
In all the treetops
you can feel
hardly a breeze -
The birds remain silent in the woods.
Just wait, soon
You will rest as well."
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~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Symphony of Triumph

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“It was a symphony of triumph.
The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance.”
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~Ayn Rand~ ("Atlas Shrugged")

Allegheny Mountain Poem #1

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“On high hilltop.
Storm roaring through the trees.
Snuggled next to a big boulder,
I am warm and dry.
Ha! Ha!”
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~Ross Barlow. (late-1970s)

Invictus

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Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
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In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced or cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
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Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
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It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
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~ by William Ernest Henley (1875).